Ten (More) Things I’ve Done You Probably Haven’t
Posted on January 15, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 214 Comments
I’m hiding from the Internet today because I made certain promises to certain editors about having certain words to them by the weekend. To keep you occupied, however, I offer you this list of Ten (More) Things I’ve Done Your Probably Haven’t, to go with my original list two years ago. As was the case then, I encourage you to share your own list, either in the comments or on your own site, with a link to your site in the comments here.
Ready? Here we go:
Ten (More) Things I’ve Done You Probably Haven’t
1. Been offered a bong hit by members of Sonic Youth
2. Had a gauze-wrapped human kidney placed on my lunch tray as a birthday present
3. Walked into a glass door, snapping off part of a tooth
4. Gotten a thank-you letter from Jean-Claude Van Damme
5. Had the top of my head kissed and/or licked by a few dozen people over the course of a weekend
6. Had rocks thrown at my bus in a Palestinian refugee camp
7. Founded a right-wing college publication (no, really)
8. Wrote someone else’s (successful) college application essay
9. Autographed books that were on the other side of the country at the time
10. Administered a contest for a million dollars
That’s my list. What’s yours?
I put my list up on my blog which you can get to by clicking here
It was an interesting assignment.
Okay, here’s mine:
1.) Got locked in the Sistine Chapel by mistake.
2.) Had a litter of kittens born in my lap.
3.) Shared take-out Chinese food with Douglas Adams and Terry Jones while sitting at a table in the middle of the business section of a bookstore in downtown San Francisco.
4.) Had sex on top of a fifty pound bag of un-popped popcorn.
5.) Baby-sat Ricky Nelson’s twins when they were four years old. (They were very well-behaved.)
6.) Introduced a friend to Ellen DeGeneres’s mom at a party so she could give my friend advice on how to come out of the closet to her own mom.
7.) Had an FBI profiler teach me how to spot pedophiles in a playground.
8.) Drank beer with a friend for his 21st birthday while sitting atop Dylan Thomas’s grave in Wales.
9.) Stood in the middle of the Nooksack River in Washington State while hundreds of spawning salmon swam right between my legs.
10.) Made out with a straight man, a gay man, a straight woman and a gay woman all within the same one-hour period. I believe there may have been an inordinate amount of sake involved.
There’s my list! :-)
Cheers!
Well Jeez, don’t set the bar too high.
founded a right wing college publication? do tell.
I’m holding back on my list.
Well, you might have been offered a bong hit, but I went to HS with Kim. (She graduated a year before I did. BTW–she was studying art and I was studying music. Hah.) We hung in the same crowd and whereas I don’t remember any actual bongs . . . there’s a *lot* I don’t remember from back then. ;)
According to my parents, Rigel, I also taught myself to read. But yeah, most of that list I haven’t.
Hmm. This is actually kind of hard, because I’ve done a lot of interesting things but not always that unusual.
1. Fought a wildfire (set by somebody I’d taught) on the same day as receiving a $100 bill in the mail.
2. Received fan mail from somebody in Sweden.
3. Had Phil Foglio laugh at MY comic. :)
4. Known somebody who died on Mt. Kilimanjero.
5. Been the only person of my gender on a small island with 90 other people.
6. Run into somebody I knew from high school at the wedding of a friend, where he was for one side and I for the other, and neither of us lived within three hundred miles of where the wedding took place.
7. Been hit on by somebody three times my age AND by somebody at least a decade younger (the latter troubling because I was 25 at the time.)
8. Designed logos in high school that are still in use today.
9. (This one’s not so rare) Straddled the San Andreas Fault.
10. Received acclaim and applause for a set of credits. That was a little mind-boggling. (I even received requests for those credits months later.)
I’ve had similar experiences to your numbers 1 & 6. Am very impressed by your number 4. Won’t do a full list of 10, but here’s one thing I hope hasn’t happened to too many other folks: I was once mistaken for a Russian prostitute in Syria.
Hey! It’s still the 14th. Did you post this tonight with a promise to your self that you wouldn’t launch a browser on the 15th until you had X words done?
I don’t know if I can come up with ten things that most people haven’t done.
1. Earned a living as a glass blower. Not torch working, glass blowing with a pipe and a big ass furnace. Five years.
2. Scratched a cheeta’s chin. Trivia, the hair of their spots is longer than the rest of their fur. I have also fed apples to a rhino.
3. Roller skated in a pool at a skateboard park.
4. Theres a building in La Jolla CA that has lasers on the roof and mirrors on the ground around the building that they use to put on light shows. I got to go up on the roof during one of their shows.
5. Been the subject of an anatomy class in a military hospital. I was about 12 and had fallen out of a tree. There were some nails sticking out of the tree and they ripped my arm pit open exposing the inner workings. Being an army brat my dad took me to the base hospital on Camp Pendleton. They called in all the interns and medics in training, about 20 people, and gave them an anatomy lecture.
6. Watched the fourth of July fire works from the roof of an operating gas fired power plant. The fire works were going off at eye level because the roof was about the same height.
That’s all I can think of.
BTW I am jealous of number 9 on your first list. Oingo Boingo is my all time favorite band.
You totally rock. I remember back when you did that automatic long distance signer thingy. Cool. Getting your head licked… eww. But, I am going to guess it was either old friends from college or old sci-fi writer geek friends. I hope. Or maybe it is some kind of fetish I haven’t heard of yet. Possible.
be well,
Dawn
ok so it’s the 15th on the east coast.
1. At 16, got really drunk on tequilla at a dude ranch, wandered into the wrong cabin, and barfed in Neal Armstrong’s bed
2. Spilled an entire 42 oz big gulp (by accident) on Brook Shields
3. Came within 6 inches of running over Randy Johnson in my car (just last weekend)
4. Stepped on Raul (SP?) Julia’s foot at the Oscars
5. Slammed a revolving door into Martina Navratolova’s face
6. Got a big ink spot, somehow, on Farah Fawcett’s blouse when seeking an autograph.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend here. I would love to get an autographed book from you someday, but I like you too much to have you risk it.
Oh. I forgot about the list part . . . here’s mine:
1. voted the Zaniest Member of my 8th grade class.
2. went swimming in the Caspian Sea
3. saw the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl
4. was on “Kids Say the Darndest Things” when Art Linkletter was the host.
5. had dinner at Bill Cosby’s house
6. talked to the *real* Elmo
7. laughed (a lot) during a screening of “Ishtar” (my DH will never forgive me)
8. read Hawaii on Hawaii
9. dressed as a Walnut Tree in the Walnut Festival Parade in Walnut Creek in 1960
10. been mistaken for my daughter and kissed on the forehead by her boyfriend
My list…
I have
1. Gotten strangled (and lived to tell the tale, obviously).
2. Helped a friend search for a missing pet tarantula. Eeyaaagh.
3. Experienced a haunting in a very large University library. Tarantula was worse.
4. Given a Chinese Dragon beanie baby to Neil Gaiman.
5. Watched my first meteor shower lying in the grass next to a deserted highway.
6. Walked into a web full of many little spiders argh argh argh
7. Experienced an intense moment of identification when in book 1 Harry Potter was locked in a closet.
8. Had boiling soup poured over my hands intentionally (not my intention…).
9. Been stalked. By relatives.
10. Spent a tornado watch lying wretched on an X-raying table or something because the clinic I was temporarily hospitalized in didn’t have any beds that could be moved to the basement.
Some of them are fun, some a little obscure, but here goes…
1. Spent a night in a Swiss police cell. With my mother.
2. Made the top 10 in a national Cocktail Bartender of the Year competition.
3. Totally fabricated an acting resume and landed the first role I applied for with it.
4. Wrote an interpretor for someone else’s high school computing project – in BASIC.
5. Acted as cameraman on the UK’s first webcam model site.
6. Designed the website for the first professional theatre company in Yorkshire (England) that accepted ticket purchases online.
7. Directed a play performed in an authentic Victorian street inside a museum.
8. Edited Europe’s most widely -read weekly electronic genre fiction magazine.
9. Performed in the same play over 500 times in 3 different countries.
10. Learned to speak the phrase “Can I speak to the squirrel, please?” in Welsh.
1) Went 3.5 weeks without food or drink.
2) With a drain tube coming out of my abdomen.
3) Have piloted a small plane (including takeoff & landing).
4) Have defrosted a small plane (and learned the wisdom of determining the wind direction before doing so. The hard way.)
5) Took a motorcycle safety course alongside a guy who’d been riding motorcycles longer than I’d been alive.
6) Took up learning a foreign language new to me at the age of 30.
7) Had 250,000 shares in a company one day away from funding before the dot.com crash. *sigh*
8) Stopped a cat I was catsitting from peeing on my carpet by peeing in her litterbox.
9) And it worked.
10) Drove through the Mojave Desert in a car with no airconditioning…in August. (passed within a few hundred feet of the Mojave Desert Phonebooth, though I didn’t know it at the time.)
11) Am studying Japanese on my own (just because).
12) Been on the Internet since long before the Web existed.
13) Have been offered to partake of the group sex.
14) Twice
15) By different groups of people
16) Moved 2,000 miles away from my family, to a city I’d never been to before, with no place to stay, and with no job waiting for me.
17) Have travelled 2,000 or so miles just to see a Cirque du Soleil troupe (that I hadn’t seen, and that was about leave the U.S. to go on a multi-year tour in Asia).
18) Have met Tori Amos.
19) Have stood in line for over 31 hours to see a concert (Tori Amos).
20) At age 30. :)
I guess that’s enough for now.
My list is a bit bizarre…
1. Met three heads of state in one day.
2. Survived my son’s first tooth — on an airplane from London to DC, when he was four months old. (This is the same kid whose first ultrasound showed him flipping us off for interrupting his nap.)
3. Had an article I had ghostwritten cited to me by opposing counsel while I was on the witness stand. I seriously doubt I’ll ever have that much fun in a courtroom again.
4. Eaten a sheep’s eyeball (while maintaining my gravitas).
5. Watched someone unsuccessfully attempt to parachute through the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (with rather messy results).
6. Gotten ticketed for doing 42 in a 25… on a bicycle.
7. (This one is not a good one) Made death notices for active-duty personnel.
8. Gave myself soldering scars — still visible on my left index finger — building my first computer.
9. Delivered a military prisoner to Leavenworth.
10. There is no tenth item. If there was, someone from a three-letter agency would come and put you on a Homeland Security watchlist of some kind.
I’m wondering about the human kidney for lunch.
Ten things I’ve done You Probably Haven’t:
1. Put on John Travolta’s roof. A few months later, saw his bedroom through the skylight when we returned to check on something. (I have lots of roofing stories so it wouldn’t be fair to use them all in the top ten!)
2. Rolled in ice naked with a bunch of Finnish men, also naked.
3. Clean bird’s spit, an essential ingredient of bird’s nest soup.
4. Taught college sophomore English Composition in a bikini.
5. Climbed the Alps and hiked to see a glacier.
6. Crossed Roman traffic and survived.
7. Chased by a cow and a dancing bear in India.
8. Made a $2000 bid on a paperback book for charity.
9. Spent three nights scrubbing hardened grout footprints on a brand new 15X20 foot tile floor with a wire scrubber (I still have nightmares).
10. Partied with drunken Swedes and helped them saw the top of their car off because we wanted a convertible.
I blogged my own:
http://derrylmurphy.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-own-list-of-10-things-ive-done-you.html
And while I can’t say it’s been licked, the top of my head has been kissed many times, especially when I’ve played goal and won us a game.
D
Gennita – your fourth item would be so much better if you were male.
1. Survived stage 3 cancer without having to do radiation therapy and only had to do six months even though the cancer was concentrated around my aorta and lungs.
2. Bred a leopard gecko (superhypo carrot tail tangerine baldy…basically an orange/yellow gecko with bright neon orange on a portion of his tail, no spots on his head, and an orange tint to the body…he’s a cutie)
3. Watched the same TV show season repeatedly for two months.
4. Starting dating a British woman across the ocean.
5. Started a website/forum/critique place for young writers of various ages (typically 12-26)
6. Found out I can graduate sooner than I had anticipated with my BA in modern literature…resulting in having my brain nearly explode from having to think about graduate school and realizing there are practically no programs for MAs that will allow me to study SF or SpecFic.
7. Gone to three “Relay For Life” walkathons onces during my chemo, once immediately after my chemo, and once well after. (by the way, it’s a really fun little shindig…people hanging out and music and plenty of inspiration)
8. Told myself I would get a big lizard and name it Nipples and ended up getting a medium-sized lizard and named it that.
9. Got caught trying to steal one of those little plastic parachute men and ended up not getting the Sega Genesis I was apparently going to get.
10. Failed to realize that my backpack would leak and ended up ruining two books that I was reading for review, one of which was a signed and personalized copy send specially to me by the author…needless to say that was a horrible day.
I realized about halfway through this thing that at 24 years old I haven’t done a whole lot…
1. Boiled water at room temperature.
2. Analyzed a broken pistol from an Olympic pistol team.
3. Operated a really huge bass speaker. (Ok, it was really a vibration table.)
1. Been strangled by an 82-year-old with every intent to kill me. (Obviously, like Arachne, I survived.)
2. Had two babies of exactly the same weight, length, and head circumference.
3. Had someone propose marriage while I was already married and had a 2-month-old baby.
4. Simultaneously taught a pharmacology lab to med students while taking Anatomy and Pharmacology at the undergraduate level.
5. Sang Old English Christmas carols, in 13th century garb, in Madison Square Garden on wrestling night.
6. Helped a teenager in Sweden write her term paper in biology – when I had never met her (and still haven’t), had been a housewife for eight years at the time, and spoke no Swedish.
7. Dated the guy now best known as the sound engineer for “Vampire Lesbian Kickboxers”, for three years.
8. Took karate lessons from a guy who was Steven Segal’s bodyguard.
9. Have been stranded in central Idaho three separate times. (I won’t go near the state anymore.)
10. Have been picked up, and passed about, with attached hugging and kissing, by the Turkish Olympic Wrestling Team.
SMD – done a lot or not, it certainly sounds like you’ve been busy.
1.) Gave a one-legged junkie a ride to his house from the Burger King in the wrong part of town.
2.) Sold Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVDs to a former MTV VJ.
3.) Got into an amicable slapfight with Tim Heidecker and Jay Johnson on a boat in San Diego.
4) Crashed the Sci-fi channel Comic-Con party and talked at length with the star of the show Eureka without ever having seen said show.
5) Flew first class on a business trip while my boss sat in coach.
6) Sat next to the actress from Weird Science on a plane. The one that used to be married to Steven Seagal. She had a small dog and, apparently, a mountain lion problem.
7) Dressed up like the Statue of Liberty using paper bags and wore it to elementary school. For no reason.
8) Had a four-hour debate on philosophy and agnosticism with a toothless tow-truck driver, while listening to Hank Williams on the radio and towing my car on the flatbed behind us.
9) Flew to the wrong city and didn’t realize it until I got there.
10) Talked to a girl for fifteen minutes while pretending I was Swedish. (It seemed hilarious at the time.)
My list (also posted here):
1) Written to the alumni newsletter for my extremely prestigious high school, declaring proudly that I was a three-time college dropout. As I recall, they published it.
2) Become a medical journalist without a college degree.
3) Edited six hundred book reviews in eight months.
4) Fallen in love at an orgy.
5) Taken extensive measures to ensure that the officiant at my wedding was not legally permitted to solemnize marriages in my city and state, and received a marriage certificate with a footnote stating clearly that it is not in any way legally binding.
6) Had my mother write me an excuse note so I could skip high school to attend an anti-war protest.
7) While the responsible adult in charge of a gaggle of 13-year-old girls, led an in-depth discussion of BDSM.
8) Introduced my mother to Benoit Mandelbrot.
9) Sung backup for Mandy Patinkin.
10) Been told that the guys who did the Budweiser “Wassuuuuup” commercials saw a near-naked picture of me and thought I was really hot.
After some thought I left out all the stuff that I’m kind of embarrassed about, but there’s plenty of material for “Ten Things I’ve Done That You Probably Haven’t (Because You’re Smarter, Nicer, and More Professional Than I Was at the Time)”.
That was fun… gives you a different perspective on your life as you look back, decide what to list, and why. My list is here.
Here’s 5
1. Illustrated a book on ferns from El Salvadorean coffee plantations
2. Illustrated a website on Sea Urchins
3. Worked in the Natural History Museum on the dinosaurs.
4. Been part of a 7 year medical trial.
5. Had a woman thrown at me by Dani from Cradle of Filth.
Hmmm. OK
1. Driven through 31 countries with my dog and walked coast-to-coast across 2 of them
2. Seen “Carrie: The Musical” on Broadway
3. Had a ping-pong ball land in my lap after being fired from a certain person on stage during the world premiere of “Priscilla the Musical”
4. Had a photo of me wearing a t-shirt of Prof Julius Sumner Miller sent to him by his old TV lab assistant in order to cheer him up while extremely ill
5. Designed computer software displayed prominently in double page spreads in Time, Newsweek, and more
6. Had a smack-addicted classical pianist call me up to find out my favourite Mozart sonata so he could pleasure himself with the information.
7. Asked a Nobel Prize-winning economist a very awkward question ( at a professional luncheon ) that partly undermined the basis for his prize.
8. Got pinched by about 700 people when I dressed up as Frank-n-furter for a college ball. Paradoxically or consequentially, I was probably the only one of them not to even get to first base with someone that night.
9. Received an apologetic email from Stephen Fry
10. Found a disastrous bug moments before Windows XP SP1 was going to be shipped (it got delayed and fixed).
11. (OK more than 10, but this is a mathematical one) Got a gold star on second year pure mathematics assignment after I based a solution on Fermat’s (then unsolved) theorem.
im interested to see if i can come up with 10
1) Talked at length to Sculptor/Architect David Best about the struggle of dealing with praise as an artist while wearing nothing but Bikini bottoms and thigh high pink and black stripped socks… I also may have been (was) tripping balls (I’m male in gender if you were wondering)
2) Performed a silent found object puppet piece called “E.O. 9066” about the Japanese internment camps during WWII for a group of survivors of said camp at the 50 year reunion of the closing of the camp INSIDE OF said camp in Utah.
3) Danced in a group of several Thousand people outside during a hurricane force dust storm.
4) Had sex in clown makeup
5) Kind of goes with four… but, spent three years in Circus school
6) Made out with my younger siblings Nanny
7) had sex in a rental car underneath the giant neon cross overhanging the church i was forced to attend growing up.
8) rode through the desert on a horse with no name.
9) Performed at the palace of fine arts in San Francisco with the likes of Geoff Hoyle and John Gilkey.
10) DJ’ed at Burning Man.
there we go =)
let me think.
1. Hit a car, as a pedestrian, and done more damage to the car than was done to me.
2. Received a letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley telling me she was rejecting my story, but wanted to see more of my work (she died 3 months later, and never did). Jan Stirling, who had apparently gotten several rejections from her, told me this was not Bradley’s usual method.
3. Owned a cat who was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, by name, while I was just identified as ‘Chiya’s owner’.
