Interest meme

[saint_monkey]

Vector orobouros>chiller

It's useless to say "I never do these things" because I do... at least the interesting ones.

Here's the rules:

Look at your LJ interests list. If you have fewer than 50 interests, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five interests, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five interests, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em. List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly what it is about these things that interests you so much.



(I've got fifty-five or so. I'm sticking to every five.)

42, apocalypse, art, atheism, bad poetry, bees, blasphemy, bs, buddhism, cannibalism, coffee, creativity, crowded house, cryptozoology, david bowie, douglas adams, entropy, equal opportunity blasphemy, espresso, excel, flying spaghetti monster, forensics, forteana, fringe, gary larson, hinduism, isaac asimov, italian cooking, memetics, monty python, most-other-isms, nagarjuna, near earth encounters, neil gaiman, nerds, nihilism, nirvana, orson scott card, philosophy, printmaking, programming, reading voraciously, religion, seattle, stephen king, the beatles, the pixies, the pogues, the state, the unexplained, vba, vegetarian cooking, watterson, west virginia, writing bad songs.

• Bad poetry - It is very hard to write a poem that isn't about love or pain. So people write about nothing else. (The exception, of course, is John Fogerty, who writes about rain, playing music. etc.) Having said that, cruise through the latest posts some time, and actually stop and read some of the masterpieces of 16 year old existentialism out there. A cornucopia of people expressing deep angsty love poems in the worst rhyming couplets imaginable. "choke me in the shallow water" indeed.
  
  
• cannibalism - For about five years, I collected stories about cannibalism from the news. (Sometime I'll post my collected stories in an entry, if you like.) It wasn't the eating people part that got to me, but it was the motivations of the people that actually did end up eating people that did it. I mean, there are no acts that are truly Mala Prohibita, evil by their very nature, in human experience. You name the action, and a human society has condoned, even celebrated it. But three acts: rape, incest, and cannibalism, come closest to being universally condemned... Rape and incest are essentially power issues, but cannibalism? That's a more slippery topic. Get to the "why" to the statement, "So I tore out his eyes and ate them," and you're getting into what the human psyche is truly capable of.
  
  
• David Bowie - Bowie, impossible to pin down. The only thing predicatable about a Bowie album, is that it's a Bowie album. There is only one other "musical chameleon" like him, and that's Beck.
  
  
• Excel - Microsoft's redeeming virtue. It's the swiss army knife of windows applictions. I've used it as a check register, a game platform, a DBMS, a data mine, and believe it or not, a network cracking tool. Give me MS Excel and a place to stand...
  
  
• Gary Larson - I like cartoonists in general. But Larson did it right, saw the field, came in, broke the mold, and got out while the gettin' was good (Also see Watterson...as in Bill Watterson of Calvin -n-Hobbes.) Larson could make Joe Sixpack laugh at an entomology joke or an archaeology joke. He is a genius.
  
  
• Monty Python - Recently chiller told me that english life really is like monty python, and that their over-the-top surrealism was actually only very subtle satire, but when I was 17 and first began watching Monty Python after work, I thought it was like an alien observation of culture. It took the most fractured take imaginable.
  
  
• Nerds - I wish I could go visit each nerd in high school and tell them, "wait till you are thirty, you'll get the girl and a porsche." (I'd leave out the "that ... or you'll live in your mom's basement.")
  
  
• Printmaking - The first time a plate came out of the acid, I was hooked. What I'd drawn had been transformed by these chemical forces into something much, much, better. Every day after that, was just another experiment, and the results (so far) have always been satisfying.
  
  
• Stephen King - The man could write the farm report and I'd read it. He really can tap into your head. Except for "from a Buick 8."
  
  
• The unexplained - Without it, existential angst would be useless.
  
  
• writing bad songs - This is actually one of my own personal hobbies. Putting my poems about love and pain into bad melodic form. I'd like to say "writing good songs" but I know my limitations.