Saturday, January 7, 2006

Eek! I've been tagged!

Not only have I been tagged for the very first time in my young blogging life, I have, in fact, been team-tagged. Both the Bailiff at Night Court and Michael Bérubé have tagged me for the “Meme of Fours.” And darn it all, I had a post all written last night, with Bérubé lined up as my final taggee, but Blogger went all wonky on me and kept adding hundreds of extra “span” and “font” codes and the darn post wouldn’t publish. I was even going to “double dog dare” Michael to sully his blog with a silly meme, but he beat me to it and tagged me first. Alas, I guess that’s how tagging works. So here goes…the Meme of Fours.

Btw, in Bérubé’s answers, under “Four Jobs,” he wrote “1. Foot messenger” and at first I thought he wrote “1. Foot massager.” See my list of “Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over” (#2) for an explanation why I would make that particular misreading.

Four Jobs You’ve Had

  1. Taco slinger
  2. Punk-ass record store clerk
  3. Telemarketer (with a 96% success rate! No, really!)
  4. Paralegal
Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over
  1. A Christmas Story (all year long, even)
  2. Pulp Fiction
  3. Small Change (L’argent de poche) – Truffaut (seriously, the best movie about children ever)
  4. His Girl Friday
Four Places You’ve Lived
  1. In my parents’ 1950s suburban ranch-style home
  2. In the Big City high-rise co-op my sister and I shared
  3. In a 1929 Spanish-style courtyard apartment building, like Melrose Place without the pool
  4. In a second story Arts and Crafts duplex in a historic district
Four TV Shows You Love to Watch
  1. Lost
  2. Battlestar Gallactica
  3. The Gilmore Girls (gotta support my doppelganger – plus it’s a good show)
  4. Deadwood (gotta support my old neighbor in the courtyard – plus it’s an excellent show)
Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation
  1. The Isle of Man
  2. Beijing
  3. Bergen, Norway
  4. A small island on the Menominee River, Wisconsin
Four Blogs You Visit Daily
(Here I’m going to give the four still-extant blogs I’ve been reading the longest – although some of them are current incarnations of earlier forms)
  1. Thanks for Not Being a Zombie
  2. Danah Boyd at Apophenia (who, btw, turns out to be a friend of a friend in the “actual real world,” not on Friendster, which she studies -- seems strangely appropriate)
  3. Ancrene Wiseass
  4. Michael Bérubé Online
Four of Your Favorite Foods
  1. Duck, any style (Peking, à la orange, paté, you name it)
  2. The Boyfriend’s pasta with tomato-anchovy sauce
  3. The mussels at Jar in LA or Monk’s in Philadelphia
  4. Pulled pork (any BBQ sauce, though I prefer KC style, Arthur Bryant to Gates)
Four Places You’d Rather Be
  1. New York
  2. Cambridge, England
  3. Anywhere in Yorkshire, England, preferably in the country, but near to a train into Leeds
  4. Vancouver
Four Albums You Can’t Live Without (well, lately, anyway)
  1. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
  2. The Essential Johnny Cash
  3. Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
  4. The Jayhawks, Tomorrow the Green Grass
Four Vehicles You’ve Owned
  1. 1975 Ford Grenada, 1985-1989 (Strangely, this same make, model, and model year is on Bérubé’s list. Mine was actually owned by my mother, but I totally pwned it once I could drive.)
  2. 1993 Honda Civic in cherry red, with bitchin’ low rider rims and low profile tires -- suh-weet!
  3. 1996 Saturn sedan – so boring I can never even remember the damn model number and it's the car I currently own!
  4. Saucony running shoes (like The Bailiff, I haven’t owned enough vehicles to fill this category, so like her also, I will add my brand of running shoes, which also happens to be the same as hers)
Four Taggees
(Forgive me if you’ve been tagged before.)
  1. Heo Cwaeth
  2. The Green Knight (who's too mysterious to do this sort of thing often)
  3. Ancrene Wiseass (if she isn’t worn out from the “100 Things” meme)
  4. Another Damn Medievalist (when she gets back from AHA and needs a break)

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually I did mean to say "foot massager." I got my technique down, man, I don't tickle or nothin.'

