ZenPundit has tagged me with this durned thing. I don’t get tagged very frequently so I think it behooves me to respond graciously.
Honestly, I think that meme is a misnomer for this sort of exercise. Meme should be reserved for foundational ideas like Bush lied or Cindy Sheehan is a moron or winning hearts and minds—ideas that help to form belief systems and are at least a little useful in identifying where in the spectrum of thought the correspondent fits.
A better characterization of this sort of exercise is a game. It’s like Truth or Dare or Tell Me Something I Don’t Know. Well, anyway I’ll play.
The games consists of seven questions:
- Seven things to do before I die
- Seven things I cannot do
- Seven things that attract me to (…)
- Seven things I say most often
- Seven books (or series) that I love
- Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would if I had time)
- Seven people I want to join in, too.
Seven things to do before I die
I’ve always been bad at longterm goals.
- Go to Paris and Rome with my wife.
- Dogsled into a campsite, stay overnight, and dogsled out.
- Raise a puppy from birth.
- Figure out what I want to do when I grow up.
- Learn Arabic.
- Create something really novel and useful.
- Improve the template for The Glittering Eye.
Seven things I cannot do
It will sound like bragging but there aren’t a lot of things I can’t do. There are some things I haven’t tried yet. 😉 But there are a few things I really cannot do. I’m not going to share the really serious things. Those are just too painful to talk about.
- Go a single day without excruciating pain.
- Fly a plane (my eyesight is too poor).
- Suffer fools lightly.
- Take a compliment.
- Get a decent night’s sleep.
- Figure out where my great-great-great-grandfather Blanchard was born.
- Follow a recipe without improving on it.
Seven things that attract me to blogging
- It’s creative.
- It’s a challenge.
- Posting daily requires discipline.
- Meeting new people.
- Learning new things.
- It engages my mind.
- It gives me an opportunity to share my thoughts on things I care about.
Seven things I say most often
- At any rate
- A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?
- When the only tool you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail.
- Qila, knock it off!
- Mira, off!
- Tally, come!
- Janice, I love you.
Seven books (or series) that I love
- Dante’s Purgatorio
- Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a foundling
- Dostoyevskiy’s The Brothers Karamazov
- Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield
- de Pomiane’s French Cooking in 10 Minutes
- de Camp and Pratt’s The Land of Unreason
- Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal
Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would if I had time)
This one is easy.
- The 39 Steps (the Hitchcock version with Robert Donat and Madeline Carroll)
- The Prisoner of Zenda (the version with Ronald Coleman and Madeline Carroll—you might see a pattern emerging here)
- The Quiet Man (like to hear me recite it?)
- Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
- Strictly Ballroom
- The Castle
- Signs
Seven people I want to join in, too
Hmmm. I feel dastardly passing this on. And Mark took one of my candidates.
- My sister, Ann. (leave your answers in the comments)
- Marc Schulman
- Joe Gandelman
- amba
- Dan Berczik
- Jeff Medcalf
- Dymphna
Thanks, Dave. I was wondering what I would do today.
My 7×7 Meme is up. Thanks for the invitation.
This is turning out really well – I had no idea that you and Marc were Dostoyevskii fans…
I have maintained that the entire “lets all answer the same bunch of questions” thing is all one meme regardless of the questions, and that tagging is a mutation of that same meme.
hey! i’m the only one who’s not a blogger! What does this mean!
there’s no way i could be a blogger—not organized enough.
in fact, it will be hard for me to complete these lists (not organized enough).
i guess “they” say you should always play to your strengths, and my strength is the disorganizedness (is this a word?) of my thinking. i’m the outside-the-box person in ‘most any group, which can be incredibly annoying. guess i’ll try later. (that’s typical…) luv, and thanks for putting me on the list. ann
Hmm…I’m already in awe of you bec. you’re in the select few on Pundita’s going, going, gone blog roll. I’m going to miss that analytic genius.
Soo…as soon as I finish the council voting, which I always manage to drag out to the last minute +2, I will begin.
And think about the next seven on *my *list. Maybe the Baron. I never know him as well as I think I do.
BTW, you’re right: “meme” doesn’t cover this genre. How about TAG –You’re It?
I will have to respectfully disagree with your previous commenter. If being organized were a requirement for blogging, at least half of us would be off the rolls real quick.
I usually wait until the antepenultimate moment myself so I know what you mean.
Lol. He got me, too. My weekly etymology post will have to wait a day. Interesting how few answers are repeated, even among people who presumably think alike or have arrived at many of the same answers to complex questions.
OK, OK. Ya got me . . .