meme

Kitchen clutter

Passing on memes is like posting new content, isn’t it? Here’s one doing the rounds: * * * Bold the ones you have and use at least once a year, italicize the ones you have and don’t use, strike through the ones you have had but got rid of. There are additions. I wonder how many pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers, egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese boards, cheese knives, crepe makers, electric woks, miniature salad spinners, griddle pans, jam funnels, pie funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers, martini… Read More »Kitchen clutter

Counting the years

As says, hello LJ! How are you? I am rubbish at posting to LJ, so here we have an easy meme in lieu of anything substantial. Actually, this turned out to be significantly harder than I thought, because I’ve had to go digging through decades-old emails in order to work out where I lived in 2001. Ah, the frailties of memory. March 2011: Living in a mortgaged mid-terrace in Southampton with and the . Loving the rock’n’roll life of a lecturer. March 2001: Living in a shared house in Southampton just round the corner from the Uni. Not entirely sure… Read More »Counting the years

15 Albums

From , on Facebook: The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note– upper righthand side.) AMENDMENT TO THE RULES – DON’T SELF CENSOR, BE HONEST – WRITE ONE SENTENCE TO EXPLAIN WHY… Read More »15 Albums

Oscar Nominee Meme

Doing the rounds in abbreviated form from various people. I’ve decided to mutate the meme, because 1980 feels like a very artificial start date for film-watching. The full list is taken from here; for each year, the first film listed won the Oscar. Titles in bold are ones that I’ve seen.

The Big Read Meme

It’s doing the rounds, and I’m a sucker for memes like this: “The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Well let’s see.” Look at the list and bold those you have read. Italicise those you intend to read. Underline the books you LOVE. Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them 😉 Quite a few read – more than I would have thought at first, but some glaring gaps which I’ve been… Read More »The Big Read Meme

Interests Meme

questioned these seven interests, if you want me to ask about yours, comment below. 4ad A rather good independent record label. The people who brought the world The Pixies, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, M/A/R/R/S, and so on. ansible Dave Langford’s multi-Hugo-winning fanzine/semi-prozine. Also an anagram of ‘lesbian’. looney labs A small games company with a reputation for quirky games: Fluxx, Chrononauts, Icehouse. magic realism I’m rather fond of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. plokta Another Hugo-winning fanzine. salt and sauce The only thing worth putting on chips. I sneer at your gravy. xanadu… Read More »Interests Meme

Lazing on a Sunday afternoon^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmorning

It’s the letter-music meme that’s doing the rounds: Reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter. Post them to your journal with these instructions. gave me “c” for “consultancy agreement which I appear to have lost all motivation to draft because I am full up from having LIVER! for lunch!” C’est Filon / Humphrey Lyttleton and his band. While Bad Penny Blues was probably the most successful of Humph’s records released by Parlophone (it charted in the top twenty in the UK), this… Read More »Lazing on a Sunday afternoon^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmorning

Book Quiz Answers

Rather later than hoped (v. busy at work), here are the answers to my book quiz: The Quotes Quote 1 Rambling sentences and sheep? It could only be Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) by Thomas Hardy, specifically the passage in which Gabriel Oak loses his shepherding livelihood thanks to an overenthusiastic sheepdog and a cliff. Quote 2 The alien zoo is on the planet Tralfamadore, which makes this Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes. Quote 3 Now, I am not wishing to be casting aspersions, but there is only one fellow who is writing about gangsters… Read More »Book Quiz Answers

Book Quiz

I may do the film quotes quiz meme that’s doing the rounds, but I was rather taken with the book quote quiz that treated us to yesterday. Given that I won through a mixture of geekery and guesswork, it’s probably beholden on me to post another.

The Rules

(shamelessly cribbed from )

The point isn’t to show off by guessing the titles of ones you’ve read, but by showing powers of reasoning to get setting and time and “interesting thing”. Googling is expressly forbidden, obviously.

All comments are screened and I’ll give out marks on Monday.

Scoring

One point if you can get within twenty five years of when it was written. (Half point for within fifty years).

One point if you can get the genre/setting (so I’m looking for something like “nineteenth century adventure” “near future sci-fi” “contemporary new york” “cod medieval fantasy”).

One point for author and/or title or series of books.

If you don’t know the actual book/author I will give you a completely unfair discretionary point if you can guess something quite interesting about the book or author just from the text provided (not something obvious like “they start sentences with conjunctions” or “they’re inexplicably fond of the Oxford comma”. So you can still get full points if you don’t know any of the actual books.

Really though, what I’m interested in is why you think what you think about the passages and how you tie them to a place and time. I think for some of them at least, the title should be guessable though. Comments are screened.

The Quotes

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