Funny thing, I just got the screenplay for that movie in the mail yesterday. No fooling. Jules' "technique" line is on page 21. This guy drove up in a '75 Grenada. . . . OK, now I am fooling.

--Michael

Dr. Virago said...

Yeah, but would you give a guy a foot massage?

Heo said...

Meme-tag answered, Dr.V. We watch two of the same TV shows.

::Waiting with bated breath to find out if Herr Professor Doktor Berube would touch nasty, sweaty boy feet. ::

Dr. Virago said...

::Waiting with bated breath to find out if Herr Professor Doktor Berube would touch nasty, sweaty boy feet. ::

Bwah ha ha.

As for me, I'm just waiting for him to get in character and give the next line. If we taunt him enough maybe he will. (Oops, now starting unintentionally to mix up movie references, what with the taunting and all. Hmmm...I wonder what Monty Python and the Holy Pulp Fiction would be like?)

Tiruncula said...

Ooh, hey, you've been to Man? I want to hear more about what you thought about it. I spent a summer there on an archaeological dig, but I've never met anybody else since who's been there.

Dr. Virago said...

*Loved* Man. We circumnavigated the island on the "Way of the Gulls" hiking path and did the usual touristy things, like visiting the castles and lots of the archeological sites from all different ages.

I found the whole island and its history and the archeological and cultural richness to be a wonderful, pocket-sized palimpsest of the history of the British Isles. And the geography, we decided, was a bit like a quarter-scale version of England -- a little bit of everything. Meanwhile, the locals were very friendly and very excited to see American tourists without Manx connections -- and in the off season no less! We even got a private tour of Castle Rushen, and then had some tea with the curator and met his Manx cat! (We also had a private tour of Peel Castle, as well -- but no tea or cats.) Of course, it helped a lot that my friend was a journalist and did a travel article on the experience. :)

But one thing I noticed that kind of drove me nuts the whole time was the way a lot of the museums skipped from the Viking age to the 17th century. WTF? In the "House of Mananan" (winner: cheesiest museum I've ever been too -- even cheesier than the Jorvik Viking museum in York) they showed life among the Celts, then the coming of the Vikings, then they said something vague about "and then they all became Christian" and then suddenly everyone was Methodist. Also amusing was the gentle "spin" given to the Vikings. There was this weird re-enactment movie of a Viking chasing a Celtic woman, throwing her to the ground (at which point, we wondered: they show this to children?!), and then grabbing a clump of dirt and grunting, "Earth! Good!" Then the narrator -- the god Mananan himself, who looked a bit like Theoden in Lord of the Rings -- intoned, "A Viking is a pirate until he finds a place he wants to be." That had us laughing so hard we still quote it with frequency today.

So there you have it -- my trip to Man in a nutshell. What I want to know -- what archeological dig did you work on?

Tiruncula said...

I was digging at Peel Castle. There were seals in the bay, a kippering factory(?) along the harbor that perfumed the whole town when the wind was right, and we diggers essentially squatted in a semi-derelict harborfront hotel with an Aga in the cellar that needed to be fed coal. Next door was a slightly more functional b&b run by a woman who was a former roadie for The Who, where once could get an excellent breakfast (kippers optional).

Dr. Virago said...

Hmmm...the B&B with the excellent breakfast might have been the one we stayed in, though I can't imagine that woman as a former roadie for the Who! Ours was way up at the far (north? northeast?) end of the harbor from Peel Castle.

So did you work on the "Celtic Lady" dig, the one who looks to have intermarried with Vikings? (If I recall what our guide said -- though he kept referring to the 17th century as part of the Middle Ages, so not a trustworthy source!)

Tiruncula said...

As I recall, we were just finding iron-age whatnots the summer I was there. The setting (and the whole culture of the funky dig-people) were more interesting than the actual finds - unlike some other digs I worked on in that era. Our B&B and the squat next door were more or less in the middle of the Parade. This was in the mid-late 80s, so much might have changed in B&B ownership, etc., since then.

Another Damned Medievalist said...

Yay! I will meme soon!