Son of Timatollah: Eight Facts/Habits

30 June 2007

Eight Facts/Habits

Ocean Guy has tagged me with the Eight Facts/Habits Meme:

The Rules are: Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

I'm delighted and appalled.

Okay, let's have at it.

I get up almost every weekday at 5:00 a.m. I read the funnies (Achewood, xkcd, and newspaper funnies at the Houston Chronicle), read e-mail, surf the web some, plan the day, meditate about twenty minutes, eat breakfast (Cheerios with fruit, bagel with cream cheese, grapefruit juice, second cup of coffee with Benefiber) and read my current book, clean up the kitchen, put lunches together (made a night or two before), and head out to the gym, desireably before 7:00 a.m. Then I go to work. I have strongly bought into this idea that if you start your day doing things for yourself, it's a lot easier to get more done at work, because you rarely feel like you're shortchanging your own life for work.

I did a Jeopardy audition in Orlando in mid-May and didn't blog about it at the time. It went well, but I'm not sure I have the personality that makes for good television.

I'm reading biographies of the presidents of the USA in order of their terms. I'm not sure whether that means I'll have to read two of Grover Cleveland or not. Only up to Madison. I've already learned that most presidential biographies are academic, university-press type books, which makes them a challenge. I've also already learned that you get a lot of context you wouldn't in a straightforward history by the overlap of the individuals and events in each other's story.

My partner Mack and I met a little over 13 years ago, and we've been living together over 12 years. We have a chocolate lab, almost 10 years old, named Ursa and a black-and-white domestic shorthair, probably about 15 years old, who used to belong to Mack's sister's family named Tom (by Mack's niece when he was theirs).

I both opened for and worked sound for R.E.M. when I was living in Nashville and trying to be a rock star. Opened for them in two different bands. The first time was supposedly the first time they'd ever played outside of Athens. (I'm skeptical in retrospect about that, but that's what we told ourselves at the time.) Our opening group was called Slim Jim. ("We're Slim Jim from Birmingham. We're ready to eat, ready to eat, ready to eat.") Slim Jim was members of a band called Actuals, or Factual, depending on when in their history, and me (their sometime roadie). We performed on interesting instruments (Howard combo organ, bongos, trombone, power drill) over prepared tape. Robb Earls of Factual and I prepared the tape. One song was called "Homes of the Stars." I had recorded the entire "See the homes of the stars" shpiel at the Nashville Gray Line terminal. The song was four measures of improvisational bleating interspersed with four measures of "the home of the beautiful Tammy Wynette," etc., which ran continuously behind our performing over it. Except it had been processed, and it got kind of psychedelic towards the end. I'm sorry I don't have audio for you. It was a blast.

Another group I was in, Ed Fitzgerald and Civic Duty, opened for R.E.M. at the Exit In. The bass player didn't show, so I had to do bass parts as well as my own keyboard parts. That was what gave me the idea to do the bassless (heh) X-04.

While living in Nashville, I was a delivery driver and technician for the Nuclear Pharmacy. We delivered radioactive pharmaceuticals to local hospitals that didn't have their own radiopharmacies.

I'm a mutant. I was born with three thumbs, but they cut one of them off.

I met former president Jimmy Carter when he was running for President of the United States. This would've been in late 1975 probably. The Allman Brothers Band was doing a fund raiser for him at the Providence Civic Center, and I was part of the leftish student newspaper (called thursday (in Cooper Bold Italic font) when it came out on Thursday and monday (in Cooper Bold Italic font) when it came out on Monday) at M.I.T. at the time. (It was at thursday that I learned the joy of the IBM Model D Executive Typewriter with proportional spacing, paste up using hot wax, and the joys of working with Louie, pressman supreme, at the Harvard Crimson, where we printed.) About halfway down I-95 between Boston and Providence, Carter moved from the motor-coach supporter bus to the school-bus student-journalist bus and took questions. I was sitting in the seat either right in front of him or right behind him, sorry I don't remember clearly, as he took our questions and talked about how solar power was going to create a boom for plumbers, how his experience as a nu-cu-lar engineer would help him solve the nation's problems, etc. I wrote a gonzo-style story about the trip and concert that lives somewhere in the M.I.T. archives.