4. Known James Nicoll for 24 years. (I referred to Imperiums to Order earlier today as ‘the game store I grew up in’)
5. Been randomly asked (2000 miles and 23 years after meeting James), if I knew him (after telling my third story in a panel about ways that I’ve damaged myself through completely random build ups of events)
6. Crossed the border to ‘permanently’ live in ‘the other country’ (US and Canada) three times now.
7. Given directions to the Secret Elevator to Batman (ok, to Adam West)
8. Gotten a security clearance from the US Government (I’m not an American citizen)
9. Taken Joss Whedon to Mary Chung’s
10. Accidentally blown up a haggis.
1. Administered a contest for a million dollars. (Target shooting event – no one won the bucks.)
2. Walked out of the ICU three hours after having a major heart attack (the nurses were abusive and were killing me faster than the heart attack)
3. Wrote a welcome speech for the Major General of the Thai Army
4. Got married (not unusual, but something I was never supposed to have done)
5. “Accidentally” grabbed NIchelle Nichols’ boobs at my first Star Trek convention in ’75. (wouldn’t wanna go there now)
6. Spent a Greyhound bus trip from Philly to Pittsburgh on the luggage rack.
7. Reminded Bill Shatner of how old he is during an interview by mentioning our previous encounter – 30+ years earlier*
8. Built paintball guns for Playboy Magazine, Maxim Magazine, Will Smith, ‘Doogie Houser’, Maurice Gibb, other celeberati
9. Turned down not one, not two, but three multi-million dollar deals in the name of principal
10. Walked up: the Eiffel Tower, Twin Towers, Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Washington Monument, and walked the Duke of Wellington’s route from Brussels to Waterloo.
*No one was hurt during the Shatner interview
Here you go.
1. While ego-surfing one night in 2000, had the first match turn up my father’s obituary from 3 months earlier. Hell of a way to find out…
2. Flew in the second homebuilt airplane one of my co-workers built. After the first one crashed due to fuel pump failure.
3. Been mistaken for an armed robber by at least a half dozen armed Philly cops with weapons drawn.
4. Assembled parts that are now part of the wings of Air Force One.
5. Witnessed the birth of my son on my 30th birthday.
6. Lost 130 pounds.
7. Woke up the day after Thanksgiving, hung over, on Daytona Beach, in a van buried in soft sand up to its axles.
8. Flew in a small airplane while it was doing aerobatics over Daytona Beach. Still the biggest rush I’ve ever had. (Not related to #7!)
9. Performed on television as part of my high school choir during a Christmas concert.
10. Had my car totaled in an accident. While it was parked at the top of my driveway. Had it not been parked there, the car that hit it would have wound up in my living room.
1. Published two short stories in two separate Chinese SF mags, in the same year;
2. Dropped a cell phone on the floor so that the battery inside vanished (not “fell out”; vanished); *
3. Written and performed, before a live audience, a mean song about Saddam Hussein.
(* Not 100% sure about 2). Maybe the battery was stolen. :-S)
Yeah, I ain’t saying nothing until I get a full detailed story on every one of these. You can’t tease us so by not elaborating upon them.
I don’t think I gan get to 10, so I’ll try 5…:
1: I’ve smoked a joint on a bridge above the Danube river in three different country capitals on a three – day span
2: I’ve seen a 30 – year – old and 14 lb Lammergeier being induced into having mock – sex with its carer so that it would recognise him as its mate (long story)
3: I’ve been stopped and questioned by the secret police in England (mistaken with a terrorist in 99), Switzerland (accused of assaulting a liquor store) and Spain (Suspected of planning violent actions on a savings bank) – not that I did anything wrong, mind you – I just look suspicious
4: Quoted lines from George R R Martin on a documentary about sharks
5: Been hooted and whistled upon and on the receiving end of enticing catcalls from a busload of 15 – year – old girls by the sand lines of Nazca – that was a good day…
cheers
1. Was the individual who informed New Gingrich that the Iraqis had invaded Kuwait (He was flabbergasted).
2. Faked Gerald R. Ford’s signature (It was legal).
3. Was passed by a semi-truck in a 50 m.p.h. zone while on a ten-speed bike (the driver was very gentle with me).
4. Drove around Baltimore with a big chunk of My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult in my car looking for action (Real life bands are mostly interested in finding good food on tour).
5. Am three degrees removed from Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler.
Broke two teeth in a major terrorism incident.
Been in combat. As a civilian.
Met Asimov, “Hal Clement”, Alfred Bester and others.
Read slush. Endlessly.
Simultaneously worked two full-time jobs and two part-time jobs.
Worked seven days a week for a two year period.
Made a standing rib roast and a Yorkshire Pudding. Made stock. From scratch.
@36 Fred Kiesche:
You are Mack Reynolds and I claim my five shares of Varaible Basic.
Perform a magic show at Paul McCartney’s Christmas party.
The entire story is at my blog http://www.gratuitoussocks.com under the title – A HUGE NAME DROP
1- I’ve given a snake a Caesarian and removed its eggs with a kitchen knife from my mother’s kitchen drawer. It was being swallowed by ANOTHER snake while this was going on, hence the need for quick removal of eggs.
2- I’ve been bitten by two snakes longer than I was tall, and one that was as long as I was tall. (Not at the same time.)
3- I was locked alone in the Salt Lake City Mausoleum as a small child for about an hour. (Which is like nearly a whole day to an adult. Specially when you are surrounded by dead people.)
4- Had ribs with Randy Bachman of BTO. (His daughters, or at least two of them, refer to me as Bat Spice.)
5- Grabbed a live wire by mistake while cleaning out a large fish tank full of oscars. Surprisingly no damage to me or the fish.
6- Bungee jumped twice. (Probably a decent number of you have done this, but also probably not a lot.)
7- Petted Gila monster lizards, played with tarantulas, and fed baby mice to live centipedes. (Oh, did I forget to mention that my father is a mad scientist and more specifically, a herpetologist?)
8- Driven across the United States coast to coast twice. (Again, some people have probably done it, but not everybody.)
9- Read War and Peace in 5 hours. (Which I do not recommend. The amount of time, not the book, I mean. But I was in eighth grade and full of piss and vinegar and trying to prove to somebody that I could speed read any book they gave me and still answer questions about it. Honestly, some books you should just savor. Likewise, I can knock off the entire Lord of the Rings in a Sunday afternoon.)
10 – Built a dragon out of snow and six feet long icicles and won a snow sculpture contest.
11- (bonus) Carted a fetus in a botttle through the halls of my high school IN UTAH. Note the last two words. Nobody freaked out.
9-
4-
Here are mine:
1. Climbed Ayers Rock (Uluru) in the dark to take beautiful sunrise pictures.
2. Spend New Years 2000 in a cottage in the middle of nowhere in Finland taking a sauna and cooling down in the lake after hacking a hole in the ice
3. Had my picture in a Shanghai Newspaper
4. Excavated 40.000-70.000 year old cave bear and macaques bones from a cave ruin
5. Sorted through buckets of dolomite sand to extract small rodent and insectivore teeth and bones with a magnifying glass and pliers
6. Talked for hours in the early morning (3am till 6.30am) with an older crack smoking dealer on the steps of a church in central Amsterdam while I was waiting for the train station to open and he was directing his goons and threatening other people away
7. Went snowshoeing for the first time on a sunny day at -34C (-29F) in Kananaskis, Canada
8. Gotten a thank you letter from Andre Norton
9. Rubbed the gums of a hippopotamus
10. Visited Zhoukoudian – the Peking Man Site and had the public bus making a special detour for me
My list lacks “wow,” but it’s mine :)
1. Been homeless. Real homeless, not crashing in your buddy’s basement for the summer.
2. Tripped over a nuclear bomb. No shit.
3. Been “fired” from the Air Force (unrelated).
4. Been diagnosed with a congenital cataract. I have named it Francis.
5. Married a woman 20 years older than me.
6. Watched the fire works at New Years in Paris from a bridge over the Sienne.
7. Took midnight mass on Christmas Eve in Rome. I’m not Catholic.
8. Gotten drunk on “Mekong” brand whiskey.
9. Survived a cab ride in Pyongtaek.
10. Went to 10 different schools *before* high school.
Let’s see now….
1) Had Crick and Watson attend my christening.
2) Wrote a million words of fanfic in five years’ time. (I keep hoping that those are the “million words of crap” writers are supposed to go through to get better).
3) Had John Lithgow bad-mouth my work when he appeared on the Conan O’Brian show.
4) Embarrassed myself in front of, at three different times, a Hugo winner, a Nebula winner, and two powerful folks in the industry–all in the space of one weekend. (Go me!)
5) Been the “resource” used by a grad student during a final.
6) Translated 10,000 words from Basque to English.
7) Read the entire run of “Six Gun Gorilla.”
8) Been yelled at by a librarian in the Rare Books room of the British Library.
9) Had a fictional Tube station named after me.
10) Had my mouth groomed by a rat.
1 When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I blew up a small grove of trees on the eastern shore of Maryland.
2 While fossil hunting, I was bitten by a rattlesnake, skidded down about fifteen feet of a road cut as a result, and driven myself to medical help.
3 I was part of an astronomical research team performing research on Cepheid variables
4 I once spent over 600 million dollars of my employer’s money in a 48 hour period
5 In a 3 hour Senate hearing, I was the only employee of a certain agency mentioned by name (other than the head of the agency.) An email of mine was quoted where I completely contradicted the director too. I was watching the hearing on streaming video, and the feed went down at that moment, so I drove home from DC oblivious. I caught a lot of crap when I got back to the home office, needless to say.
6 In a matter of one hour, literally on the back of a menu from a local pizza delivery restaurant one of my colleagues and I designed an IVR system that has saved about $2 million per month. (OK, OK, it did take three weeks to buy the hardware, actually build and test the database behind it.)
7 I have puked tequila, Guinness stout, Sambucca and Bailey’s Irish Cream from a Mercedes driving at autobahn speeds
8 I have helped shrinkwrap several dozen helicopters
9 After knee surgery, learned the hard way that Vicodin makes me hyper. I was awake, hyper and mostly immobile for four days.
10 I scored a 260 something out of 300 points on my physical training test in the Army, one of the better scores for my reserve unit, and immediately afterwards sprained my back picking up my uniform.
Mine is here.
I’ve done your number three, scalzi. What are we, nearsighted birds?
“5. Had the top of my head kissed and/or licked by a few dozen people over the course of a weekend”
Sounds like a record that needs to be broken, says I.
1. Passed 14 kidney stones. I’m working on the 15th right now.
There’s really nothing else I can think of right now, but really, can you blame me?
I’m very, very jealous of the Sonic Youth item.
Heres my only one:
Played CBGB. (twice)
Mine is not terribly exciting. Here goes.
1) Snuck myself and 2 friends into a $200 fund raising dinner and got a table so we could eat for free.
2) Toured the Navy Operations center inside the Pentagon (it’s basically the central command room).
3) Been asked to print porn for an extra $10 when I was working a job developing photos (the incentive was not enough for me to consider it, since my workplace would have probably fired me for printing porn).
4) Listened to a speech by former Prime Minister Aznar of Spain a few weeks before he was voted out of office.
5) Been yelled at twice by the Secret Service: First for waving a pen at GWB (perhaps the pen is mightier than the sword) and second for trying to walk through the capitol building on the night of the State of the Union Address in 2004 (they sent me outside into the cold).
6) Lost my job at City Hall in a town I used to live in because the Mayor decided to give my job to an acquaintance of his (I was a secretary).
7) As an intern in Washington D.C. I didn’t buy food for a month because I lived off of food provided by lobbyists at receptions.
9) Delivered goat kids when the goat mother was having trouble.
10) Drove Walter Williams from the airport to my college. He was incredibly abrasive to talk to and he was annoyed with me because I had only taken one economics course.
!. Getting out of my car at a party, heard two gunshots, and went to investigate 2. Drank five boilermakers in thirty minutes 3. Walked into a tent, saw a friend cooking a spoon of heroin, and walked out 4. Embarrassed myself in a phone conversation with Ian Rankin 5.Plenty of bong hits, but none with any rock bands 6. Shared a hit on a joint with a woman cop at a rock concert 7. Had my left foot amputated(doing well Thank you) 8. Been hit on by two eighteen year olds at the same time at age thirty-seven to my complete surprise 9. Can’t think of anymore, damn it
I have:
1) Pooped in all three branches of the US government
2) Beat Damon Wayans at foosball
3) Been to the premiere of a Tom Arnold movie
4) Went to Disneyland with Rachel Leigh Cook and Rider Strong (about a year after Rider and I were both featured in Tiger Beat, go figure)
5) Been in the stampeding path of a full-grown Buffalo (bison)
6) Got stuck in Al Gore’s motorcade the night he conceded the 2000 election
1. Vomited on Mount Fuji (Twice – altitude sickness)
2. Lifted the last operational load off the last combat stores ship in the Navy (USS White Plains AFS-4)
3. Tied myself to a sleepwalker in Northern Wisconsin
4. Sold trinkets to Sean Astin inside of a mountain
5. Recorded tracks for the Annual NORAD Tracks Santa event (I did Sydney, Australia and Honolulu, Hawaii)
6. Sang along to Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy while driving through the Burren
7. Ordered a strip search on a suspected thief
8. Had Al Gore misidentify my service and rank despite being in a service-specific uniform (He called me an army captain while I was wearing Navy Khakis)
9. Traveled to Alaska in the middle of January with no winter clothes on purpose (I wore short sleeves and a light jacket the entire time despite a foot of snow on the ground and sub-freezing temperatures)
10. Fired an M-60 machine gun at a tornado
I’ve almost experienced your number six (had rocks thrown at my bus while driving into and out of Hebron).
I should really do up my own list.
(1) Walked into a drug deal in Belize in the back of a ranger station (involving the ranger).
(2) Conned NASA into giving me VIP tickets for a space shuttle launch
(3) Sat next to the King and Queen of Tonga on an airplane
(4) Set type and printed my own customized lunch bags on a vintage letter press at the age of 6 (yes, nominally supervised, but my grandfather and a goodly helping of Jack Daniels)
(5) Received four aces in a row in blackjack, splitting them all (lost on three, pushed on the fourth).
(6) Told a United States Senator he was in my chair and had to move (he was quite apologetic)
(7) Ate an orchid
(8) Had a beer with Barack Obama (manifestly not a very big deal at the time)
(9) Saw a car (a Datsun B-210, no less) get hit by a freight train while I was first in line at the crossing gates. She lived.
(10) Seen two total eclipses
These lists are a ton of fun to read!!
Mine isn’t as exciting….
1) have a tattoo of: 2 bars of the flute solo from Mozart’s flute and harp concerto
2) had surgery to remove my first rib on the left side, thus ensuring my feminist creds, since Adam can now have his damned rib back
3) took my flute completely apart and put it back together again, in working order, to see how it worked (fully supervised by an instrument repair person)
4) played in a high school band that performed at Expo 86
5) an expert at making bubble hash (hey, we all have our hobbies)
6) at age 8, decided I was going to marry Archie Goodwin when I grew up
I’d finish the list, but it is too busy at work!
@51 SPKelly: 10. Fired an M-60 machine gun at a tornado
If you shoot them, does it only make them mad?
1. Kissed a complete stranger on the top of the head because I was directed to by a friend.
2. Bowled with two current members of the Detroit Pistons (and got trounced by both of them.)
3. Once had Alice Cooper tell my then three year old, who had just announced to him that her favorite song was “Welcome to My Nightmare” “Shouldn’t you be at home watching Teletubbies?”
4. Went to elementary and middle school with Uncle Kracker (this is clearly one of those items I’m not particularly proud of)
5. Neil Gaiman once left a voice post in my Livejournal
…running out of steam, here.
1. Attended a Beduin Arab wedding in the middle of the desert in the UAE.
2. Driven round and round Loch Ness with my family looking for the monster, to no avail. (Stupid monster.)
3. Met XTC.
4. Sailed first class on the QE2.
5. Sailed on the Persian Gulf in a fishing dhow.
6. Spent ten years as a comic book artist.
7. Hung out with Billy Bob Thornton at his rented house during shooting of The Alamo.
8. Been an assistant director on several independent films.
9. Hung out with Ron Livingston in the backyard of a house during one of those film shoots, while his fiancee Lisa Sheridan did scenes inside.
10. Worked as a driver on the most recent season of The Bachelor.
11. Met Terry Gilliam in the 80’s while still in film school, where he came to talk about the controversy surrounding the just-released Brazil.
12. Cockblocked Nic Cage. (Details by request only.)
13. Played with a leopard cub.
14. Married a topless dancer. Then divorced her.
I was going to add “Hung out with Quentin Tarantino,” but then realized that probably two-thirds of Austin has done that, so I left it off.
I’ll likely post this in my own blog later.
10 things I’ve done that you probably haven’t.
1. Talked with Wil Wheaton about blogging (briefly, at a book-signing).
2. Read the Harry Potter series in more than one language (though book 7 isn’t out in Hebrew yet)
3. Walked most of the underground tunnel network at McLean Hospital (a psychiatric hospital attached to Harvard Medical School)
4. Toured the primate enclosure at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston before they moved the primates into it.
5. Been in two riots/panics. One the day following a suicide bombing, one following a knife fight in Jerusalem.
6. Been outdoors in a sandstorm, blizzard and hurricane. (not all at once)
7. Wore the little “mourning armband” that came with my copy of Superman #75 to school the day after Superman “died” in the 1990s. I was 11.
8. Walked along the rooftops of the shuk/souk in the Moslem Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.
9. Helped pack a patient’s blood sample in dry ice so it could be shipped from the US to the UK for some specific testing. (Nobody else in the unit could find dry ice or a styrofoam cooler. I was the secretary.)
10. Been sideswiped by a van while crossing the street.
1. Sat in a doctor’s office with Jack Klugman
2. Stuck a Q-Tip through my eardrum as an infant (hence #1, many years later)
3. Saw Marcel Marceau in Paris
4. Paid for trip to Paris by selling my old Star Wars figures/toys on eBay
5. Won a 10-speed bike from a box of Alpha-Bits
6. Was called (my blond wife and me) an “Aryan wet dream” by Harlan Ellison.
7. Stood knee-deep in freezing, Venetian pigeon-feather messy water in the middle of a flooding St. Mark’s Square (on purpose).
8. Once saw a carny working the Hit a Rubber Frog into Floating Lilypad Game with a homemade frog tattoo on his arm.
9. Named a cat Repeat, after first cat Pete died.
10. Went to the Senior Prom with my (now) wife
1. Superglued my own ass to the top of my desk. (Unintentionally.)
Do I really need to list another nine?
I don’t have much …
1. I was in a crash that included the death car of the 60s (Corvair) rearending the death car of the 70s (Pinto) and lived to tell the tale thanks to a really good reconstructive plastic surgeon. The Pinto did not explode.
2. I beat Manute Bol at nine ball in a Miami hotel bar. He was very gracious and very tall.
Mine is here.
That was hard. But thanks for the blog fodder!
