"Put down that wrench!"

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 glasses, tea strainers, bamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags, banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, spaetzle makers, cookie presses, gravy strainers, double boilers (bains marie), sukiyaki stoves, ice cream makers, fondue sets, healthy-grills, home smokers, tempura sets, tortilla presses, electric whisks, cherry stoners, sugar thermometers, food processors, stand mixers, mincers, bacon presses, bacon slicers, mouli mills, cake testers, pestle-and-mortars, gratin dishes, apple corers, mango stoners and sets of kebab skewers languish dustily at the back of the nation's cupboards.

* * *

I feel rather better about our collection - we use pretty much everything that we have, the only exceptions being the juicer (which we might have got rid of, now I think of it), the fondue set (wedding present, naturally) and the sugar thermometer (which has received quite a bit of use in the past, just not this year). How anyone can own martini glasses and not use them at least once a year is beyond me.

From gnommi, 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 IT'S IN THERE - LOOK BACK OVER YOUR WHOLE LIFE TO KEY INSPIRATIONS (in no particular order..):

1. Blowzabella - A Richer Dust
I'm a bit of a folky at heart, and I think that I picked this up second hand at a record stall when I was an undergraduate. Blowzabella have a sound that could best be described as 'challenging', if you dislike hurdy-gurdies and bagpipes. Fortunately, I like them.

2. Les Troubadours Du Roi Baudouin - Missa Luba
I have Simon to thank for introducing me to this, via the Lindsay Anderson film if.... I then waited for the best part of twenty years for it to be released on CD (even to the extent of buying scratchy second-hand vinyl and getting Steve Harris to rip it).

3. The Pentangle - Basket of Light
Another schoolboy introduction, I have Jon Baldwin to thank for giving me a C90 that he'd taped from his parents' LP. Jazz-influenced British folk rock.

4. The Grateful Dead - Aoxomoxoa
I got into the Dead in a big way when in sixth form and an undergraduate. I prefer their earlier stuff - fresher, more vital - and this is no exception. For me, the high points are Mountains of the Moon and live favourite St. Stephen (although I prefer the recording of the latter on Live/Dead)

5. Various - London is the Place for Me
I've acquired many of my favourite albums by chance; this was picked up in the stock clearance at the Andy's Records in Boston (2003ish? whenever the company folded). This is a collection of Trinidadian calypsos from London in the early 1950s that record the experiences of West Indian immigrants in Age of Austerity Britain (two of the musicians - Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener - arrived at Tilbury on the Empire Windrush in 1948). Touching and acidic by turns.

6. Various - A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings
This was a recommendation by Phin Head, back when he worked in Southampton (2002ish?). A collection of American folk recordings from the 1930s and 1940s, mostly collected by Alan and John Lomax - think of the soundtrack to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, but authentic and better.

7. Outback - Baka
Heard by chance busking in Covent Garden in 1990 or thereabouts. Mandolin and didgeridoo two-piece.

8. Carter USM - 101 Damnations
Matt Gibson was responsible for this in my first year as an undergrad. I'd heard Sheriff Fatman (who hadn't), but he raved about Midnight on the Murder Mile so much that I (eventually) bought the album.

9. Moby Grape - Moby Grape
Cheery, late 60s San Francisco band. If they'd had the luck that the Dead had, you'd probably have heard of them. I listened to this a great deal as an undergrad.

10. Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues
Obligatory appearance by His Bobness, included mainly on the strength of Love Minus Zero (which I once, while in a sleep-deprived and hungover stupor, accused Dave Warry of snoring in tune to). Again, I listened to this a lot as an undergrad.

11. The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat
The second Velvets studio album - still with John Cale, but significantly harsher than VU and Nico. Plus, it has Sister Ray. I got into the Velvets while I was in Edinburgh,

12. Philip Glass/Kronos Quartet - Dracula
Glass's re-scoring of the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi. Really, really rather good. I'm not a goth, btw.

13. Pulp - We Love Life
Somewhat of a return to form for Pulp after the bleakness of This is Hardcore. I've never understood why Bob Lind and The Night That Minnie Timperley Died didn't get singles releases - I think that they're the strongest tracks on the album. I always associate this album with Issy's time as an SRT in Bath.

14. Ludwig Van Beethoven - Symphony No.9
But which recording? I'm torn between the Furtwängler recording from the 1951 Bayreuth Festival, and von Karajan's 1962 recording with the Berliner Philharmoniker. And it's the 9th - what's not to like?

