July 30, 2006

• NOTE: I've edited this since first writing it, so you may want to read it again even if you read it previously.
  

  All right.  Yesterday's satire, funny/sad as it is, came originally from the parody site Whitehouse.org, according to a highly placed and eminently reliable source.  Who knew?    And I've been tagged by casey_at_bat and QueenPicky .  Here's my assignment:

  Once you are tagged, you must post six things about yourself which are either weird, unusual, habitual, or are just plain fun to hear about (and true!). Once you post these things in your blog, you must gently tag six to ten others in the Xanga world, who then, in the spirit of not wussing out, must read words like these and follow the same rules you did.

  And here are my answers, in no particular order:

  1)  I've always been extremely squeamish about things that are alive and deformed, or dead and decomposing.   I've never been able to pick up dead animals, or even look at squashed animals along the side of the road.  Not only that, but when I would be mowing the lawn as a kid and would come upon rotten apples that had fallen from the neighbor's apple tree, I couldn't pick them up.  I'd have to look away from them while kicking them with my shoe under the fence and back into the neighbor's yard.  At the same time, as a firefighter I ran rescue calls for 16 years, and even forced myself to witness an autopsy in an attempt to desensitize myself.  It helped, but still I couldn't pick up a dead body or touch a badly mangled person.  Somehow, thankfully, I was always able to avoid those situations.

  2)  My IQ has been tested about six times, and the scores have ranged from 134 at the low end to 184 at the high end.   I've passed the qualifying tests not only for Mensa but also for the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry , which purports to weed out the top one-tenth of one per cent intellectually.  But I have not deigned to join either organization, because I find them elitist and I don't quite see the point of belonging.  My Xanga readers are as interesting as anyone in those organizations could be, and probably a whole lot nicer.
  

  I also hasten to add that I'm quite aware that traditional, standard IQ tests measure only a certain kind of intelligence, and there are a number of different kinds of intelligence, some of which I do NOT possess in abundance.  I once had a neighbor who was illiterate - incapable of reading or writng - but who could tear an automobile engine apart and put it back together practically blindfolded.  I am in awe of such intelligence.  There is also artistic intelligence, social intelligence, etc.
  

  3)  As a result of involvement with a community radio station for the past slightly more than 3 years, my knowledge of and appreciation for what is called "world music" has gone from just about zero three years ago to fairly comprehensive today.

  4)  As a city boy who didn't know how to do anything practical, I resolved after graduation from an Ivy League institution of higher learning that I would forego the "Military Industrial Complex" and teach myself how to work with my hands - do home repair, auto repair, gardening, etc.  I learned all those things to some extent during the decade of my twenties, but in the process I never learned how to earn money.  Then I got disabled.  Now I'm too old and fat and tired to do home repair, auto repair, and gardening.  I now realize that if I had learned how to earn money, I could have paid people to do all those other things for the rest of my life.

  5)  When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, one of the things we used to do was throw eggs at cars.  I now know, of course, that that was a dastardly thing to do, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  "Where did you get your eggs?" you ask.  Well, we pretended we were attending a birthday party and had been sent on a scavenger hunt.  On the list of items we were to get (which we had created ourselves) was "one raw egg".  EVERYONE has an egg in their refrigerator, right?  "How cute!" thought our neighbors as they handed us an egg.  "A RAW egg.  How creative of the party hostess!  They'll probably drop it and break it on the way back to the birthday party.  Hahaha!"  Little did they know that when we got about 12 eggs, we'd go over to the busy street and throw them at cars.

  We also got money that way.  On our scavenger hunt list would be "one 1968 quarter" (let us say).  We'd get quite a lot of quarters.  But one time I got stupid.  "Oh, gosh," the lady of the house said.  "I have a 1967 quarter and a 1969 quarter, but no 1968.  I'm so sorry!"  "Oh, that's all right," I piped up.  "Any date will be all right."  "Just a minute," said the lady of the house.  "Let me go and get my husband."  So we idiotically waited until the husband came to the door.  He was about 7 feet tall and about 400 pounds of solid muscle, and told us that he just happened to be a Chicago cop.  Needless to say, he put the fear of God into us about fraudulent scavenger hunts....for a while. 

  6)  I have twice, while on vacation in Los Angeles, tried to get on TV game shows.  One was an old one that no longer exists (except perhaps in rerun limbo) called The Joker's Wild (kind of a cheaper version of Jeopardy), and the other was Wheel of Fortune.  In both cases I passed their written test with flying colors, but wasn't chosen for the show.  One of the things they do is ask you to tell them a few biographical details about yourself.  While I am indisputably one of the most interesting people I know, I figure I got beat out by the guy who claimed to have won the International Monopoly Championship in Monte Carlo the previous year. 

  Well, this was fun and I could undoubtedly come up with more, but we'll save that for another time.  Now whom should I "gently" tag?  I can't remember whom I tagged before.  They should be people who visit my site at least semi-regularly, and to whom I subscribe.  I dunno.  How about the exquisite MaVicious , my perspicacious paramour  EternalCrimsonWings , the misnamed mybaddy , the redoubtable and calcium-rich THDmilkman , the irrepressible and iconoclastic DailyKevin (aka Kevin72) , the lovely-but-with-thorns angryflower1 , and of course - of course! - my virtual adopted daughter Anne_Lanche ?  Have fun with it, ladies and gentlemen. 

   

  • 4:47 am
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