1. Went outside to chop wood because I was bored, ended up chopping my shin. There’s now a dent in the bone.
2. Sprayed myself in the eye with deck stain trying to see what the clog in the sprayer was. (man I was dumb)
3. Tried to see if I could push a stapler against my thumb with just enough force so it wouldn’t eject the staple. Obviously I had no idea how much force that would be and the staple went into my thumb.
4. Attempted to joust with friends while riding bicycles and weilding swords and shields that were pieces of sheet steel with the edges filed down.
5. Kareoked The Sweater Song with a couple friends to a crowd that was into country.
6. Convinced a former boss that my parents would spread peanut butter on the bottom of a pan when they were making lasagna so that it wouldn’t stick to the pan.
7. Traveled to southern Illinois to interview an Amish woodworker about the gun cabinets that his company makes. The guy’s (approx.) 3-year-old son looked at me like I was from another planet.
8. Toured multiple million-dollar homes to take pictures of the closets.
9. Watched my mom try to “rescue” a racoon cub (which really didn’t need rescuing). I supplied her with a ladder and work gloves. When the critter got away from her, it charged her and tried to bite.
10. Had to dance to YMCA while wearing a giant head dress in front of everyone at my wedding (a few of my friends also had hats and danced).
I didn’t think I could do it. Not nearly as exciting as many of the other lists.
Don’t have 10, since most stuff I’ve done has been done by lots of other people. However, I will offer up two things:
1. Been chased and attacked by a goose at the Central Park Zoo when I was 4.
2. Taken 30 depositions at Sing Sing. And in a corrollary, have been to 4 different maximum security prisons in NY state.
Hm. This is not exactly exciting, but here goes:
1. Have shot rifle matches in four different states.
2. Physically subdued somebody who was angry and high. I did it without injury to him or me.
3. Did it again a few years later. He’s been clean now for more than a year.
4. Had kittens born in my bed while I was (initially, anyway) asleep.
5. Got a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE. I didn’t do as well in the math portion. :-)
6. Finished grad school with a 3.94 GPA.
7. Never once smoked or taken illegal drugs.
8. But, I regularly bought and drank beer prior to my 21st birthday. I didn’t get carded until after I was 21. *shrug*
9. I’ve been using the internet since 1991. My first exposure to the web was with Mosaic sometime in ’92 (I think). I first used Netscape when it was in version 0.65 Beta.
10. Watched Penn State beat Michigan State with my four-hour-old son.
Not to throw a wet rag on your list (well… actually, to throw a wet rag on your list), Items 1,2,4,5,and 6 were actually things that were done TO you, not by you. Still, all in all, very impressive (you still had to have yourself in the right place at the right time for those things to happen) especially #s 5 & 7.
My own list:
1: Been the first human being to have ever walked in a place (several times, I am a caver)
2:Saved my son’s life (from getting run over by a car)
3:Smoked a cigarette in the parking lot of a public hospital while waiting for the doctors to decide I really did have a collapsed lung (and flirting with the cutest nurse I have ever seen)
4:Spent 2 months hitchhiking out west.(I am sure others have done this too, but in this day and age, most people wouldn’t even think about it)
5:Stood in the gut pile of a fresh jaguar kill (and then trying desperately to see him thru the thick jungle so I would know which way to… RUN!!!!)
6: Threw a bachelor party where all the guys had to come in drag at a cabin in Crawford County, MO
7: I was the best man at a wedding in an elevator
8: Laid with my head over the edge of a 300+ ft waterfall in the light of a full moon and looked at the “moonbow” in the mist below me.
9: Flew out of an airport one day after it had been attacked by terrorists (Madrid, last year, what a nightmare)
10: …Hmmm… Having a hard time coming up with any others that don’t involve caving, and that would be cheating.
1. Rolled in week old garbage with an Air Force general and Army colonel, on a ship, in the Indian Ocean.
2. Personally lectured by Larry Niven on the craptacular stupidity of carboard villains and the gratuitous knocking off of same for cheap thrills.
3. Pulled trap.
4. Spent a night in a Thai rubber plantation.
5. Seriously propositioned to be a sperm donor, the old fashioned way, by a lesbian couple.
6. Climbed all over by South Korean school children.
7. Watched a fireworks show at Sea World San Diego from a Zodiac boat a couple of miles offshore.
8. Spent Christmas in Perth, Western Australia and New Years in Hobart, Tasmania, in the same year.
9. Packed up a deceased servicemember’s personal belongings for shipment home.
10. Been on the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.
1. Chased (on foot) a taxi across London’s Tower Bridge. (Because, you see, I dropped my wallet in the back seat. And yes, I did catch up with it, at the traffic lights just past the Tower of London.)
2. Sung with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
3. Been a columnist for Windows Developer Magazine.
4. Been taken for Australian by an American. (He was from Georgia and must’ve had a tin ear of not inconsiderable proportions.)
5. Been taken for Austrian by Germans. (That one made me proud.)
6. Ridden an antique steam railway through rural Arkansas hills, only to find that the conductor had actually visited my wife’s home town (which is waaay out in the boondocks of northern Norway and has all of 700 inhabitants).
7. Flew from Scandinavia to Australia, stayed overnight, flew back.
8. Experienced an emergency landing in a Boeing 777 after one engine failed during take-off.
9. Was Norwegian champion in the 400m hurdles five years running.
10. Had dinner with Roald Dahl. In his home.
Bonus item: I was once paid $500/word for a piece of writing. Can you top that, Scalzi?
1. Cleaned up after a suicide. Not fun.
2. Had one current lover help me break into my locked car, while on a date with another, while yet a third was DJing on the radio.
3. Shot arrows during night time, by the light of the moon.
4. Spent a 4th of July walking a panicked, colicky horse, and then watched the rest of fireworks with her from her stall. (She stopped being scared when she could *see* what all the noise was.)
5. Went grizzly bear watching. Saw their day beds, their stomp paths and message trees… and almost met one up close and personal, during a game trail hike.
6. Did a 2 am to 5 am shift of “pregnancy watch” of a gravid chimpanzee who we weren’t sure would know what to do with the baby once it was born. (She did fine, actually.)
7. Fed an octopus. More than one, actually, and more than once.
8. While climbing Little Si: got bee-stung on my way up and decided, if it turned out I was allergic, I’d rather be found dead facing up towards the mountain than in the parking lot and so did not turn back; wandered off the hiking trail and onto the rock-climbing trail and realized as much when I found myself clambering over room-sized boulders; wandered off-trail *again* on my way down from the top and found myself on a steep, long grass-covered slope with no sign of a trail at all, and (after a few shivery moments contemplating rescue-by-helicopter) climbed back to the top and found the correct trail down. Don’t hike alone, kids.
9. Waded across floodwaters to throw a rope to someone and pull them in.
10. Went fossil hunting in Eastern Washington.
Oh, hell. That’s me at No. 69 – hey! 69! Heh – I forgot to change back my alias.
Okay, here goes.
10 Things I Have Done That You Probably Haven’t:
1. Run a spotlight at a 10,000 Maniacs concert.
2. Sang at the funeral of Sen. John Heinz.
3. Ridden on the tailboard of a fire truck in full turnout gear.
4. Read every issue of every newspaper published in Philadelphia between 1788 and 1801.
5. Been plagiarized by the Washington Post (and received an apology for it).
5a. Found out about this plagiarism when the University President cited the Post article at my PhD graduation ceremony.
6. Ran through traffic at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel to retrieve a hat that was not mine.
7. Drove through Janesville WI in the back of a pickup truck with a life-sized replica of the first atomic bomb.
8. Conga’d down my driveway with a dozen drunken Russians on a business trip.
9. Sent my first email in 1986. Not impressed. Sent my second email in 1993.
10. Did not pick a winning candidate for any office from either party for my first seven elections.
11. Refused a speaking role on a TV special in 2nd grade.
12. Played Jew’s harp in a band.
Okay, a dozen rather than 10. Hey – I’m in liberal arts. I’ll leave the counting to the scientists.
1) Studied to be a Roman Catholic priest.
2) Fought the town bully, and won.
3) Wrote a play that’s been staged more than 100 times. I have yet to see it.
4) Helped deliver a calf. (To be honest, the cow did more than me.)
5) Argued at length with Vincent Price about how best to make espresso. (An argument which we both enjoyed tremendously.)
6) Read American Gods while dipping my toes in Lake Atitlán.
7) Played taps on cornet at a military funeral.
8) Traveled 2400 miles (one-way) for a cup of coffee.
9) Improvised a 45-minute stage show — with no spoken words — while the Moody Blues played a live backing-track.
10) White-washed Tom Sawyer’s fence.
MANNY’S LIST 1.0
1. Cut a chunk out of the bottom of my foot when I stepped on an industrial-grade suspenders (braces) clamp.
2. Sprained the ball of my foot.
3. Sat bleeding by the side of the road while cars drove past me.
4. Had spiral fractures of all the toes on one foot.
5. Sat on a bee and then gotten a chemical burn on the upper thigh when applying ammonia that was supposed to be diluted but was not to the sting.
6. Ridden down a mountain on an aerial tram after the engineer had declared the wind conditions were unsafe for operating the tram.
7. Exploded a sinkful of dishes by putting Naval Jelly on a magnesium griddle.
8. Had a neurologist call my MRI and my condition “interesting”.
9. Drowned (mostly).
10. Rolled a canoe in exactly the same spot two times a year apart. (Unrelated to the drowning.)
That list was depressing, so I started again.
MANNY’S LIST 2.0
1. Gone body surfing in a drainage ditch.
2. Played a round of Par 3 golf with only a putter.
3. Shown Marc Canter the first Mac, pre-release.
4. Had Jay Fenton give me a pre-release demo of MusicWorks.
5. Reviewed Commodore 64 software.
6. Performed an Asatru wedding.
7. Performed a condensed version of “The Wizard of Oz” on a farm in Oklahoma while a storm was approaching.
8. Driven across the Nevada desert with a sailor on leave listening to Zombies and Surfaris 8-tracks.
9. Ushered at a Gordon Lightfoot concert, a Ray Charles concert, and a Bob Crosby concert in the same year.
10. Seen pictures of my g’grandfather driving in the first race at Daytona, on the beach.
Scalzi made me do it:
1) Intentionally failed the Army’s Air Assault course.
2) Became reasonably fluent in Persian/Farsi and then lost it (and I wasn’t Iranian to begin with).
3) At 6′, 200lbs, been the “littlest bouncer” (how cute!) at a Country Western Bar.
4) Worked at a bar Jack Ruby used to manage.
5) Taken a class from one of Ted Bundy’s professors.
6) Taken a class from one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s teachers . . .
7) Had a client who claimed his father helped with the assassination of JFK.
8) Had “The Bangles” sign my chest at a music store.
9) Been a roadie for an Ethiopian band.
10) Have Gwendolyn Brooks find your favorite literature “interesting”.
You can find my list
here
I can’t compete with most, but:
1. Did a face-plant into Geena Davis’ chest at Century City.
2. Been to the top of the towers on the Brooklyn, Manhattan and George Washington Bridges.
3. Survived the bombing of a movie theater in Tel Aviv because I walked out on Smoky and the Bandit ten minutes before the bomb blew up.
4. Almost broke my neck in a tragic “Red Rover” game.
5. Convinced a family to move out of their house for three months…two days after they had moved into the house.
6. Convinced 3M to sell a mountain to the State of Minnesota so we could shoot a stunt scene there. (Admittedly, the deal was already in the works, but had been bogged down for months.)
7. Visited a tunnel in Brooklyn that was supposed to have been filled in late in the 1800’s.
8. Listened in on a phone conversation in which a world-famous Director was informed that he’d been fired from the movie he was working on.
9. Almost been swept over a waterfall at Yosemite.
10. Had scalding hot oil poured out on my chest while trying to fix an oil filter gasket in 10 degree weather.
It is remarkable how many of us have found unique ways to injure ourselves and others.
MAO
11. I wrote a resume for the former Chief Marketing Officer of Pizza Hut.
1) Been mistaken for Jack Osbourne (after he lost weight, thankfully) at a Playboy party by a Playboy bunny.
2) Told bunny she was wrong (still not sure why).
3) Paid rent by signing up for medical testing
4) Got Terry Jones’ email address from him and then never used it.
5) Was described by Germaine Greer as ‘an innocent’
6) [secret]
7) Written horoscopes for a national newspaper.
8) Lived with a future European pornstar (as flatmates, nothing more)
9) Met the guy that Matt Damon has THAT fight with in the Bourne Ultimatum.
10) Only came up with nine answers when we were asked for ten. Oh, wait… Damn!
1. Won a candy bar as big as my head in a halloween costume (i was a stag beetle) contest when I was eleven
2. Had a rib broken during a wrestling match when I was fourteen.
3. Was threatened with physical harm by a member of the Russian mafia in Saint Petersburg
4. Suffered an acid burn on my right hand which exposed the tendons, with no lasting damage other than a scar shaped like Australia
5. Rode a Holstein cow. Well, sat on a Holstein cow. They don’t move much.
6. Spent some time in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in southern India.
7. Was stabbed in the eye with a spear during a kung fu competition.
8. Practiced iron shirt chi kung for oh, about ten years now.
9. Dated a girl in Virginia, then dated a girl named Virginia.
10. got a copy of You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop
1. Had testicular surgery. Twice.
2. Shared an elevator with Neil Gaiman and managed not to make a gibbering fanboy jackass of myself (the trick? Just smile, nod, and talk about jet lag).
3. Went to Burning Man back in the 90s.
4. Finished the Silverman Half Ironman Triathlon without throwing up.
5. Toured Pearl Harbor with a Pearl Harbor survivor.
6. Talked about the differences between American and Chinese journalism with a Chinese reporter in a hot pot restaurant in Chengdu, China.
7. Gotten my name etched on a space probe.
8. Had my lab coat autographed by Ray Bradbury.
9. Played drums for a band whose signature song, “Why We Wearing Clothes At All?” would trigger public nudity on a grand scale.
10. Sold myself off at a bachelor auction for $275, or $1.45 a pound.
1. Gave Groucho Marx my autograph (I was nine).
2. When I was ten Jonas Salk told me, “Don’t touch anything.”
3. Scoped out babes with Adam West at Comic-Con.
4. Started an announcement at Comic-Con with the words, “Attention K-mart Shoppers.”
5. Recounted a D&D story to Marion Zimmer Bradley, which she later turned into an incident in a story.
6. Been homeless.
7. Got sedated by marijuana.
8. Argued on a number of occasions with a serial killer, before he started his killing spree. (The man was an officious dork.)
9. Broke my ankle and didn’t learn about it until years later when I had the ankle x-rayed to find out why I kept wrenching it. The resulting conversation went sort of like this…
Doctor: Mr. Kellogg, when did you break your ankle?
Me: Do what?
Doctor: Break your ankle.
Me: When did I do that?
Doctor: That’s what we want to know!
10. Translated Gary Gygax. (Into English. The man has a unique talent for producing lengthy, rambling sentences that change subject at least three times, tenses five times, and viewpoint twice. He can also find words in the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language the publishers don’t know are there.)
1. Fathered six children. With the same woman. That I’m still married to. Over a twenty years span.
2. Played big band jazz in a hundred year old theatre.
3. Ran over a skunk. On a motorcycle. (I was on the motorcycle, not the skunk). That bike still smelled faintly of skunk when I sold it two years later: he baked into the exhaust.
4. Early online pedophile stalkerage: was propositioned by a transvestite on The Well at the age of 15 or so.
More here: http://pwsblog.blogspot.com
Oooh, Oooh, Oooh! Forgot one.
11. Yelled at an employee who interrupted my phone call…to tell me he’d cut his thumb off and wanted to go to the hospital.
Addendum.
Have exchanged insults with Ray Bradbury. (He’s convinced I take life much too seriously.)
1. Swam in the mississippi during a full moon while being seranaded by flutests in rennasance garb
2. Head butted Greg Herbold (Mtn Biker Celeb)
3. Lived in a van for 8 months, travelling N. America
4. Assisted archeologists in recording petroglyphs using a reflector, mylar, and a sharpe.
5. Spent two weeks working at a diamond mine just south of the arctic circle. In February. (With admin access to their database server)
6. Learned how to read on Xmen comics
7. Planted day lilies divided out of Frank Lloyd Rights’ Taliesen landscape (illegally)
8. Drove a manual transmission car with roller blades on. Not recommended.
9. Was film and lighting crew for an erotica fashion show. At an alternative nightclub. At midnight. Twice.
10. Organized a LotR marathon, showing all movies, extended version, back to back, with 1/2 hr meal breaks. This took about 15 hours.
11. Had the torch I was carrying taken away because I was “inciting nakedness” at a bicycling event.
12. Carried and read 5 books on my palm pilot while on a backpacking trip. You can recharge those with 9v batteries & a homemade wire device that wouldn’t make it through airport security these days, btw.
Jumped up and down on the San Andreas Fault with a hundred friends.
Breakfasted with Neil Young and Neil Armstrong in their homes.
Continued working unpaid six months after being terminated, sneaking in to finish the project anyway.
Written out seven-figure checks to people.
Watched the Leonids meteor storm on a granite cap at 8,048 feet surrounded by snow.
Embroidered shirts with computer instructions transcribed from paper tape.
Discussed the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox at length with my physics colleagues at a cafe, while wearing full Rocky Horror drag.
Been tutored in the proper consumption of vodka by a professor from Moscow.
Dated two strippers, but have never gone to a strip club.
Read A Lonesome Night in October in front of The Gates of Hell.
Here’s my list, which includes zooming through Norwegian fjords and judging a Rolls-Royce concours.
10 things I’ve done you (possibly) haven’t:
1. Broken someone’s leg by accident
2. Been proposed to by two different people on different occasions when I identified an obscure music track artist and title.
3. Been told by the US military that I was too short to fly on a plane.
4. Had an Irish driver in a French made tow truck take our Swedish car to an English pub with a Welsh barman so we could call for a repair guy while we were next to the Roman Wall.
5. GOtten 2nd degree burns
6. Cried in the middle of a Paris sidewalk and had a construction worker stop working and help me out with my problem.
7. Been on dates with three seperate individuals who had my same birthday.
8. Been the youngest and fasted promoted supervisor at the big name ISP I worked for at the time. (I don’t think this one is still true, but it was at the time of the promotion)
9. Ridden on a pirate ship in the middle of an ice rink in front of thousands of people.
10. Sold my jewelry to a big name porn video production company (vivid).
1) Had a maintenance man give me a behind the scenes tour of the Pompeii ruins.
2) Gave a performance of 16th and 17th century Christmas Carols at Colonial Williamsburg.
3) Also preformed at half time for a NBA game as part of a acrobatic act where I was part of a human pryamid of 6 women and we had people backflipping over us.
4) Did an arial act that involved me hanging upside down on a ladder
5) Got second degree burns about 30% of my right hand and didn’t leave a scar.
6) Fell down the stairs while trick or treating and ended up with a scar in the shape of a fish on my thumb.
7) Had John Scalzi promise he would fight crime for me. Come on Scalzi! You’d better keep your promises!
8) Accidentally became a freelance writer at 15.
