Daily WYR...

At the request of Jen, today's Would You Rather is of a positive nature.

Would you rather...

be able to teleport one inch forward
OR
have an echo that is in the voice of Edward G. Robinson?

Discuss.

Oh, P.S., I have to give mad props to PJ because she's the first one I saw with the whole "This site is XX% evil" and I stole it from her, and then other people stole it from her and/or me, and God knows it never pays to piss off mommy.

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Nonsensical funsicle.

Tagged by PJ, via Jen's comments.

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Grab the nearest book.*
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post that text (and the next three sentences) below the text following these instructions on your blog, along with the instructions.

* "Nearest" means you can't rummage around for a "cool" or "intellectual" book. Really, whatever your hand falls on first.
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To freeze a sprinter, the shutter must open and close before the image of the runner perceptibly changes position on the camera's image plane. Therefore, the faster the subject runs, the faster the shutter speed you will need to stop the action and avoid a blurred image.

A second factor affecting the final image is the camera-to-subject distance.

One elevator door was half-open on an empty shaft, from which drifted hissing wind. The door was coated to look like wood, but a dent at kneel level showed it was black metal. While he squatted, fingering the edge of the depression, something clicked: a second elevator door beside him rolled open.

"Hey, good-lookin'!" the blond driver yells, her hair flapping in the wind. "Don't go! I think I love you!" Laughing, her friends pull her hat off.

Several people put their arms around me and said keep coming back!

Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), the revolutionary leader, was himself executed in July 1794. This destruction came not from outside the system; it was produced by the system. As in the later Russian Revolution the revolutionaries on their humanist base had only two options--anarchy or repression.

In a large skillet brown meat, half at a time, in hot oil. Drain off fat. In a 3 1/2- to 4-quart slow cooker combine undrained tomatoes, beef broth, onion, jalapeno or serrano peppers, garlic, cornmeal, chili power, brown sugar, oregano, cumin, and black pepper.

Let anyone who will not believe it, go thither and inquire for himself. There was once an ass whose master had made him carry sacks to the mill for many a long year, but whose strength began at last to fail, so that each day as it came, found him less capable of work. Then his master began to think of turning him out, but the ass, guessing that something was in the wind that boded him no good, ran away, taking the road to Bremen; for there he thought he might get an engagement as town musician.

The bus company? They got another one. Line coach Douglas Fowlkes recalled that the media wrote about the losing streak so much that it was always at the forefront of the players' minds: "When are they going to win?"

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I am now tagging Mr. Rochester. Come on, David, let's see what's sitting within arms reach of you!

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Bookworms.

All kinds of people have this meme up. Jen, Paula and O'Tim to name but a few.

I'm game. Here goes.

1. One book that changed your life?
Catcher in the Rye. Read it my sophomore year of high school. That's when I knew I wanted to write.

2. One book you have read more than once?
The Milagro Beanfield War. Few books have ever gotten me to care more about a main character than this one.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
One Hundred Years of Solitude, because that book makes me believe in magic.

4. One book that made you laugh?
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The entire series of five. I read it once every two years or so, and I laugh out loud every time.

5. One book that made you cry?
The Grapes of Wrath

6. One book you wish had been written?
How We Cured Cancer

7. One book you wish had never been written?
None.

8. One book you are currently reading?
I'm never reading one book at a time. I typically have three or four going, and depending on my mood at bedtime, I'll continue with one of them. Right now I have going: Screenwriting 101: The Essential Craft of Feature Film Writing by Neill D. Hicks; Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry; Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac; and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.

9. One book you've been meaning to read?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

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Writing about writing.

A few peeps over in Me Peeps sidebar, namely O'Tim, Jen, Pillock and Paula (and sometimes PJ, thought not enough), write about writing a lot. Specifically, their own writing. I devour that stuff. As a writer who writes writing, I'm fascinated by other writers and what they go through to get their writing written, whatever sort of writing they might be writing. Or have written. I also love reading about other peeps' triumphs and failures, the woo-hoos and the aw-shits. Maybe it's just me, but hearing other people talk about dealing with the same shit I deal with, albeit in different ways, different times and sometimes different countries, makes it a lot easier for me to get back on the horse, dig my heels in, hit the ground running, deal with adversity, pick myself up, put my nose to the grindstone and whatever other cliché you fancy using.

So I'm thinking, maybe I should write about writing, specifically, writing my own writing. Not all the time, mind you. I still have to post pictures of my boy every once in a while to remind you that I can be sufficiently sappy. And I have to post Thursday 13s because I'm a lemming. And I have to post a rant here and there because otherwise I become constipated. But in between those, I'm going to write about my writing.

I'm also finishing up the now one-month-and-a-half-behind-schedule (you) essays. My apologies to those of you who have been eagerly awaiting its launch, and particularly those of you who contributed (many!). What I really need is for someone who can take the design I created and help me program the rest of the site, because that interweblogosphere programming stuff is a real mindfuck sometimes.

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