content generator from sola

[the_siobhan]

Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.

400 blows
One of my ex's once asked me if I had a theme song, and I named this one without even thinking abut it. To me it's always been a song about survival in spite of being on the losing side and about standing apart from other people because of one's experiences.

dutch chicken benchmark
bcholmes has this story she tells about working in Amsterdam and trying to come to grips with how straight forward they are about sex and talking about sex. At one point, she asked a co-worker what kind of topics might be considered to riské for mixed company. The co-worker couldn't think of anything. Gay sex? No, gay sex was fine. Kinky sex? No that was ok too.

"How about sex with an animal?"

The co-worker thought about it. Finally he conceeded that it would depend on the animal.

"So what kind of animal would be considered in bad taste?"

"Say... anything smaller than a chicken."

And so the Dutch Chicken Benchmark was born.

grippy
I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan. At the opening credits of The Colbert Report a bunch of words go by that say things like "INSPIRED" "PATRIOTIC" etc. There's one that hangs out a little longer so you can get a good look at it, and for a long time that word was "grippy".

It has since been replaced by "megamerican", "lincolnish", "superstantial" and a bunch of others. But grippy is still my favourite.

pattern matching
I am fascinated by the fact that people in general have such problems learning from their mistakes, and even more difficulty learning from the mistakes of others. Our brains are supposed to be designed to look for patterns in the way our environment works, but that talent seems to grind to a halt when it comes to human behaviour.

Being able to predict the future by looking at the successes and failures of the past is a process that really interests me.

reluctant messiahs
Originally the title of a book, but I just really took to the concept that certain people have an powerful impact on others through no volition of their own.

urban planning
Mostly because Toronto is so crap at it. There are cities that really work well and ones that really don't, and I'm really interested in how the differences come to exist.

wasp factory
A really cool book by Iain Banks, and a really cool record label in Cheltenham, UK.

Comments

[eciklb.livejournal.com]

Claw foot tubs - I used to have one in Covington. I like the fact that they're very solid and functional and deep (so good for the rare deep soaking bath) and at the same time they're romantic, in an old fashioned non-excessively-frilly kind of way. I'm generally fond of older architecture that hasn't been updated in bad ways (the 1970s-ification of the house next to us in Covington was frightening!), and claw foot tubs, original woodwork, and elaborate mantels are all signs of that.

Devil duckies - They go in the claw foot tub. One Halloween, we found them at $1 for 3, or thereabouts, on American Science and Surplus. So we bought 15 of them, filled the claw foot tub, added red food coloring, and had a devil duck pond. E put dry ice in the toilet tank, and the bathroom was the spookiest room in the house. I've since given away several of the duckies, because really, how many does one person need? But I've also adopted a normal ducky, a dead ducky (black with green beak and x-es for eyes), and a vampire ducky (dressed like a Bela Lugosi vampire), so I've got a little line of duckies on the counter of the guest bath.

Duct tape - holds stuff together. Also removes paint and plantar warts.

Experimental archaeology - because I've got competing tendencies toward bookworminess and needing to *do* things. I'm always amazed at how long people will sit around talking about how stuff was done in the past without being hit by a compulsion to try it.

Social history - I'm not that keen on battle formations and long-past political debates. I am fascinated by the different ways different societies in the past dealt with issues of gender and sexuality and family and social class, especially since they're often so different from modern perceptions of "the way it's always been."

Stegosauri - this is a fairly recent obsession, brought on by a strange compulsion to hear a song from my childhood that I can't find anywhere. The lyrics include, "My name is stegosarus, I'm a funny-looking dinosaur."

Visual irony - irony is my preferred form of humor, and I'm generally pretty visually oriented. There's lots of good 20th c. art that falls into this category, and I ought to be able to pull an example or seven off the top of my head, but I can't right now.