9) Recieved a wedding proposal while I was hanging upside down in a tree. (I said yes after I got my feet back on solid ground)
10) Has Poppy Z. Brite accuse me of being one of “those people.” Sorry.
1) Been thrown out of a Barnes & Noble in the Big Apple after climbing atop a bookshelf to wave at Margaret Thatcher.
2) Gotten thrown out of Mamma Leone’s on Broadway in the Big Apple after inadvertently insulting the restaurant’s red sauce.
3) Slept under a bridge for a week.
4) Been interviewed by the FBI because my ex-fiancee’s brother was creating software for the company.
5) Was forcefully removed from the room at the Smithsonian holding the Hope diamond because a friend and I were discussing how one could successfully steal the gem.
6) Been asked out on a date by one of the principal male dancers of the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
7) Hung out with Wynton Marsalis after a gig.
8) Saved a five-year-old boy from getting hit by a car the same week that my best friend died after falling off a bridge.
9) Watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a row, no breaks.
10) Got smacked in the head with a beer bottle while breaking up a fight between a husband and the guy his wife was shtupping.
Off the top of my head:
1. Conned a US Navy Cruiser through the Straits of Malacca and the Straits of Hormuz, the East Timor Strait, and through the Galapagos Islands.
2. Jumped from the second story balcony a women’s hostel into the middle of a sidewalk cafe on the island of Majorca, wearing only my skivvies, in order to avoid the local policia. Received a standing ovation from the patrons – and the police.
3. Once swam in the Pacific Ocean and the Bearing Sea within the same hour, in a blinding snow storm, at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, off the Aleutian Island of Shemya.
4. Once flew over the north pole, again wearing only my skivvies, with a gallon of melting orange sherbet in my lap.
5. Hiked across Morocco safely by pretending to be Canadian. Can actually say, “Don’t shoot me, I’m Canadian!” in Russian, Arabic, Farsi, and Pushtu – I’m not Canadian.
6. Once rode across the Pyrenees Mountains, from Caberra, France though Andorra, to Barcelona, Spain – on a Spanish prison train in middle of the night without papers and on the strength of my winning smile.
7. Once rode through the Akka, the Arab Quarter of Haifa, Israel, in the back of an Israeli Army deuce-and-half, again in the middle of the night. You want to try paranoia? There’s nothing better.
8. Was decorated for saving the lives of 43 Iraqi civilians.
9. Had my picture taken sitting on top of 6 tons of cocaine.
10. Once flew up a riverbed at 100 knots, hanging out the side of a Blackhawk helicopter in a gunner’s harness, looking up at the tree tops. Clearly heard the pilot say “Uh, oh” over the headphones, just before a highway bridge support went past me, missing the rotor blades by no more than a foot.
There’s more, but that’ll do for now.
Wow, everyone is so much more interesting than me. I’ll try it.
10) Saw a TOW missile being fired.
9) Called in an air strike (training, not real. Real bombs though.)
8) Met Charlie Sheen in the Hard Rock Cafe in Tokyo.
7) Was told jokes by R.L. Burnside after a show.
6) Went to Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint in Chulahoma, MS
5) Climbed Mt. Fuji (walked up is more like it)
4) Heard a short shot artillery shell slice through the air over my head.
3) Personally got Davey Allison’s and Dale Earnhardt’s autograph in the same day.
2) Snuck into Charlotte Motor Speedway and took pictures through the speed camera hole in turn 4 during a Winston Cup practice.
1) Walked on a coral reef.
Sure are some interesting folks here. My not-so-interesting list:
1. Fooled around in a church basement during a music performance. Performed by her family.
2. Was in the forefront of a riot at a Surf Competition in Huntington Beach, CA
3. Married my high school sweetheart. (she was also my senior prom date.)
4. Hit on Gloria Estephan of the Miami Sound Machine, backstage at Disneyland. I had no idea who she was, and she was very nice. My friends still tease me for the attempt.
5. Been in the background of 2 movies, 3 television broadcasts, and 4 newspaper articles, none of which were about me.
6. Helped set a world record at Disneyland.
7. Sneaked onto a freeway to play, and watched the police recover one of the Hillside Strangler’s victims.
8. Took a trip to New Mexico to meet my twice great-grandfather’s new wife and baby (who is my great uncle and 12 years younger than I am.) and looked at his “Indian Registration Card” from the “Territory of New Mexico”
That is about all. But then again, I’m not done living yet.
1. Went sledding (on a trash bag) on a de-mined section of the 1986 Sarajevo Olympic ski hills.
2. Attended undergrad classes at 4 separate universities, and still managed to get my B.A. in four years.
3. Ran a maple sugar shack for a day.
4. Completely demolished the LCD screen of my first laptop… 4 hours after I bought it.
5. Paid $120 for a taxi ride.
6. Walked through wet cement on a public road.
7. Won $500 and a limo ride to the first day of school.
8. Backpacked for 5 weeks in Europe… with my mom.
9. Ran over a tree. Yeah, all the way over it.
10. Married the second guy I ever dated.
Not as impressive as some, but not bad for being 25. :)
This is fantastic – here we go:
1. I bought a car I did not know how to drive. It was manual.
2. I was chased by two evil Turkeys.
3. Rode in a car with hitchhikers. I was in Switzerland, so it was okay.
4. All but one of the times I have ridden in a limo was accidental, unexpected and free.
5. Went Trampeze flying last week for my 37th birthday.
6. Walked down the red carpet at the Essence Awards ceremony and stood next to Briant Gumbel, Bill Cosby and saw – heaven help me this man is monster gorgeous – LL Cool J.
7. Three times I have quit jobs and moved across the country – twice to places where I knew no one – without a job to go to.
8. I was “accidentally” in a run way show.
9. I have a good job, making good money (not a boast) and did not finish my degree. Most of the people who have my job have Masters.
I also had to delete some of my entries as the activities may be illegal to read about in some states. (hahahaha!)
Deb
Hmm, my list is mostly fairly mundane, but…
1) Managed to stay married to the same guy for 30+ years (an achievement on many levels!)
2) Worked in the high tech industry in the ’80s and ’90s, due to knowing a fan (thanks, Kurt Baty!) who helped me get a job at Stratus Computer.
3) Edited a non-fiction book (Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn) that was nominated for a Hugo (which, I know, is not the same thing as being nominated for a Hugo myself, but, it’s probably as close as I’ll ever come)
4) Interviewed by Jeanie Moos on CNN about Dead People Server (and have been interviewed for radio and newspapers a number of times about that as well)
5) Attended the Lord of the Rings Oscar party, and got to be in the same room as Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens, Elijah Wood (et.c., et.c.) just a few hours after they won all those Oscars. Didn’t meet anyone other than one of the producers (Rick Porras)
6) Was one of the first people to greet John and Elizabeth Edwards when they landed in Pittsburgh in July 2004, the day he was named John Kerry’s running mate
7) Had two different co-workers appear on national TV within about three months of one another (one was a woman pleading the case of her Russian-born husband (he was eventually allowed to emmigrate from Russia), and the other was Lisa Bristol, Christa McCauliffe’s younger sister, during the Challenger accident)
8) Was onstage with Connie Willis and Harlan Ellison during the LACon Hugo Ceremony (though I didn’t see anything until I saw a video of the incident after the con was over)
9) Showed up briefly on the Today Show (in a taped segment about Francis Ford Coppola, that included some of his appearance at MagiCon)
10) Knew Bruce Schneier when he was a teenager as we were both in Minneapa
1)A crocodile tried to attack me
2)A monkey tried to attack me
3)A dog tried to attack me
4)The dog succeded
5) I was shot at twice
6) At one point , with out trying , my phone number was the same as my national ID number
7) It turned out the my girlfriend and I are far away relatives
8) Once a flight I was supposed to board was cancled , so instead I walked all the way to my destination
9) ran over my favorite pair of sunglasses with my car
10) Once , in the space of 4 hours managed to bang my head about 15 times into the same obstacle, each time forgetting that it was there.
1. Had a car I was driving get hit by a moving tree.
2. Finished in the top 100 of the Chicago Marathon.
3. Saw the shortest Bob Dylan concert ever — Nov 1965 — His sound system crapped out after one song, and the had to refund everyone’s money.
4. Beat an Olympic medalist in a head to head race. Note: She was still in high school at the time and didn’t get the medal until 8 years later.
5. Worked as an extra in a beer commercial.
6. Scored 100% on the mental test when taking my physical for the Selective Service.
7. Took 2nd place in what was probably the 1st triathlon held outside of Hawaii.
8. Wrote a functioning computer program, that produced output, which consisted of 2 machine code instructions.
9. Spent my wedding night sleeping in the baggage rack on an Amtrak train.
1. Met the love of my life in the consuite of Worldcon LACon IV. He totally stole me from the guy who was chatting me up. Just like Zaphod did to Arthur, stealing Trillian. :)
2. Lost my virginity in the FRONT seat of a Cadillac.
3. Had a reformed drug dealer friend with AIDS tell me about how he’d killed a man, wrapped him in the carpet, and put his body in a dumpster. (I don’t know, but I assume that this is what he had been in prison for.) And I remained friendly with the guy until he died a year later.
4. Sent a crackhead boyfriend to jail for stealing my TV.
5. Had Lani Tupu (of Farscape) pull down my shirt to look in my cleavage for jello shots. By the way…. I have like 100 jello shots left over from Windycon that I think I’ll bring to ConFusion. Anyone want one?
6. Walked every single mile of the first Michigan Breast Cancer 3-Day (about 60 miles). Sure, a lot of people did this, but maybe not as many as you think actually walked every mile. My first walking partner quit the first day. My second one passed out in the shower the second day and couldn’t walk the third. My third walking partner could not keep ahead of the sweep vans the last day, and I was determined not to get a ride to the end. And I made it. I couldn’t walk for a couple of days AFTER, but I made it.
7. Read (or skimmed), and wrote 3-page essays on, 4 Native American history books in one night. And I actually remember a couple of them.
8. Had a Star Trek comic book character named after me.
9. Waited on Bobcat Goldthwaite twice in one day, and had him growl at me for an extra bonus.
10. Had one car stolen twice (never replaced the ignition the second time, so it started with a screwdriver) and its window broken another 3 times so a total of about $30 worth of stuff could be stolen (total). I love Detroit.
Alan – I also scoped out chicks with Adam West at a comic con (but in Detroit, and I wasn’t really scoping them myself). :)
Adam – I also managed not to act a fool riding in an elevator with Neil Gaiman. I’d already been embarassed enough the first time I saw Neil in like 93. I was going to get Sandman #8 signed for the friend I’d borrowed it from (to do my makeup as Death for Halloween). As soon as I saw Neil, I fell in love, and when he asked my name, I told him… so he signed it to me. Whoops.
Loved reading everyone’s lists. Thanks!
Here’s my list: http://www.spasticmonkeys.com/blog/2008/01/15/500
#41-Gelee–ooh good one, I had something similar, I think you’ve got me beat on the number of schools before high school, but I went to junior high and highschool, and then went back to junior high and then back to high school. All in three years.
Alright, my list may be a bit lame compared to some, but it’s mine.
1. Lived on a Franciscan monastery as a kid.
2. Didn’t have sex until I was 21 (not related to #1).
3. Regularly appeared as an extra in the first 3 seasons of America’s Most Wanted (I think I missed 1 or 2 episodes); usually as a hotline operator, but once as an undercover LAPD gang officer and once as an Alaska State Trooper (no lines, just background shots).
4. When I wasn’t playing an America’s Most Wanted hotline operator on TV, I actually was an America’s Most Wanted hotline operator (the show is taped, so the operators you see in the episodes are not actually taking calls – they’re faking it). I once took the actual telephone tip that led to the capture of one of the fugitives.
5. Once had my employer transfer me 3,000 miles away so that I could move in with a girl I met a few weeks earlier; I was working a close-to-minimum-wage job (retail sales) at the time; the company agreed, by the way.
6. After moving 3,000 miles, was nearly strangled, literally, in a movie theater by the fiance of the girl in #5; we were on a date (the girl and I, not the fiance…. I wasn’t aware she had a fiance).
7. Decided I needed to move out of the girl’s house after the incident in #6, which left me homeless. I ended up living in a tent for 6 months.
8. Quit my job after #7 and decided to sell incense and tie-die to tourists at the beach and freeway off-ramps (hey, it was California); made more $$$ doing that than I had at the retail job anyway (and it was a lot more fun).
9. Dated a woman twice my age (I was 22, she was 44). We broke up after a couple years.
10. Worked for Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign, even though I was a 23-year old hippie with long hair and a beard (Perot wasn’t too fond of my appearance, but I worked my ass off).
11. Once had sex at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
12. Was arrested by the US Secret Service. Not for #11, but rather for “interfering with a diplomatic mission” because I was… interfering with a diplomatic mission (locked myself to the front gate of the French ambassador’s residence with a kryptonite bike lock). The charges were dropped, but not before…
13. …I spent 2 days in jail (my lawyer said I should’ve been out in a few hours, but the Secret Service “lost” my paperwork).
The second half of the list (see #35).
6. Carded L. Sprague de Camp and his wife at a convention (boy were they pissed, but I had my orders).
7. Have drunk wine in the Red Room of the White House.
8. Walked across a 30-foot-tall railroad viaduct with no cross ties when I was about ten (my mother wanted to kill my uncle).
9. Chatted with Courtney Love’s ex-husband about their relationship.
10. Blasted through a red light in the wee hours of the morning to avoid being car-jacked.
1. Rode a cow after ingesting psilosybin mushrooms.
2. Later that day, accidentally whizzed on an electric fence.
3. Still later, did it again on purpose.
4. Co-wrote a bad novel with someone 1,500 miles away, sending chapters through an ISP called “Odyssey — Where Adults Come to Play.”
5. Caught a catfish by somehow looping the line around its middle.
6. Slept in a four-poster bed in an antebellum mansion, now on the register of historic places, in Gallion, Alabama.
7. Was the subject of the following sentence spoken by an outlaw biker in Memphis: “There’s a fucking clown on a motorcycle smoking a joint.”
8. While dressed as the clown mentioned in No. 7, waddled behind the Peabody Hotel ducks while delivering a Balloon-a-Gram.
9. Was friends with a man executed in Missouri for a triple murder.
10. Was stung three times on the penis by yellow wasps after whizzing on their nest. (Not on purpose. After re-reading this list, I realize how stupid I am. But I’m not THAT stupid.)
1. washed and dressed corpses
2. sold plasma
3. got published in Estonian
4. had mono decades after the other kids
5. saved a baby bird from bullies when I was five
6. watched in a mirror as my C-section was performed
7. rode shotgun–literally
8. went cave crawling
9. wrote obituaries at a newspaper
10. attended and reported on the first space shuttle launch
I’m not famous nor do I have the travel some of you have obviously done, but here’s my shot:
1) I have no sense of smell because I had 7.5 oz. of blood clots removed from my head when I was 2.5 mos. old (my scalp would look like a softball if I shaved my head).
2) Taught myself to read and was always 3 or more pages ahead of the teacher in Kindergarten.
3) Freaked out my junior high science teacher getting the blindfolded, nose pinched, taste an apple or a potato correct every time (he didn’t know about #1).
4) Was the only female on the boys’ swim team in high school (and earned my letter as a diver).
5) One day the swim team bus didn’t come to take us to practice and 11 of us piled into the coach’s GTO (I was on top of the pile).
6) Once someone talked me into reading the LotR, I read the entire trilogy straight through three times in just over a week
7) When the extended version box set of the DVDs came out, I watched the entire thing twice in a single weekend.
8) I finished my master’s degree, got promoted, turned 38, found out I was pregnant, and quit my job all within 6 months.
I give up – can’t think of 2 more.
Most related to fishing or Alaska…
1. Rolled over my fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska in the winter time & lived to tell about it.
2. Refused “Abandon Ship order” from Coast Guard Commander after said roll over.
3. Saved doomed fishing boat (took 6 hours)
4.Met the Grandfather if the Iditarod, Joe Rennington Sr.
5. Caught a 29 inch 15 lb rainbow trout in Summit Lake Alaska
6.Caught 70,000 pounds of red salmon in one set of the net (made $7,000 in on hour!!!)
7. Saw the “Worlds Largest Wooden Bowl” in a warehouse in North Kona.(made from the trunk of a large monkey pod tree)
8. Drove on the sidewalk at 80 m.p.h. in Seward, Alaska in an attempt to escape the cops…didn’t work.
9. Got married in Las Vegas…On Valentine’s Day!
10. Got a LARGE tattoo of an octopus pulling down a ship.
That’s all…
OOps! didn’t mean to be anonymous…
1. Attacked by a swarm of bees while carrying a giant lollypop. Ended up with lollypop entangled in my hair.
2. Had lunch with President Clinton’s Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, David J. Scheffer.
3. Told Scheffer’s father that his son was a spoiled brat.
4. Been chased by a rattlesnake.
5. Had a pet rabbit and roadrunner on an archaeological dig.
6. Ran barefoot through a cacti filled desert. Received no injuries.
7. Went to law school for a summer in Athens, Greece.
8. Was a stripper.
9. An elk jumped over me.
10. Robert Kennedy patted me on the head.
1. Had Jon Scalzi open the door for me. (Quite the gentleman that one.)
2. Performed as Bilbo Baggins in my school play.
3. Got dangerously close to a Humpback whale and her calf while halibut fishing in a rickety boat.
4. Witnessed the catch of one of the largest fish I’ve ever seen in said boat.
5. Went SCUBA diving in one of the deepest freshwater mines in Minnesota.
6. Climbed the Dunn’s River Falls in Jamaica.
7. Got to see Newt Gingrich in person while visiting the capitol.
8. Got attacked by my uncle’s crazy dog during a power outage.
9. Wrote a 300+ page book for a bet.
10. Nearly drowned in the Cache Del La Poudre River in CO.
My list:
1. When I was 22 I had a 46-year-old girlfriend. Amazing woman.
2. I walked two miles of the Great Wall of China carrying my four-month-old son.
3. I got lost in Akihabara (tech capital of the world, in Tokyo) and wandered in a technological-overload daze through almost every street for eight hours.
4. I was yelled at by an ANZAC guard in Sydney for jumping down a flight of stairs in the memorial building. He said I was desecrating the “shrine” with my thoughtlessness (I was all of 12 years old at the time). A veteran who was standing by intervened on my behalf. Good chap, that.
5. I’ve held a cobra while living in India (granted it was a de-fanged cobra)
6. I’ve lived in every major Australian city except Darwin.
7. I’ve lived on every continent except for the Poles and Europe. (Actually lived, not just passing through on a stop-over or anything lame like that).
8. I lost the power of speech when talking to Neil Gaiman at a Coraline signing. (Now that was embarrassing).
9. In a single day I met Ben Bova, Orson Scott Card, James Patterson, Susan Orlean, David McCullough, Sara Douglass, Richard Russo, Brian Michael Bendis, and several other writers whose names now escape me. Writers are the only celebs to me. And I love Book Expo.
Argh, can’t think of a tenth. Ah well.