15. Ozric Tentacles - Strangeitude
Emmeline introduced me to the Ozrics in 1992, and I still have a well-worn C90 of Pungent Effulgent with a track listing written in her fair hand. Their inclusion on this list probably means that I'm some kind of crusty hippy, but you'd probably worked that out yourselves.

Tagging: andrewducker, atommickbrane, burkesworks, drdoug, hsw, ladymoonray, makyo, marypcb, mr_tom, purplestuart, ruthj, sbisson, steer, titanic_days, zotz

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.

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."

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicise those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. 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 meaning to fill for years (my inability to read any Dickens bar the Mudfog Papers, for example).

thegreatgonzo 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

I remember when this World Wide Web was all Silverstands... One of the great what-ifs of computing history (second only to Babbage, I'd say), Xanadu was Ted Nelson's plan for a global hypertext system. In (sporadic) development since the 1960s, and arguably no closer to a releasable product than it was then, sadly.

It's the letter-music meme that's doing the rounds:

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

atommickbrane 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!"

1. 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 is probably my favourite of his Parlophones.
2. Clap Hands / Tom Waits. Simply because Rain Dogs is a work of genius.
3. Coal Creek March / Pete Steele. One of the many recordings made by Alan Lomax in the 1930s. There's more where this came from in the Library of Congress's American Memory collection.
4. Close To Me / The Cure. Everyone loves Fat Bob.
5. Cool Britannia / Bonzo Dog Band. My heart belongs to Dada.

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 and other such persons in the continuous present tense, and that fellow is Damon Runyon. The quote is from Guys and Dolls (1932), a book that demands to be read aloud.

Quote 4

A trick question. It's a quote from a political theory text that's a book within a book. Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which is from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). Doubleplusgood.

Quote 5

It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon, as usual. Garrison Keillor doing his homely thing in Lake Woebegon Days (1985). If you're not aware, the Lake Woebegon News is available as a podcast - try looking on iTunes.

Quote 6

Another trick question. The conceited ass is clearly Sherlock Holmes, but the narrator isn't Dr Watson. In this case, it's Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully and notable cad from Tom Brown's Schooldays. The quote is taken from George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman and the Tiger (1999), which also manages to work the Battles at Rorke's Drift and Isandlwana into the story. Highly recommended.

Quote 7

A bit of an easy one. It's a gumshoe evaluating a dame, and with that turn of phrase it could only be Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939), eyeing up the delicious Mrs Regan.

Quote 8

Obligatory cultural stereotyping in the sequel to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, the wonderful and little-read Three Men on the Bummel (1900). The unrepentant ignorer of signage is Harris, of course.

Quote 9

The book that launched a thousand stream-of-consciousness travelogues, and which was probably also responsible for the goddamned hippies. Jack Kerouac's semi-autobiographical road novel On the Road (1957). The sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed that the name of the book appears in the quotation.

Quote 10

Modern Westernised Japanese with obsessive descriptions of food, so it has to be Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles (1997).

The Scores

And so to the scores. In reverse order:

• nul points, coffeeandtv0 (it's the taking part that counts)
• 3 points, mcnutcase (who fell straight into the Sherlock Holmes trap)
• 5 points, burkesworks (spot on the Vonnegut)
• 8 points, lionsphil (partial credit for some good reasoning)
• 10 points, swisstone (short and sweet)
• 17 points, gothick_matt (good across the board knowledge, and some good guesswork)
• 24 points, steer (glad you enjoyed the quiz)
• and finally, with an uncanny 38 points, blue_condition

Named Awards

The Golden Banana Skin (for falling for the trick question in 6) goes to mcnutcase.

The Broken Chronoclastic Infundibulator (for the highest aggregate wrong guesses at dates) goes to gothick_matt, with an honourable mention to steer for missing the Jerome by sixty years.

The QI Medal of Honour (for the most interesting fact) goes to lionsphil for his trivia about the throat-shot Orwell.

The Amulet of ESP (for guessing a book you haven't read) goes to blue_condition for identifying the Hardy, including the character.

The original posting is now unscreened - thanks for playing.

I may do the film quotes quiz meme that's doing the rounds, but I was rather taken with the book quote quiz that steer 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 steer)

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

1. You've lived in a variety of places including Bath, Soton and Edinburgh. Where would you most like to raise your family and grow old?

2. What's your favourite all-time film?

3. For a geek you seem quite good at stuff like mending cars and putting up sheds. Is there a non-intellectual job you could imagine doing for a living with satisfaction?

4. Do you think monogamy is viable in a long term relationship?

5. Do you think the Semantic Web is really going to change the shape of society in any definable way?

Comment if you want to be asked questions...