Oh, just thought of # 10
10. My picture has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald twice
I find this post incredibly depressing since I can’t think of a single post-worthy act in my life.
(Fair warning, some of these also fall under the heading of “…and you probably wouldn’t want to.” )
(Although a few are probably under the heading of “…and I would never do again.” )
1. Stepped in a pile of dog shit, on a hill, slipped, and attempted to remove a significant portion of my left foot, with a lawnmower.
2. Been to Ireland.
3. Kissed the Blarney Stone.
4. Gotten my teeth straightened over the age of 30 (and still counting… )
5. Traveled to New Orleans with 20 other people in the back of a Ryder truck.
6. Slept in a bus station.
7. Grown up with an identical twin.
8. Grown up with a Father in a wheelchair.
9. Attended a graduation at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
10. Walked on a volcano.
I kind of feel that too many of these were of the melancholy / downer variety – but those were what I thought of.
MO’B
1. Been caught having fantasy steriod monkey sex on my parent’s couch….at age 30.
2. Ate a live cricket as part of an intiation rite.
3. Danced around a bon-fire with Pakistani Soldiers.
4. Gave a vagrant a 100 dollar bill becomes he said ‘Please’.
5. Fired a missile, watched it malfunction, and come right back at me (I ducked).
6. Drove a Tank with two other drunk crewmembers and a Korean Soldier who did not speak English very well in the Turret.
7. Went into a Gay Bar in a dress uniform to pick up a Soldier who went in on a dare and passed out (girls, I now know what it is like to receive absolutely unwelcome advances).
8. Went to a Star Trek Convention and admitted it to my friends the next day.
9. Took part in a Renaissance themed wedding and stayed in character the whole time.
10. Spent an entire night clubbing in Seoul with friends pretending to be a traveling Porno troupe with the names Bubba Pullman (me), Rock Troy, Dirk Pitt, Lusty Canyon, and Lieutenant Wang.
1. Gotten myself written into a comic book as a monkey.
2. Gotten lost in the Louvre.
3. Been groped by a mime of questionable gender.
4. Been on a religious pilgrimage at the age of 7.
5. Had my Smarties stolen in an encounter with circus monkeys.
6. Accidentally set a bush on fire.
7. Directed and acted in a One-Act Play.
8. Learned five languages before I was 18. (Not to native fluency, mind you.)
9. Run around half naked at New Years Eve. In the snow.
10. Participated in a Dragon Dance.
81 #2 – I did manage to become a near-gibbering fanboy while getting my photo taken with China Mieville.
and after some sleep
@ 27 continued:
12. Had Mick Jagger ask me for lollies (candy) when I was 4yrs old
13. Peter Allen intervened when an overbearing “friend” was trying to chat me up.
14. Came home from a December holiday in Belize with a parasite living in my arm. Medical friends thanked me for being a wonderful host over Xmas.
15. Started 2 jobs where I was offered a higher salary than asked for.
16. Wrote parody notices signed in the name of my college master and put them up next to his. His secretary had trouble deciding which was more authentic and took down his notices.
17. Added supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to a well-known spell-checker during a year in which I was introduced as English’s equivalent to l’Académie française.
18. Had one of the Pet Shop Boys buy and pour me champagne, and Meatloaf offer to buy me a beer.
OK that’s enough, 2008 is feeling a bit boring.
1. Fell off a roof into a cactus patch as a result of laughing too hard when a police officer ordered me to put an accordion down. (Alcohol was involved).
2. Been detained for questioning by Parisian police for attempting to swing a pig’s foot on an elastic string into the one-floor-beneath hotel room of some hot girls.
3. Fainted while cross-examining a defendant in federal court.
4. Sat next to a pop star on an airplane and completely failed to recognize him.
5. Gone through a Class IV rapid while accidentally attached to the side of the boat.
6. Had a hand impaled on a chain-link fence, then had a janitor swear at me for resulting damage to said fence.
7. Been “indicted” by a “Citizen’s Court” of tax protesters on charges relating to being part of the black-helicopter-equipped New World Order.
8. Fallen off Hadrian’s Wall whilst intoxicated.
9. Engaged in foreplay in trial evidence locker of Hardcore Gangs Unit of District Attorney’s Office.
10. Obtained first conviction in nation under new anti-terrorism statute.
12. Eaten a rose apple.
13. I have never done drugs myself, but there are several instances where I’ve caught my dad with drugs.
1. Disected a cow heart and a sheep pluck, twice.
2. Cleaned up a mercury spill with a very huge and very loud vacuum cleaner.
3. Yelled at one of my students for accidentally making chlorine gas during a routine lab.
4. Ran head first into a wall while completely sober, giving myself a concussion and completely ruining the biggest party weekend of the year.
5. Attended the 60th birthday dinner of the US Ambassador to Japan, which consisted of chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and Dos Equis.
6. Dropped out of high school after three years, dropped out of college after two and a half.
7. Given Neil Gaiman a small stuffed platypus with my school seal on it.
8. Read Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War in its entirety.
9. Won a $1,500 scholarship for my poetry, though I’d only been writing seriously for a few months at that time.
10. Worked as a photo vetter for a social networking website. I still cannot explain the teenage inpulse to post naked pictures of themselves on the web.
not sure i can come up with 10, but here goes:
1. drove my truck 80 mph down the merrit pkwy in ct with several loaded, semi-automatic weapons inside (no i’m not a cop)
2. licked a girl’s knees on the floor of penn station (after singing “take the skinheads bowling” by camper van bethoven to her)
3. cast a spell on a few people in my high school that may or may not have caused them all to get into a car accident
4. shook george herbert walker bush’s hand on the point pleasant boardwalk in new jersey in 1988
5. lived in a garage for 3 months with 2 cats and 3 kittens (not that unique, but i don’t know anyone else that did it)
6. was accused of “revolutionary activities” by a new jersey state trooper when he searched my car and found a notebook of story ideas
7. smoked a joint with HR from bad brains
8. was chased by a mob of angry wild turkeys on the road to west rock in new haven, ct
9. chased michael alig (mcauly kulkin’s character in “party monster”) through the streets of montclair, nj at my friends funeral while threatening to kill him
10. crap, i’m stumped finding a tenth one. fired an illegally modified ingram mac-10 on full auto
10 Things I’ve Done and You Maybe Haven’t
1) Forgotten everything I learned in post secondary. Which is why I’m planning on going back within the next 12 months. (I couldn’t code 2 lines of PHP without a reference if I had a gun held to my head.)
2) Had my eyes pried open by a surgeon because my eyelids were gummed shut by that icky crusty stuff that your eyes make
3) Spent most of the summers of my youth in Cochrane, Ontario, where my Dad grew up. I miss that place.
4) Called in sick to my part time job (I work full time at one job and part time at another) because my friend’s 2 week old baby boy was sleeping on my chest and I thought that being a baby pillow was time better spent than going and taking people’s money for groceries. I was right.
5) Diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome after a sever allergic reaction to sulfa drugs. (in relation to #2)
6) Spent almost 3 weeks in isolation in the burn ward at the Children’s Hospital as a result.
7) Was a cute ass kid in a local pizza place commercial. What happened?
8) Convinced, with the help of my friends, some Americans that us Canadians drove dog sleds year round and left our cars at the border. I was 15.
9) Walked away from a car accident that totaled my car (she ran a red light, t-boned me, I hit the car in the lane beside me and almost went through an A&W) with only whiplash and back injuries. (That I’m still recovering from. Almost 5 years later.)
10) Have a small collection of local crew roadie tour shirts from my Dad. Okay, it’s only three. Okay so one of them is Nickelback (sorry), but it says “Crew Are People Too” which makes me smile.
11) Rode on a chair lift up and down a mountain a few times on a high school band trip (we went to Banff, Alberta to play then Lake Louise/Sunshine Village for the day), because I can’t ski. (Got kicked out of the beginner lessons once at a local hill because I couldn’t fall right.)
Here’s mine, for better or for worse:
1. Flirted with a cute girl at a party who, a few weeks later, killed her entire family, including an infant sibling.
2. Was left for dead at an accident scene. I regained consciousness and walked to the ambulance, to the surprise of the attendants.
3. Got drunk at a party inside KGB headquarters and delivered a toast, in Russian, on Moscow television.
4. While working as a telemarketer, woke Shaquile O’Neil from a sound sleep. (He was very nice about it, but wondered why his business manager was stupid enough to give my company his home phone number.)
5. Flunked out of college. Then returned to the same college and earned two graduate degrees.
6. Waited on all of the members of Aerosmith at a wedding rehearsal dinner for Stevem Tyler. (Nice bunch of folks.)
7. Was almost run over by Boris Yeltsin’s motorcade.
8. Petted a rhino. (They really should make zoo enclosures more secure.)
8. Got drunk in Ohio. Woke up in Michigan. In the woods. Wearing a suit.
9. Worked as a hod carrier.
10. Got all four wheels of a 1980’s Chevy Malibu off the ground at the same time while speeding down a dirt road.
1. Slid 75 feet on Interstate 35E on my back (I was wearing a winter coat) while my car bounced along a parallel course in the median strip.
2. Neil Gaiman gave me a cookie.
3. Was asked by a group of blue-haired slot players where Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant was at the MGM Grand, though I didn’t work there, and got a tip anyway.
4. Ate lunch with Martha Layne Collins while she was governor of Kentucky. I was in second grade.
5. Mooned the Kentucky Governor’s Mansion. I was in twelfth grade. (Martha Layne Collins was no longer governor then.)
6. Received a master’s degree in music performance even though I took the wrong courses for my minor almost across the board.
7. Sold a $6,000 baritone saxophone to a police detective.
8. Spat on by giraffes.
9. Own a “Kenton Plays Wagner” LP. (That’s right. Stan Kenton and Richard Wagner.)
10. I never met one of my former employers; my current employer I’ve seen once in 2.5 years.
Fun idea and some great tens, blogged mine here.
1) Directed a play that involved 10 actors, 4 separate video sequences, an onstage suicide involving a device designed to spray blood
2) Lost my retainer on the bottom of Lake Michigan until my dad found it for me
3) Marched with the creator of “My So-Called Life” and the writer of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” on the WGA picket lines as a non-WGA member
4) Helped a giant snow fort outside our high school that would be used for a sleepover later that year
5) Watched July 4th fireworks from on the grounds of the United Nations after scaling the fence to get in there (this was pre-Sept. 11)
6) Waited outside a bar with Kate Beckinsale because neither I nor Kate Beckinsale’s husband had proper ID to get in (this was the wrap party for the film “Serendipity”)
7) Caught a woman plagiarizing “Angels in America” in a respected poetry journal, and alerted the proper authorities
8) Was romantically involved with a dominatrix, and convinced said dominatrix to move out to Iowa with me
9) Wrote a play with a talking cow in it, a musical with a sentient computer in it, and a play about vampires (the one about vampires was produced)
10) Been to East Germany, and stood at the Berlin Wall, three months before both were to cease to exist
1. Rescued Richard the Lion Hearted from the Durnstein castle ruins in the Wachau Danube valley.
2. Had a cocktail with Nick Nolte
3. Met TImothy Leary in SF
4. Play a show at CGBG’s
5. Jammed with Jimmy Martin from Faith no More.
6. Had sex in a laundermat
7. Saw the Lochness Monster.
8. Lived in Vienna Austria for 2 years.
9. took psychedelic drugs during an electrical storm.
10. Saw a car lose control and kill 10 people in Washington Square park in NYC.
There are some very strange people on here. I mean that in the best possible way.
1. Stood six feet away from Elvis Costello/U2/David Bowie/Bruce Springsteen/Sting/Elton John/Billy Joel while they sang
2. Shook Bono’s hand
3. Was invited to dance by Bruce Springsteen
4. Was called a “dumb c**t” by actress Denny Dillon
5. Have met all the members of Monty Python except Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam
6. Pissed off actor Topol (Who’s calling, please? Topol. I’m sorry, who? Topol. Topol? Yes, Topol! Like the smoker’s tooth polish?)
7. Was party to stealing a monsignor’s car and joy riding around Alphabet City when it was still a really bad neighborhood
8. Almost walked into the Thompson Square Park riot
9. Attended a mob wedding and hung out/danced with several members of the Gambino crime family (including one button man)
10. Drove 110 mph on the FDR Drive at 2:30 in the morning OR drove across the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight at 60 mph while singing along to “No Sleep Till Brooklyn”
1. Helped run a theme camp at Burning Man the last 5 years.
2. Helped create something that received 1000+ diggs (hugeurl.com)
3. Within 9 months of quitting pot went from bedroom dj to playing at Burning Man and getting paid for local gigs. While holding down a tech-industry day job.
4. Took picture of police in Xian, China beating the tar out of a street vendor selling things without a license. Deleted it later in the trip when our party-appointed guide must have heard and started obliquely asking about it.
5. A car didn’t notice a red light as I was biking across an crosswalk, slammed on his brakes too late and would have put his bumper about a foot past my bike frame. Jumped straight up off the pedals and landed standing on his hood as my bike got hit, ended up totally unharmed, bike still rideable.
6. In high school for career day, got to go hang out at MECC and talk to the coders who made Oregon Trail.
7. Helped set up and manage the wireless network for the NCAA playoffs, so spent hours running and crawling around under the seats and bleachers in the Metrodome dragging ethernet cables with me to power and link the wifi repeaters.
8. Created a unix script to give me a new game of Nethack with a wizard and a spellbook of identify (start game, examine inventory, quit or save). Said script accidentally ate the entire processing power of the shell servers at my ISP while it rolled new characters for me. The admins sent me a sternly worded warning and asked for the code.
9. Was on the YUAI/Bucky’s team for Trivia Weekend at Lawrence University in ’98-’00. That team has won trivia every year I was there and lost only one since. ’98 was the first to incorporate lots of networked computers, each one defaulting to a different search engine as its home page.
10. Found an amazing woman on the internet in 2000. Married her.
Continuation from #64:
3. Burned hardboiled eggs.
4. Been foreperson on a jury in a criminal trial.
5. Had crazy lady tell the FBI I was involved in the kidnapping of her child. Had very nice phone conversaion with said FBI agent in which I explained that the woman had lost custody to her ex-husband and was now suing everyone with whom she interacted during the custody battle and that I as a city attorney was representing a social worker who had been ordered by the court to prepare an assessment of said crazy lady.
6. Toured the set of Sesame Street when I was 6. (Classmate’s dad worked for CTW)
7. Attended a session of the Court of Military Appeals at West Point.
1. Lost my car key, leaving myself buck naked in a county park with no way to get home.
2. Been an extra in a movie, which involved being baptized just before Jesus in the Jordan river.
3. Stubbed my toe badly enough to require crutches for 5 days.
4. Been invited, by name, to never set foot again in a certain small city. The invitation was published in the local newspaper by the city council and the chamber of commerce.
5. Seen 13 movies in 36 hours and still had time to eat meals and sleep.
6. Instructed the hospital to remove life support from my mother.
7. Been praised by one boss and fired by the next, for the same thing.
8. Broken the brass shaft of an alternator without any tools.
9. Been caught in a speedtrap without a drivers license, 2800 miles from home, by a cop who had sympathy because it turned out he was from the same small town where I was born.
10. Set fire to a wheat field, accidentally.
Took a while to come up with, but I wanted to play.
1. Played Mrs. Harcourt, the mother in “Anything Goes”–when I was 17 years old.
2. Worn a corset–that I made myself.
3. Was housemates with Jennycam’s former boyfriend. (Housemate. Not girlfriend.)
4. Broke my right collarbone in half by falling off a horse.
5. Held a horse’s head while she died.
6. As a baby, was held by Candy Lightner (founder of MADD). Or so my mother tells me. I don’t remember. This was before MADD.
7. Got sunburned–in Britain.
8. Played the accordion on a fake German industrial song.
9. Got a tour of a B-52 cockpit from my Dad, the pilot of said B-52.
10. Written fanfiction for Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
Let’s see what I can come up with.
1. Worked in the Lion’s kitchen at a local zoo cutting and injecting vitamins in to the meat for the lions to eat.
2. Got chased up a tree by a lion after walking in to the wrong enclosure. Thank God they were declawed on the front paws.
3. Sat on a bridge over a major U.S. river and drank a bottle of Strawberry Boone’s wine with my best friend the night before I moved.
4. Dated the Head Cheerleader in High School; and yes, the person was female.
5. Swam with wild dolphins after jumping off the bow of a moving boat because I was dared to.
6. Shook hands with the guys from Nine days just after I delivered their pizza pies to their dressing room at a concert hall. This goes for Avril Lavigne, the guys from Nickelback, Maroon 5, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Journey, Styx, and The Charlie Daniels Band.
7. Took Horseback riding lessons from Darcy of the Smashing Pumpkins.
8. Met and helped Richard Gere move. He’s a nice man, and I worked for pizza.
9. I helped my aunt tune a piano for Whitney Houston.
10. Stole a beer from Burt Reynold’s mini fridge while tuning a piano for him.
I guess that’s it..
1. Administered a correspondence course for GP doctors when I know nothing whatsoever about medicine.
2. Worn a T-shirt that was (while I was wearing it) admired by Queen Noor of Jordan.
3. Walked 20 – 30 kms up the Headhunter’s Trail in Sarawak wearing a shoe which had the sole held on only by elastic bands.
4. Killed a cobra with a broom.
5. Survived 30-40 wasp stings (all at the same time, in the middle of a mangrove swamp).
6. Slept in a thoroughly decadent baroque bedroom with chandeliers and a mirrored ceiling overhead, quite unconscious of the fact that a revolution had just started in the country I was in…
7. Took my daughter’s in-laws to a Balinese brothel in the middle of the night thinking it was a karaoke bar
8. Got (thoroughly) beaten to the top of a 13,455′ (4101m) high mountain by the youngest person to have ever climbed it independently (my daughter, aged 8 at the time) .
9. Swum with wild penguins (and no wet suit either).
10. Had a Vice-President of Iran to dinner in my house, for which I did the cooking…
B. Durbin Says:
4. Known somebody who died on Mt. Kilimanjero
Done that. On New Year’s Day 2000.
Lets see…
1. Been held up at gunpoint in Ecuador (and lived to tell about it).
2. Trekked around most of same with only one pair of shoes.
3. Had my picture taken Atlas Shrugged-style in front of a monument at the equator.
4. Studied for 6 months at the dojo that Morihei Ueshiba founded.
5. Swam in a major tributary of the Amazon.
6. Learned to speak three languages fluently by the time I was 21.
7. Lived on more continents than anyone in my family…ever.
8. Walked away from a freeway accident.
9. Went to senior prom in traditional Japanese garb.
10. Worn samurai armor.
Okay:
1. I’ve broken my neck and lived (and walked, too).
2. I was once personally insulted by Sean Bean (from LotR and The Hitcher).
3. I’ve written my own complete and playable D20 module based on my own (unpublished) book, and then played it.
4. I once confused S.M. Stirling with George R.R. Martin when I approached Stirling at a restaurant.
5. I’ve been linked from the front page of BoingBoing (I’m sure Scalzi can say this too, but it was a big deal for me).
6. I’ve been seriously injured by a Chihuahua.
7. I once was in control of one of the 250 largest message boards for around 10 days.
8. I’ve lived in a 4 star hotel for six months.
9. I’ve gotten a blow job in the middle of the dance floor at a gay nightclub.
10. I’ve issued checks to men in drag multiple times for perfectly legal reasons.
1. Was allowed 20 minutes completely alone with only an oil lamp in a tomb in the Valley of the Nobles in Egypt.
2. Have met, spent time with, and even had dinner with – 9 of the 12 Moonwalkers.
3. Have two sweet and wonderful messages on my answering machine at home from Harlan Ellison.
4. Sat in the seat directly in front of Gene Kelley during a film festival in Santa Fe when he quietly came into the dark theater to watch his famous scene from “Singing in the Rain”.
5. Hefted Russ Meyer star Kitten Natividad’s tits and have a photo to prove it.
6. Wore one of Ed Wood’s angora sweater’s that is owned by Delores Fuller.
7. Spent the better part of a day talking with Maila Nurmi (Vampira) and after a long while she looked at me seriously said – “You are just like me”.
8. Spent 4 hours riding on the back on an elephant while looking for white rhinos in the Royal Chitwan Jungle of Nepal.
9. Spent many amazing evenings at Fred Saberhagen’s home. And, at Jack Williamson’s home.
10. Spent a long glorious afternoon at Bob Burns home playing with the original King Kong and Mighty Joe Young armatures and Bob said to me – “I could tell right away – you are one of us.”
11. Spent many wonderful hours with Ray Bradbury and wrote him a letter that made him cry with joy.
Thirteen because I have issues with discipline. Also posted on my own site here.
1. Been told by Susan Sontag that Joseph Conrad was a genius but I wasn’t.
2. Been rescued from being yelled at by irate motor-boater by Steven Tyler.
3. Helped a friend pour fish emulsion in the college administration building’s central HVAC intake.
4. Been on a firing line blasting away with a .45 at mid-size propane tanks (full) for targets.
5. Had sex standing in the middle of the intersection of 16th and Illinois, San Francisco. (Brief.)
6. Dated three women who have since published chick-lit books.
7. Stood less than 50 yards away from the big guy at Burning Man the year the explosives inside all went up at once. With my back to it, dammit, guarding the perimeter. (Somewhat related: Paul Addis, he who prematurely ignited The Man last year, was also on the firing line in #4.)
8. Nearly drowned in San Francisco Bay twice. OK, the first time was actually Stinson Beach, but close enough.
9. Had hot yak-butter tea in the house of the chief innkeeper in Manang, Nepal.
10. Been removed from the bus by the Austin Police and questioned as a suspected weenie-wagger. (My fly was open and I didn’t know it).
11. Ridden to West Point in a car with Edward Teller, who fell asleep in the back seat while a friend and I discussed abortion (who on campus was getting one and who wasn’t) in the front.
12. Gotten on a plane by myself to London at 16 when I’d never even been to Philadelphia 30 miles away alone before.
13. Come close to burning my house down at 15 trying to recreate a flamethrower with a turkey baster.
1) Been diagnosed with and treated for tuberculosis
2) Had sex in every place I’ve worked (so far)
3) Put 300,000 on one truck (go Toyota engineering!)
4) Been/Am in the contestant pool for Jeopardy!
5) Eaten horse testicles
6) Completely traversed the Panama Canal
7) Been to Tolovana Hot Springs
8) Worked on contract negotiations between my former employer and “Elizabeth II, Her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada” Eventually, the project was covered in National Geographic.
9) Captained a College Bowl team that went to nationals. Our members – 3 girls and 1 guy. Trust me, you don’t see that in College Bowl.
10) Been propositioned to be number five of a foursome. Turned them down “I should check with my husband to see if he’s ok with it, but he’s commercial fishing and I can’t reach him for six weeks.” They all thought that was pretty decent of me. Thank goodness, because we had four more days left at the convention!
11) Had a legitimate $1.25 M check written to me, personally, by a major foundation. Sadly, it was for a project I was helping manage, so I had to sign it over to my employer. But I made a copy and put that up on the wall above my desk.
I left out the truly salacious and all the illegal stuff. Obviously.
1. Had Daniel Ellsberg explain to me, one on one, in my dorm room, why he leaked the Pentagon Papers.
2. Gotten a listing on imdb for “additional programming” on a computer game for which I did nothing at all.
3. Slept with an original dancer for Dick Clark’s Bandstand. Not American Bandstand, mind you. The original one in Philadelphia. The year and exact ages of the participants is for you to guess.
4. Saw Apollo 12 launched, live and in person.
5. Sat on Peter Jennings’ lap.
6. Had Stone Phillips praise my eulogy for my father, in my living room.
7. Attended a funeral which featured, in this order, a eulogy by a friend of mine, a performance by Natalie Merchant, and a eulogy by a different friend of mine.
8. Been made into a character in a Fantastic Four comic.
9. Been grilled by military security for observing, and using, the combination to get into the area where I was working on-site.
10. Done programming work for John Aristotle Philips, who was briefly famous in the 1970s for designing a working atomic bomb while a Princeton undergrad.
1. Had my first pregnancy blamed on taking my work home (I had just started a job as an editor of “adult erotic fiction.”)
2. Broke my boyfriend’s rib by hugging him (and he still married me).
3. Traveled by car from South Carolina to Grand Isle, LA and back with one 8-track that we listened to the entire way — Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell.
4. Was tested as an adult for congenital sylphilis (It came back negative).
5. For about two years, frequently walked to the end of my street to wave at people on cruise ships as they entered or left the Panama Canal .
6. While evacuating from a small island during a hurricane, was stopped for some time while crews cleared the tree that had fallen in the road, and was terrified that another would fall on me.
7. As a child, helped to kill and clean chickens for dinner, and thus learned a real appreciation for the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
8. As a teenager, spent a a lot of time in the room I had been born in (the hospital was converted to a library, and the delivery room was used for storage, and I was a volunteer).
9. Once read a dozen Harlequin Romances in one day. Hey, my taste has improved. Now I read Scalzi.
10. 20 years after #3, I’m listening to Meatloaf, Bat Out of Hell (title song).
1) I have been a Butcher, an Army Soldier, a Pizza Delivery Driver, and a Construction Worker all on the same day. (Did that a few times during my enlistment in the Army).
2) I dropped out of High School and graduated college Cum Laude. Take that you foolish “this is a mistake that will haunt you for the rest of your life” guidance counselor.
3) I turned down a job as a High School Teacher to take one at an Elementary School.
4) I have created art that is on permanent display on two coasts, as well as one in the North and several in the South. I also have a sculpture on display in Colorado Springs. I am literally “nationwide”. Why- I do believe I even have one in your home Mr. Scalzi.
5) I’ve never met anyone in person that could, even in the loosest sense, be considered famous.
6) 100+ people have my artwork under their skin (I sold flash artwork off and on for two years).
7) I am personally teaching art to 1386 students this year and will continue at that pace for as long as I teach.
8) Yo hablo español (aprendo a la Universidad de Houston cuando yo estaba en escuela.)
9) I once pulled an engine out of a car with my bare hands. It was a VW Beetle…but still it was really heavy and I scraped my thumb pretty bad getting it out.
10) I changed my name. (I was once named Trevor, a name I loathe like a boy named Sioux or Francis might of their name.) I realize this makes me petty and overly concerned with a trivial thing like names. So?
1) Had a conversation about nuclear power with Pete Townsend – including discussion of the alternatives of solar and nuclear fusion that were proposed in the 1920s (I think…) – whilst riding in an elevator because the security guard had insisted I leave the hotel. I was 17. Townsend’s wife thanked me for being neither a prat nor a bimbo before they headed off to buy boxes and boxes of Levis at the Army-Navy store to which I had directed them. Apparently, they were hard to get in Britain in the 80s.
2) Was kissed by Roger Daltry – twice – after a different security guard made me leave by a separate door than Townsend despite Pete and his wife insisting that I was a good kid.
3) Survived an evening of partying with Rick James, with my virtue intact.
4) Briefly dated Brandon Lee, then switched to being his friend because we recognized that snark without romantic attachment was far more productive and fun.
5) Was the lady in a Lady & the Tiger trick. Once. It would have taken a better magician to convince me to do it again, as it came a little too close to Tiger eats Lady.
6) Dated jousters. Yes, that’s plural. I was a bit slow in my youth (or fast, depending on how you look at it). At least I stuck to one troupe…
7) Ran a costume business using only original designs. For ten years. In the black from day one. With my bodice design, I can give anyone cleavage – even men.
8) Argued with Robert Silverburg over whether or not Shadrach in the Furnace fit his own definition of quest narrative. Not sure if I convinced him or not, but it was a great conversation and he signed a copy of the book when he ran into me later that day so at least I know I didn’t piss him off.
9) Engaged in a group discussion of The Sandbox with Edward Albee. Was terribly impressed that he spent as long as he did talking to us, considering what a misanthrope he’s supposed to be. We were high school students, and even people who like people have a hard time liking high school students.
10) Survived a fall into a half-full grain bin, despite idiotically continuing to thrash around. Then suffered through a tirade from my grandmother, who lapsed into Czech half-way through. My dad still won’t tell me what she called us for thinking it would be fun to use the rafters as balance beams…. Thank god there was someone on the farmyard or I wouldn’t be able to make this list.
Ruth Ellen: 2006 for me. Weird stuff.
I’m adding on!
11. Run the board for Mark Fuhrman’s radio show. (During the breaks he asked me questions— the usual stuff, like “what do you plan to do with your life?” and “nice engagement ring; when’s the wedding?”— but I swear, it felt like an interrogation.)
12. Went to somebody’s Christmas party as his “Russian mail-order bride.” His coworkers told him to keep me.
13. Successfully fooled most of a BBS (barring, of course, the admins) into thinking I was in my forties at the age of thirteen.*
*Really, all I had to do was use proper grammar, be very polite, and correctly use the sorts of words I’d find in the books I read.** My writing now is less proper!
**I’ve since discovered that excessively proper grammar is often a sign of youth. I don’t ever call anyone on it, though. I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage them!
1. As a teenager, handled South American poison-arrow-frog venom with syringes (“don’t stick yourself–you won’t make it to the phone”)
2. Was written about in a newspaper published by the Lyndon LaRouche organization
3. Was called “Mr. Second Order” by a co-discoverer of the top quark, for excess pedantry
4. Stood within three feet of the president of a post-Soviet Central Asian republic (since deposed)
5. Yelled on stage before an audience about a giant chicken heart eating New York
6. Dressed as Gary Gygax for a Halloween wedding (somebody else’s)
7. Won five dollars for guessing the most average number
8. Was the butt of an irritating local TV news humor bit from the young Steve Doocy
9. Wrote nonsensical parody song lyrics that were later unexpectedly set to music and recorded by someone on the other side of the earth
10. Traced my entire professional career back to connections made at a high-school science fair (this has been described to me as “the American Dream on the Planet Nerdo”)
1. I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…
OK, maybe not.
1. Chased down and held for the police a blood-spattered attempted murderer.
2. Been the first person with curly hair a Najavo kindergartner ever saw in person (‘Huh- it’s all curly, like on a sheep.’)
3. Found a dead humpback whale on a desolate Mexican beach by smelling it first, miles away.
4. Delivered the coup-de-grace to a trussed cow with a giant knife, while surrounded by Indian cowboys (Guarani Indians).
5. Successfully completed the NSA’s ‘translate this fake language’ exam in the fastest time then on record.
6. Received a tearful ‘thank you’ bear-hug from a WWII Soviet tank commander to pass along to the people of Detroit for giving him a tank with which to kill German fascists.
7. Spent hours stargazing at Eirik the Red’s L’Anse aux Meadows settlement site about 1,000 years after he left and four hours after it was closed for the night.
8. Been mistaken for both a Nazi (in Paraguay) and a Jew (in North Carolina). Given the red carpet treatment for the former, threatened with physical harm for the latter.
9. Had one of the notoriously parsimonious Scotsmen buy me a pint of beer (“Yes, I’m from Scotland. Sorry, I didn’t wear a kilt,” to which I replied, “Well, I’m from Detroit, and I didn’t bring a gun, so I guess we’re even.”)
10. Had not one, but three, porcupine quills stuck in my nipple.
PWStrain @83…
“1. Fathered six children. With the same woman. That I’m still married to. Over a twenty years span.”
Folks, we have a winner.
This is probably one of the more mundane entries, but I had fun dredging up the memories. Well, with most of them.
Okay, let’s give it a shot.
1. Shook hands with Martin Sheen.
2. Was arrested a few minutes later.
3. Met Casey Kasem.
4. Was arrested a few minutes later.
5. Was hit by a car while riding my bicycle. Flew through the air. I lived.
6. Have visited five continents. (Have lived on two.)
7. Adopted children from Ethiopia (before Brangelina made it cool).
8. Flew on an airplane from Addis Ababa to London. Had to make an emergency landing in Cairo because – ahem – they had not taken on enough fuel to make it all the way.
9. Waited for four hours in the Addis Ababa airport for mechanics to fix the engine of the airplane that we would be flying. Actually saw them putting part of it back into the plane.
10. Read John Scalzi’s proposal to his wife in the Fresno Bee on the day it was first published. Waited with baited breath for the answer.
Wow, that really makes you think. I thunked out mine.
http://stevethorn.com/blog/index.php?/archives/318-Ten-Things-Ive-Done-You-Probably-Havent.html
Uh, #11. Was a key witness in a murder trial (as in I could “place him at the scene of the crime). The victim was 9 years old. He’s now sitting on death row (and has been since about 1992). Last time I checked, he was still there.
How did I forget that one?
Alan and Salome:
Adam West hit on my sister, and then me, at a comic book convention in Detroit.
I’m going to bed with all of these great life experiences swirling in my head. I can’t wait to dream about them. Mr. Scalzi, you do attract a magnificent crowd.
10 things I’ve done that you (probably) haven’t.
1. In 2nd grade at age 7 while living in France, walked from the school bus stop at the Troi Fontaine Army Base to home on the other side of the town of Bar Le Duc to let Mom know that the car never arrived to pick up my sister Karen and I and that we needed to go back and get Karen. (Mom was quite upset at the driver and amazed at me).
2. Biked to work at my job at the TV station and on separate occasions was ogled by Whitney Houston and Roxanne Pulitzer (quite the hotties back in the day, I must say!)
3. Hung out with Taj Mahal’s band after demonstrating my Frisbee Nail Delay technique for Rudy.
4. As a photographer’s assistant got to help out with a photography session of a laser light show viewed from atop the Lincoln Memorial.
5. Toured the foundation of that same Lincoln Memorial- lots of stalactites down there from all that limestone.
6. Watched the Persieds from my campsite at about 9000 feet up in the Flattops Wilderness Area of Colorado -quite a lightshow that.
7. Failed to get a FBI Security Clearance.
8. Designed artwork to be hot-stamped on Frisbees and Discraft UltraStar flying discs.
9. Won the Design of the Year for one of those designs.
10. Had a photograph of the DC skyline at dusk blown up to 4×8 feet and used as the backdrop of the news set for the local nightly news at the TV Station.
11. Member of Company D killed in action. See The Sagan Dairies, top of second page. -“Still delightfully alive” quoth Scalzi when he signed my copy.
Wow… whatta read… I gotta agree with Buck, Mr. Scalzi do attract em. I had done my list as a link… but I’d like to share it here also.
1. Received a boob as a birthday present. (1, size ‘C’, silicone implant)(and nope, not “installed”)
2. Left home and moved in with my eighteen year old girlfriend… at sixteen.
3. Had my wife look up, raise an eyebrow and then simply go right back to her knitting in response to my accidentally firing a .25 caliber round into my LazyBoy.
4. Been to a Billy Joel concert… in the company of five women who were all “on a date” with me.
5. Gotten a friend’s sailboat jammed under a bridge by the mast… (yes, alcohol and skimpy bikinis were involved)
6. Been a bouncer at a Carly Simon concert…
7. Received, as a gift from my best friend, a (real) Katana… hand made by that same friend.
8. Had a ATF agent call me (at the gun shop where I were the night manager) and tell me there is a “possibility” that some suspects in the theft of several LAW (IE anti-tank) rockets from a National Guard armory, “may” be in my area… (an interesting feeling)
9. Walked into a bar to find four ladies (whom I was dating all at the same time) all sitting together in a booth… (another interesting feeling, preferred the LAW rockets actually)
10. Shot in a high-power rifle competition at Quantico Marine Base… with a Chinese made SKS rifle (now THAT was a hoot!).
Long time reader, first time… well, you get it. Anyway, here’s my 10 (plus or minus two). Thanks for some great reading.
1. Filled various pieces of fruit with explosives and detonated them on the 4th of July.
2. Marched in a parade with the followers of Beanpole: God of Pointless Behavior.
3. Had a wordless “meeting of the minds” with Wynton Marsalis, who later confided that “Man, I knew you played somethin’!” when he asked me about music.
4. Was yanked, mysteriously, away from a window sill half a second before the top sash came slamming down on its own. (I was the only one in the room.)
5. Been asked to autograph another band’s CD.
6. Been stabbed in the palm of the hand with a fork, which stuck straight up.
7. Gotten high with a popular local (later, national) band… in a bar, while underage.
8. Met two of my current band mates… in a bar, while underage.
9. Had a now-internationally-famous folk duo play my birthday party.
10. Had an e-mail conversation with a beloved author from my childhood.
BONUS: 11. Had my hair braided into Princess Leia Buns. (When it was long.)
BONUS: 12. Been randomly hugged because I reminded a college girl of Bono. (I don’t see it.)
Okay, here are my 10 things I’ve done that you (probably) haven’t:
1. Got married on the Ides of March at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas.
2. Had sex in a library.
3. Lied to Elliot Gould.
4. Spent 40 hours in unmedicated labor before having a c-section.
5. Spent 20 hours in unmedicated labor before having a c-section. Gave up on the natural birth thing, no more kids, two is enough.
6. Went to elementary school with Sarah Jessica Parker and served in Student Government with her.
7. Attended the Miss Venezuela contest.
8. Was subpoenaed by the Department of Justice to give a deposition in Washington D.C. Refused to travel so they came to me (I was 8 months pregnant at the time).
9. Was interviewed by the Village Voice.
10. Am member #980 in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan club.
What a great bunch of people! I read that someone got a parasite from Belize. Been there done that. And, actually, I met a law student from Villanova that had the same thing happen. She got it in her ankle but you know what I am talking about. Yuck!
It sort of sucks getting a worm type thingy in your arm or “elsewhere.” I’ll never forget the day. Yuck, again!! I had been on a long archaeological dig and we were in Mexico for a long time. When I got back to the states, I realized that my “problem” was an actual living thing, living in my body. OMG, I called the emergency room. The doctor in the emergency room laughed! Can you believe it? I had parasites in my body and he laughed! He was an old doctor but that’s no excuse. ;) In the end, the parasites were easily eradicated and I lived. It was a lesson learned. Thingy’s like us too. ;-)
1) Walked through a cyclone to school at the age of 7. (And then back through it on the way home. It was a very wet day. And yet I didn’t, and still don’t, live in a tropical area.)
2) Been praised for the speed and thoroughness of my room-entry technique by an SAS sniper/assaulter. To this day I do not remember any of that bit. I was outside the door, I was on the far side of a large room. There was no in between.
3) Met a local semi-famous millionaire, and realised that he was so banally evil that I’d actually wish something as horrifying as cancer upon him. Would also happily set the f***er on fire and watch him die, and feel the world a better place.
4) Been hopped over by a group of 5-6 wild kangaroos whilst lying in ambush with other members of my platoon. We managed to be so quiet they didn’t realise we were there until one of them nearly stepped on one of us, at which point they understandably freaked and bugged out, once they found the ‘right’ direction to flee in.
5) Been run off by an Emu in breeding mode at the age of 10 or so. Good thing there was a fallen tree in the way, as there was no way in the world I could have outpaced that sucker for a few more feet on flat ground. Stupid, psychotic birds. Almost too dumb to live.
6) Discovered what happens when you ask (one of) the (many) Wrong Questions™ of said SAS sniper, thereby causing him to instantly switch over into terrifyingly-psycho-glare-mode, and me to back well up and not quite wet myself. Nice guy, most of the time. *sweat*
7) Fallen into an SF/F geek’s dream job, working at a small, specialist bookstore, not once, but twice. (And loving the job, despite the annoyances of tight-fisted owners.)
8) Been asked at a wedding reception ‘So, how long have you two been married?’ when with my then GF of about 2 months. Then went on to be with her for 10 years, and lived with her for 10+years, and not necessarily the same years. (Still do, actually. We stayed together for the cats’ sake.)
9) Been a mediocre at best soldier in the Australian Army Reserve for roughly 3 years, now more than 15 years ago, and discovered that when the military trains you in something, you *will* know it forevermore. I swear I could still field strip and reassemble the L1A1 Self Loading Rifle (better known as the FN-FAL) in under a minute whilst blindfolded.
10) Marched 3-5 kms to a firing range in the middle of January (summer) and been one of 5 or so soldiers to collapse from Heat Exhaustion. Then 2 hours later marched back over the same ground, through a hailstorm. Discovered the hard way that a hailstone the size of a marble *really* hurts when it drops onto your index fingernail, and the other side of your finger is holding an assault rifle. (But not as much as what a Sergeant will do to you if you drop your rifle in the mud. Thankfully it was someone else that dropped the rifle, and not I.)
(There’s a bunch of interesting things I learned in the Reserves, like how to tell what was being fired by the sound of the bang, the difference between a 5.56mm round and a 7.62mm (NATO) round going overhead at roughly 300 metres, and that You Do Not Kill a Bull-Ant, as that will only Piss Off the Rest of the Hive. If it’s bugging you, just flick them away, and they’ll leave you alone. If you kill one, you will be in a world of s**t. I also saw someone drop a 40mm grenade into an open turret hatch on an old Sherman carcass at 450metres. Twice in a row. Uphill.)
1,) Attended the third grade in a POW camp. With barbed wire and machine gun mounts. And no playground equipment. Great year.
2.) Played all four soprano clarinet parts (1st, 2nd, 3rd B-flat, and E-flat) in one concert for NC All-State Band.
3.) Was married by a judge who never saw us while he ate his lunch during the ceremony.
4.) Dug out my vehicles, every day by hand, during a winter of 321 inches of snow.
5.) I once asked Ralph Nader to shoot himself. He declined, asking me to do it for him, so I did.
6.) Took the ferry round-trip from Helsinki, Finland to Tallinn, Estonia, staying only about 90 minutes so we could have lunch.
7.) In the first class of an advanced/accelerated program in all the sciences, math and computers that was so weird, one guy quit the first day — only 6 of the 31 finished the program, including me.
8.) Saw the movie Titanic 61 times during the six months it was “first-run” in the theatres. Some things need to be seen on a big screen.
9.) Used to own Schroedinger’s Cat (half-dead, half-alive), now own Heissenberg’s Cat (either you know where he is or how fast he’s going, but not both — he can also tunnel through walls).
10.) Rode in both the US and Canadian TurboTrains, plus the Amtrak RTG Turboliner and Rohr Turboliner III.
Wonderful lists, everyone!
Dr. Phil
1. A friend and I were hiking up a mountain. We round a corner and right there, knee deep in a stream, a moose is pissing. She turns her head around to look at us, as if to say, “What are you guys looking at?” We backtracked until she vanished into the underbrush.
2. Same trip, my friend was climbing a hillside totally unsuitable for climbing. He gets stuck. We both start thinking (but not saying) whether it would be necessary to call for a helicopter. I calm him down, and he ends up reaching the top of the bluff. Then we took the stairs down.
3. I made a County Attorney go to the back of a line because she (perhaps out of ignorance) cut to the front. Now she’s a Senator.
4. I accidentally kicked a girlfriend in the face. I still feel kind of bad about that.
5. Survived a snow-hut collapse. I think I wrote about that in some Talkback before.
6. Tried to give a copy of a book I really liked to Harlan Ellison. He politely declined.
7. Met Dorothy Molter, the “Root Beer Lady”, the last human allowed to live in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
8. Bought a pack of cigarettes for a rape victim. (No, I was not the rapist.) I’ve never bought tobacco since.
9. Bought bottled water for a man who had just killed a toddler with his car. The toddler was unattended and wandered out into the highway. There was nothing the man could have done.
10. Responsible for a multi-car accident and a traffic backup that stretched back miles. My car was untouched. The car belonging to the guy who had stopped to help me was totaled. No one was injured, but I still felt a little bad about that. Until the guy sidled up to me, before the State Troopers arrived, and told me that he didn’t have a license or registration.
Bonus: Performed a kick-ass karaoke version of “Two Princes” a decade after anyone cared about the Spin Doctors. Also, “Hell” by the Squirrel Nut Zippers.
1. Underwent dental surgery without anesthetic because I wanted to save time.
2. For a high school presentation, I wrote ‘FUCK’ on the blackboard in two-foot tall letters and the teacher never caught on.
3. Had seven wisdom teeth removed (this is unrelated to #1).
4. Got nabbed for internet piracy. Specifically, a torrented episode of Battlestar Galactica.
5. Showed up for jury duty and served on a trial jury without every having to show any form of ID, which was pretty great for me since I’d driven to the courthouse without my wallet or any other form of ID. Isn’t our Justice System great?
6. Nearly got thrown out of a (Catholic) Confirmation Retreat (and my church) after an altercation with a “Christ Clown” that concerned finger-paint, tears, and hokey symbolism.
7. Taught one of my own high school history classes after the teacher had to run out.
8. Wrote (well, bullshitted) a twenty-three page term paper on the symbolism of Bubba Ho-tep, upon which my whole grade in “Elvis as Anthology” rested. Got an A.
9. Over the course of two hours, I barely suppressed a claustrophobic panic attack during an overcrowded Noam Chomsky public lecture.
10. Drawn a strip for my webcomic every MWF since September 2006.
#161
We once had four Emus… we got em cause they’ll stomp the livin crap outta anything. We had bout twenty hens and they were getting predated on pretty badly so we got the Emus to protect the chickens.
So then we had safe chickens and endangered people.
Gettin to the hens was, well, I’d rather face Gretchen… (during “that” time of the month).
Stupid, psychotic, batshit, killer, black tar crapping dinosaur hand-me-downs… Hey, did ya know they taste JUST like chicken?? :D
11. Owned four batshit man killer Emus… (top THAT one!)
Oh, I remember this! You posted it on BTW as well, back in 2005.
I’ve mentioned some of this stuff before in passing, but not in this format, and for sure not the bit about being unnerved by an imaginary clothespin.
Karen
1) had my love life fairly well covered by the british press. subsequently destroyed the nation of zimbabwe with my sexual proclivities, according one local journalist. (i combined these two to cheat)
2) broke into a major biotech firm 2am on a sunday, and managed to get a guided tour. i am more amazed than you.
3) implanted a magnet in my finger to give me an extra sense for EM fields (it worked) (don’t do it).
4) ran from an angry herd of giraffes. they are scarier in person.
5) did an interview with mtv about my sex life.
6) learned to mig weld, use a plasma cutter and a chop saw stinking drunk on whisky, as a tribute to hunter s thompson.
7) took pictures of someone’s exposed 11th intercostal nerve in an operating room.
8) put my husband in a psych ward on an involuntary commitment.
9) hid one of the largest cashes of pirated software in the world (at the time) in the trunk of my car during a police raid in orange county.
10) learned to juggle from a karamozov brother.
Not nearly as exotic and/or entertaining as some, but here goes:
1. (As an annoying 20-year-old) answered obnoxious group of teenage male tourists in their own language, after they whined to each other in it about my — previously established — presence at a spot they’d wanted to claim.
2. Visited one of the “not open for visitors” excavated houses in Pompeii — with a grudging okay from the guard — because it was where my Latin primers were set.
3. Was freaked out about the crazy madness of tech stock prices and how the dotcom bubble was going to crash really soon. In 1996.
4. At about age eight, and without at the time understanding what they were doing, watched some people cooking and taking heroin in a very crowded compartment during a train-ride on the way back from an anti-nuclear demonstration.
5. Just plain attended, assisted at, or helped organize 25 weddings in 11 years.
6. Needed my own passport at 6 weeks to be able to travel back and forth between countries with either parent.
7. Watched a Nebula winner skip getting the award to officiate a wedding.
8. Drove 380 miles to LA one afternoon and back that evening, after seeing a movie (in the private box, courtesy of its star) at the Grauman Chinese Theater.
9. Had London airline agents forget where they’d parked me and another unaccompanied minor until they started paging us because we were about to miss our respective trans-Atlantic flights.
10. Watched (semi-)professional live theater in several odd locations. Besides the more usual parks and schools, also in back premises of a copyshop, on the metro, at a parking garage, in a former church, in a restaurant basement, in medieval courtyards, and throughout a large converted auto mechanic’s/garage including its stage, audience seats, ceiling, and outside bar/patio. And I think I’m forgetting a few venues.
Hadda add this one… #117 / 5 sparked a memory.
12. Had a .45 caliber pistol magazine stolen from me by a Capuchin monkey.
A man came to my gun shop and tied his Capuchin monkey outside while he browsed… I told my salesman I’d be right back and went out to see said monkey. I was kneeling and just watching him out of his reach, I thought…
The blasted monkey came over, whipped out his hind leg and snatched one of my spare magazines off of my belt! Then, with a maniacal look on his face, the little bugger began hammering it on the curb! .45 cartridges were flying everywhere, I was getting right pissed as that was one of my good (read expensive) mags! I damn near pulled on the little monster as his owner ran up and got my mag away from him… idiot monkey.
Really fun post JS!
1. Was noticed as a pre-teen for musical talent by a world-famous concert harpist. She normally gave lessons at $100/hr – but gave me them for free.
2. Was in the children’s choir for a production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, which we performed for him on his 70th birthday. Got his autograph.
3. Stood in the eye of a hurricane. (Bonnie ’98, Wilmington NC). She moved so slowly over us that we were in it for an hour.
4. Got stranded in the middle of a river at low tide, tugging an 8-foot boat through ankle-deep water. We were between the channel markers (there’s a picture somewhere to prove it but alas I don’t have a copy). Obviously they’d not been keeping up with the dredging…
5. Helped herd a flock of tern chicks down an island beach and into a corral so we could tag them with metal bands. Cutest baby birds evar! :)
6. Once spent a winter cleaning an outdoor fishtank every couple weeks. Involved plunging my arms up to the armpit in icy cold water.
7. During an offshore science cruise, ate fresh tuna sushi straight from the fish, immediately after it was caught, while it was being cleaned and its muscles were still twitching.
8. Pet-sat a tank of 20ish juvenile clownfish. Basically they brought it over and set it up on the floor of my living room for three days.
9. Swam with a barracuda. Without my glasses on I couldn’t see what it was, so I was following it around. Then I noticed that everyone else had fled to the other side of the boat…
10. Spent a day dressed up as Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. Was loved by many small children. Baffled many grownups (“is that a cucumber?”). Was threatened to be used for target practice by DNR boat patrol.
Ahh, that jogs my memory a bit, and reminds me of some things I’ve done/had done that *are* highly unlikely to be shared.
Had one of my baby bottom-front teeth eventually extracted, only to discover that the root had not dissolved at all. My mother still has that, and I swear it’s a couple of inches long. (Also had a crappy public school dentist fail so utterly to remove another tooth that she had me try to get it out myself with her pliers. And then when we did eventually get it out, the silly bint dropped it down the sink whilst washing it. Funnily enough, I never saw her again.)
Spent a morning sitting in a suburban house here in Western Australia, listening and watching with a mix of minor awe and profound pity as some guy constantly played outstanding classical music on the grand piano and talked near-gibberish the whole 3 or four hours I was there. My mother was in a nearby room, getting an astrology reading from this dude’s wife. Said mother later explained why guy was both brilliant and broken. His name? David Helfgott.
Something I really hope hasn’t happened to anyone else here: Spent an entire evening trying to stop a girl from getting her hands into my jeans, or drag my hands into hers, whilst constantly telling me how much she enjoyed giving blowjobs and how good she was at them? Hell, she even followed me into bed, where I was thankfully saved by her mother. (I was 16 at the time.) The reason I worked so hard at it for so long? She was 9! *icks at the memory*
JD: Hey, did ya know they taste JUST like chicken?? :D
I wouldn’t say that it tastes like chicken, but it could taste like cardboard and I’d happily eat it, cause every serve of Emu I eat means another of the buggers is dead. ‘Roo is pretty tasty, too, cooked right, and damn tough otherwise.
1. Administered a correspondence course for GP doctors when I know nothing whatsoever about medicine.
2. Worn a T-shirt that was (while I was wearing it) admired by Queen Noor of Jordan.
3. Walked 20 – 30 kms up the Headhunter’s Trail in Sarawak wearing a shoe which had the sole held on only by elastic bands.
4. Killed a cobra with a broom.
5. Survived 30-40 wasp stings (all at the same time, in the middle of a mangrove swamp).
6. Slept in a thoroughly decadent baroque bedroom with chandeliers and a mirrored ceiling overhead, quite unconscious of the fact that a revolution had just started in the country I was in…
7. Took my daughter’s in-laws to a Balinese brothel in the middle of the night thinking it was a karaoke bar
8. Got (thoroughly) beaten to the top of a 13,455′ (4101m) high mountain by the youngest person to have ever climbed it independently (my daughter, aged 8 at the time) .
9. Swum with wild penguins (and no wet suit either).
10. Had a Vice-President of Iran to dinner in my house, for which I did the cooking…
1. Had my child complimented by Andie McDowell.
2. Watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham palace with a teenage girl on my shoulders.
3. Jumped off a bridge because “All my friends were doing it.” Literally.
4. Fell asleep while standing up and working a power sander (multiple times).
5. Almost killed Mark Waid with a heavy metal door five minutes into my first comic con.
6. Delivered a pizza to a two-time Heisman trophy candidate.
7. Was given a free issue of Game Informer magazine and won a contest worth $400.
8. Had a blowout in a 1978 Thunderbird going 105 mph.
9. Went to my school’s prom 5 years in a row.
10. Watched either The Highlander or The Blues Brothers every day at noon for an entire summer.
11. Told my friend he was going to cut his thumb off with a band saw…five minutes later, he did.
The best thing about this list is that it demonstrates that many of us have lived interesting lives…even the most boring of us.
The problem with this meme is that it sticks in your head and won’t let you sleep as you keep coming up with more things that you wish you’d put on your list. At least it did for me. So, in the interest of a better night tonight, here are a few more…
1. Spent an hour in the air chamber of a 10,000-pipe organ while it was being played.
2. Became anonymously famous on the internet.
3. Crossed two state lines just to go to a library.
4. Had teeth filled on multiple occasions without anesthetic because I hated the needles more than the pain.
5. Sang karaoke duet from “Les Miserables” in a bar in Pittsburgh.
6. Walked through a raging hurricane with two friends, singing at the top of our lungs every song we could think of that had the words “rain” or “sun” in the title.
7. Ate haggis without benefit of whiskey.
8. Walked through the streets of Philadelphia dressed as Death, complete with a six-foot gnarled wooden staff. Nobody gave me so much as a second glance.
9. Rode an elevator with former PA Governer Dick Thornburgh, who was running for the Senate at the time. We were the only two people there, and he didn’t say hello. I didn’t vote for him.
10. Worked on two different shows as a stagehand where we actually had to stop the show and ask if there was a doctor in the house. Both times there was.
That ought to do it.
Well I don’t have 10 but I have a few
1. Have held both a human heart and 1 million dollars cash.
2. Delivered both of a set of twins.
3. Have a complete collection of Maxim magazine. (US)
4. Have seen a nun naked. (I am not a peeping tom, it was a medical thing)
I’ve never commented Scalzi before, but this was just too good. Let’s see what I can come up with…
1. Dressed as a drag queen for Halloween (did I mention I’m a teenage girl?)
2. Won “best prize” in the costume contest at my catholic all-girl’s school, dressed as said drag queen. (this is my proudest accomplishment ever.)
3. Broken the dioscesan van with my youth group (we broke the emergency brake.)
4. While serving as a waitress at a small party, I forgot to tell the Bishop of my state that the crab cakes were hot, resulting in a tongue-burnage incident.
5. Lit pocky on fire.
6. Once got 5th-row orchestra seats for “The Lion King” for cancellation price two hours before the show began.
7. Sprinted up 82nd street in NYC (an uphill street) wearing heels and a skirt.
8. Received a pair of rainbow-striped thigh-high stockings.
9. Smuggled a mongoose skull from Hawaii back to the mainland.
10. Taken a lighter and a pocketknife through airplane security, in my pocket, without having them confiscated. After 9/11. (In my defense, I actually forgot they were there.)
Kind of a lame list, but pretty good for being 15 years old, I think.
I like this topic as a list of the breathe of human experience available:
1. Had Jacques Cousteau autograph a books for me when I was 11
2. Had an ABC made for TV movie about homosexuality shot at my house (That Certain Summer)
3. While snokeling off Hawaii found a piece of coral that broke off and grew of the break so it is topographically round (all growth surface) I had this confirmed by several coral experts.
4. Had nude photographs of me used in a human anatomy class.
5. Saw the B-52s in a highschool gym in San Diego and danced my ass off.
6. Attended Zorthians Ranch for Children (if you have to ask you weren’t there)
7. Rolled a Toyota Tercel
8. Have had a game warden’s plane land on a lake silently behind me in an attempt to catch illegal fishing. I had a scientific permit so the warden was very disappointed.
9. Found a rock poster in a window for $50 that was worth $2000
10. Marreid the first girl I ever went on a date with (15 years later)
1) Vapourised a large part of a physics lab with a linear accelerator.
2) Subsequently animated large chunks of an even bigger particle accelerator
3) Animated Mankind’s unassisted ascention to space
4) Bonked on Brighton Beach
5) Had Bill Gates present my work
6) Had Stephen Hawking swear appreciatively over my work
7) Been denied a design award when the quorum realised I’d used an Amiga.
8) Worn stockings under jeans and Chelsea boots
9) Impersonated the Marquis of Blandford
10) Used IEDs to clear trees for local farmers when I was 16
Lessee:
1) Had lunch with Norman Maclean and my mother in the Humanities Division office at the University of Chicago.
2) Accidentially wandered into the pathology museum in the basement of Bernard Mitchell Hospital. Yii…
3) Climbed onto my garage roof in the wee hours on January 1, 1982 and watched the sun come up.
4) Had then-U of C president Hanna Gray scream at me for bumping into her in the Administration Building (I still have the burn scars).
5) Was given a private tour of Abbey Road Studios by a music producer and watched Caroline O’Connor record “What I Did For Love.”
6) Dressed up as “Tietania, Queen of the Bondage Fairies” for the London Rubber Ball and had my picture taken by bemused German tourists.
7) Officiated at a Wiccan handfasting.
8) Have a relative who used to work as a dominatrix.
9) Have been mistaken for Roxanne Conrad/Rachel Caine.
10) Co-wrote and appeared in Chicago’s first lesbian one-act comedy.
Heh. I forgot this one, it’s brilliant:
14. Had “Happy Birthday” sung to me, in key, in four-part harmony, with a twenty-piece orchestra accompaning. That makes twice I’ve had a completely tuneful “Happy Birthday” rendition. But I think the orchestral one was cooler.
1. Watched an 11 year-old give birth at a Baltimore hospital. The low point & why I quit working there. This was during the ‘80’s crack epidemic, so there were many horrible experiences that this topped.
2. Took care of 500 gram babies (about the size of a “beanie baby”) in 3 different teaching hospitals.
3. I worked with terminally ill children in their homes, before Hospice was available in our area.
4. Climbed to the top of Gibraltar–going up the stairs, because the lift was out and we didn’t have enough money for a cab. I am very afraid of heights, but was more broke than afraid.
5. Escorted two babies from S. Korea to the US for families I never met. This was as a volunteer.
6. Worked full time for a printer at night while going to college full time during the day.
7. Began learning to play the violin after 35. I have no music background, so this was quite a challenge.
8. Had 13 inches cut off my hair and donated it to Locks For Love. I’m growing it out to do again.
9. Have hosted 9 international exchange students.
10. Missed a movie when I was sitting behind Garrison Keillor on an airplane (back when they still had movies on domestic flights) because he is very tall and I am very short.
11. Like a few others who have posted here, I was paid to participate in medical experiments. The best one paid $1,000 for 12 hours. It was big bucks 18 years ago.
#145/5 I’ve never met anyone in person that could, even in the loosest sense, be considered famous.
Me neither damnit… though I have been ‘near’ a very few.
14. From the tape line, watched Charlie Sheen & Joanne Whalley-Kilmer film that stupid car-on-the-beach scene in that stuipd “Navy Seals” movie.
15. Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood, while in town filming “Brainstorm”, ordered steamed shrimp which I cooked for them (while I was a short order cook at The Fish Market in Nags Head NC).
(a) I measured out the one pound of shrimp, added a small handfull, heated them, took out the excess, sent the order out and watched them from the kitchen pass through as I ate my shrimp…
(b) My fiance’s Dodge Dart is in one of the bridge traffic scenes.
16. (sad one) While managing a gun shop in Va Beach, I sold some 9mm ammunition to a young lady one morning. She went home and committed suicide a few hours later. She left no note and no one knew why she did it.
She was very attractive, quite memorable and was calm and relaxed during the time we spent discussing ‘practice’ verses ‘self-defense’ ammunition. She bought a box of practice ball and a box of hollow points.
I know there was absolutely no way I could have known. I know I cannot be responsible for another’s actions. I still hold firm in my second amendment beliefs… but it does give one pause, doesn’t it…
I’ll chime in as one of the ‘pretty boring’ people…
1. I have broken each of my arms twice, 3 while roller skating, once during PE class at school, ALL while my mother (single parent) was out of town, and all between the ages of 7 and 12.
2. Attended summer camp with my arm in a cast (break #4) because (as my mom puts it) I ‘really wanted to go’.
3. Had chicken pox for the second time at age 20; was sick for 2 weeks, and lost my job because of the time off. They re-hired me once I had medical clearance to return.
4. Dropped out of high school for 1 1/2 years, returned and made up all but one credit, so…
5. … got my GED instead.
6. At age 29, began college for the first time. I have my Master’s degree now…
7. …and I managed to graduate from undergrad and grad school with honors, while also working 40 hours a week.
8. I am the only one in my immediate family with any higher education.
9. Had the Toyota Corolla I was driving get pushed under a semi’s trailer by cross winds. Twice (same incident). Only had small, surface only scratches. The semi drived didn’t know I’d slid under until he WATCHED me go under the second time in his side mirror (he’d heard the crunch of the first time).
10. Frequently post on websites in comment threads that no one is reading anymore. (Totally made that one up to have a 10th.)
Fun idea! Thanks for the interesting reading, everyone.
1. Lived in 20 different places around the world, including Japan, Italy, Guam, England, Spain, Puerto Rico, and 14 US states.
2. Sold John Boy Walton (aka Richard Thomas) 3 sets of rubber animal families for his triplets.
3. Hit a pedestrian with my car because he wouldn’t get out of my way and I was in a hurry. (I only tapped him–he was fine! Jerk.)
4. Walked away from rolling a car over on its top and a head-on collision with no injuries in either accident.
5. Been on Air Force 2…while it was Dan Quayle’s plane…and got to ask if he used the big screen TV to watch “Ren and Stimpy.” Response…”I don’t know what that is.”
6. Dislocated my own jaw with a frozen rack of ribs. Popped it right back in but spent the next 3 years in pain.
7. Experienced zero gees on a KC-135.
8. Broke my hip while dancing to “Hammer Time.”
9. Had two peeping Toms, one of whom scaled the side of a building to peep into my third floor apartment window. He got away but the second one (ground floor-er) was arrested.
10. Survived an 8.2 earthquake that lasted 60 seconds while in that same third floor apartment.
12. Once slept through a 5.6 earthquake. (I do some hardcore snoozing).
13. Saw the ceiling of the house I was living in at the time sway back and fourth about 6′ during another earthquake. (The fact it’s wiring had cloth insulation should give you an idea of how old it was. )
14. The same house was later the target of speculation it had been used for Satanic rituals when cat skeletons were found buried in the front yard during demolition. (Part of the expansion of an elementary school campus.) No Satanism, just my then housemate burying cats that died on him.
@184: Now if you’d sold John Boy Walton or John Boy Quayle a set of rubber nee-ples you would have scooped the pool here.
I put mine on my website, too :-)
1. Scaled the exterior surface of a 1735′ radio tower. To the top. Really. (I’ve been to the top of a 2000′ tower, but it was via an elevator. Still.)
2. Captained a sailboat and sailed with my wife in the Caribbean sea. This would have been much more interesting if I’d have had a run-in with the Pirates of the Caribbean, but, alas, no pirates. (Before that I was in the Navy and sailed (if you can call it sailing when you’re on an aircraft carrier with 5k other “sailors”) throughout the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Arctic Sea and Red Sea.)
3. Read the entire Patrick O’brian canon.
4. Jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.
5. Ate the still-palpitating heart of a diamondback rattlesnake (and wrote a story about it).
6. Went horseback riding in the Carmel Mountains in Israel.
7. Had a dinner cruise on the Nile and the next day visited the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. Entered the tomb of a long-dead king. Was suitably fascinated.
8. Caught, grilled, and ate 8 lobsters in Key West, just off Boca Chica Key, while Hurricane Andrew loomed over the horizon.
9. Enlisted in the Navy because of a song.
10. Heard the voice of my dead friend warning me of danger. Twice.
1. Pet a cheetah. It was purring and half-asleep; I think it was probably drugged.
2. Had sex on a golf course.
3. Learned to count to 20 in Xhosa– sadly, I now only remember number 7….
4. Walked on ostrich eggs. (Also rode an ostrich, and later ate ostrich neck soup)
5. Had a paint fight with a friend, only to discover it was oil paint. We had to wash our faces with turpentine.
6. Was the only female living in a suite of 5 males in college.
7. Sang at the French Consulate in Boston.
8. Performed in a stage version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for Sheldon Harnick.
9. Auditioned for the Steppenwolf Theatre in front of Austin Pendleton.
10. Got lost on Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.
1. Took original pitch for Spongebob and eventually convinced humorless higher ups that it was funny.
2. 1 point away from beating #1 ranked U.S. table tennis player.
3. Had an airplane on the runway drive back to the airport to kick me and my family off.
4. Held up twice in one night in Amsterdam.
5. Run with Bulls in Pamplona, not once, but three times – in 89, 93, and 97.
6. Car stalled in middle of Lincoln Tunnel. Had to be pushed out.
7. Stuck wet finger all the way into an electric socket and lived. (I was 3 at the time)
8. Had answering machine message personally recorded by Mike Judge as Beavis and Butthead.
9. Turned down last minute invite to pajama party at Playboy Mansion so I could instead propose to my then girlfriend (and now wife).
10. Wrote last episode of three different TV series.
1. Wrote a novel.
2. Got in between two drunken assholes who were looking for a fight, and one of them was armed with a broken bottle. No one got cut.
3. Watched all three Lord Of The Rings Extended Edition DVDs back to back.
4. Rode an elephant.
5. Had sex in the parking lot of my elementary school (not while I was a student there.)
6.Received a 1340 on the SAT at the age of 13. (My score in high school was a bit higher.)
7. Was quoted in a national publication at the age of 11.
8. Acted as navigator in a rental car being driven through the mountains of southeast Puerto Rico in pitch darkness by someone who had never been there before, and had never been there myself.
9. Witnessed a Major League no-hitter live.
10. Started dating a girl because of a game of Spin The Bottle…at the age of 21. (@188 – so far, so good.)
1. Used a very tiny glass needle to inject DNA into the nucleus of a living cell.
2. Broke a $20,000 piece of equipment with a pair of tweezers.
3. Went home from work with high explosive crusted all over the front of my jeans.
4. Witnessed a sex change operation performed on a goat.
5. Failed to come up with ten things I’ve done that no one else has done.
Hmm, late to the party, but…
1] Been in the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 command modules.
2] Got private pilot lessons from an Apollo astronaut.
3] Been picketed by Operation Rescue.
4] Been picketed by PETA. On the same day.
5] Shook Richard Nixon’s hand.
6] Had a rifle bullet go by my head.
7] Been elected to public office.
8] Been removed from public office by legislation. (They abolished the office in a “government restructuring.” )
9] Flagged down and hitched a ride on a hot air balloon.
10] Been held at gunpoint as a suspected cattle mutilator. On the same day.
The last two were likely the most surreal hour I will ever live.
1. Gave birth to my twins on different days.
2. Gave flowers to the queen of Thailand.
3. Watched an Atlas launch.
4. Shook Brian Binnie’s hand.
5. Preempted state law.
6. Had a leopard or baby tiger kill our geese when I was a kid even though our pregnant houseguest ran out to shake a broom at it. (We thought it was a mongoose, at first, but the Bangkok Post version is better).
7. Had tea with Dorothy Dunnett.
8. Seen a pregnant elephant.
9. Eaten jellyfish.
10. Fallen short of 10.
Oh, I forgot a good one.
6. Eaten chocolates given to the former President of the United States by the King of Morrocco (and then regifted to a friend of ours.)
@186…Some of the animals sold to JB Walton had rubber nee-ples…does that count? lol
1. Spent 18 months in the German Air Force. Most of that time about 150 feet underground.
2. Saw the Star Trek movies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 with 15 minute breaks between them in a cinema in Munich. Twice.
3. Spent one night naked in a natural hot spring up in a mountain valley in the Grand Tetons with three Brits, four French, two Japanese, one Italian, four Germans, one Swiss, two South Africans and five Americans.
4. Visited 12 European countries in 30 days by train.
5. Toured the Kremlin when it was still the Soviet Union.
6. During one trip, spent 7 continuous nights on a train, 6 nights on a boat and 5 nights on a bus.
7. Swam in the Mississippi and almost got hit by a paddle steamer.
8. Went around Australia by Greyhound. It’s big.
9. Saw roving death squads with their victims on trucks during the 1989 student protests in China.
10. Was marooned on an island in the South China Sea for more than a week after a typhoon hat landed a direct hit.
1) Lost part of a finger to a snapping turtle
2) Allowed children to handle mercury
3) Won a national blog election, perhaps even the first ever.
4) Got mugged while I was on crutches…
5) Had a 20 foot shark swim under my raft in about 10 feet of water, and was completely unaware of it.
6) Was linked off Scalzi’s AOL page,until he rudely chopped out his side columns there.
7) screamed at Mitt Romney until he made some calls and gave me a fishing license that covered myself and up to 29 of my students
8) Was knocked out for over five minutes by a Ukranian girl on my soccer team
9) Had to return a $30k gift ( a shopping bag full of cash,nonetheless) to a local Mafia figure we know… when I was a teenager.
10) Threw up on my future husband on our first date. I met him by falling off a wall.
10B) I’ve eaten lion before.
Another latecomer. Here’s my list.
1) Visited the geographical South Pole.
2) Been filmed in a ruin, wearing a cape and mask, for a death metal music video. (Hmm. Well. It was fun, actually.)
3) Collected people to a cuddling pile on a street corner. Or whatever you might want to call it. I’m talking about a lot of people laying and leaning more or less on top of eachother, just to talk and relax. This was during the Falun Folkmusik Festival in 1993 or 1994.
4) Now that I think of it, most people have not done this: defended a PhD thesis in particle physics.
5) Worked in a cleanroom 2000 meters underground.
6) Arranged a science fiction convention nearly alone (70 members, 2 guests, one conrunner on the brink of total insanity). At least I had gophers, and people helping out with some of the practical aspects.
7) Tried to teach math to 30 13-year-olds who instead climbed out on the roof of the school.
8) Visited several student bars wearing a baby on my chest. (No, of course I didn’t drink!)
9) Made a catalogue of a collection of thousands of fanzines (which was later donated to a library).
10) Looked very scientific, filling and shaking test tubes dressed in cleanroom gear, as a backdrop to some special founding announcement.
1) Have been a multimillionaire (*)
2) Saved a man from being run over by a London underground train
3) Sat in the VIP section at space shuttle Columbia last launch
4) Studied five different languages in six different countries at eight different universities
5) Married on my sister-in-law’s birthday, who had married on my wife’s birthday…
6) …So at our wedding we had both a wedding cake (actually, a large Tarte Tatin), and a birthday cake
7) Started playing on soccer teams at fifteen; scored my first (and only) goal twenty-six year later, in a championship game (we won)
8) My house in Italy dates back to about 1500, but the basement walls in my brother’s house are actually about 1500 years older than that (Roman walls)
9) Have published several articles, none of which was written in my own native language
10) Can count to 31 on the fingers of one hand
* In Italian Liras, alas, before they converted them to Euros.
1. Performed “YMCA” while waist-deep in the Dead Sea, smeared with mud.
2. Been dragged across a field by a galloping horse.
3. Won Jeopardy three times.
4. Sat down at my desk and set bare feet on a dead rabbit. (My cat had put it there as a gift.)
5. Had a hair-pulling, full-contact wrestling match with the editor of a Catholic newspaper.
6. Killed a black widow spider barehanded. (It was climbing into the bathtub with my toddlers.)
7. Had a streaker invade my birthday party.
8. Confronted a bull elephant on a hiking trail in the African bush.
9. Been stuck in a Manhattan elevator with Richard Harris and Richard Simmons.
10. Drove one thousand miles to Roswell, New Mexico, before I had my driver’s license.
Gennita Low, I’ve also done your number 6, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Rome is scary!
1) Gotten stuck for 3 hours on a glacier in Alaska while waiting for a new airplane.
2) Mistakenly herded sheep while hitchhiking in Ireland – they just kept walking ahead of us!
3) Eating a “spacecake” in Amsterdam – and failing to get high. After numerous warnings to eat it slowly because of its strength.
4) Taken a helicopter down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then rafting it for three days.
5) Seeing my parents renewing their vows in a Blue-Hawaii themed Elvis wedding in Vegas with two separate Elvises, one of them under 5 ft high.
6) Being pulled over by an Irish cop in rural Ireland because I was driving away from a protest against a natural gas refinery. He said it was only a “routine stop” – suuuure.
7) Stayed up until dawn every day for a week straight to film a very goofy movie about zombies and vampires that I starred in and had written the script for.
8) Got paid $500 for only watching one hour of TV per week for six months when I was in sixth grade.
9) Ran around campus and through classrooms dressed up as Sue from Ms. Pac-Man with the other ghosts and Pac-Man.
10) Have interviewed Bill Nye. He carries a copy of the periodic table in his wallet!
And I’m just one month short of a quarter-century! I should look at this list when I think my life is boring.
What a great idea these lists are. I don’t know if I can summon up 10, but let’s see…
1. Sang for the president of Estonia
2. Stroked an orca
3. Told fortunes by placing slugs on people’s palms and watching where they crawled. People waited in line for this honor.
4. Climbed out the roof of a stuck elevator, up the shaft, and out onto the next floor
5. Herded emus
6. Had a sea lion chew on my snorkel
7. Ran in front of a moving bulldozer while wearing pajamas
I do have a bunch, including one I know I’m the ONLY person in the world who has experienced. Unfortunately, I don’t talk about THAT anymore.
But, in the “walk into a glass door” vein, I submit this:
While riding a GoPed over a cattle guard, went flying and fell on my face, breaking my nose. Months later, when trying to decide whether I should get some surgery to fix the bend in my healed nose, tripped over a JetA fuel hose, fell on my face, and broke my nose again. The second break straightened it back out.
Unfortunately, neither accident made my nose any smaller.
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ottie
1.been in a fight with 2 famous footballers
2.had sex with 3 different woman in 1 day
3.have had 2 threesomes
4.been strip searched and found innocent
5.went fishing and caught a piranha,then ate it.
6.prevented a robbery of a store by beating up the robber and almost got stabbed in the process
7.held an anaconda
8.travelled to 24 countries (im 24)
9.used an ak47 assault rifel
10.gone away on a 2week holiday, and didnt come home for 3 months
Good blog, some amusing details. I believe seven of days ago, I have viewed a similar article. Does anyone know how to track future posts?
kavram
I was on the gateway arch in 2003 and it was great. It is just impressiv what was build there. And the museum is worth a look.
I tried the bird nest soup last year from like http://www.geocities.jp/hongkong_bird_nest/index_e.htm . Tastes really good… yeah, I thought it was gross at first, but wow, you won’t regret it.
I, too, would like to know about this right-wing college publication. Elaborate, please?
My husband has hated me since I had my breast cancer surgery which removed my breasts. I went ahead and had them both removed because I was terrified. That it would just move into my other breast. Because that’s the place cancer returns when it returned. I’m still terrified it will come back. Brian hates the way ivlook
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