Pictures: Bricks In The Wall: Window Grate

In honor of the approaching return of regular academic life, a series inspired by the "Bricks In The Wall" metaphor for education. Yeah, it's been that kind of summer, and it's gonna be that kind of Fall.

New Google Meme: Fun with autocomplete

Via EotAW:

Newest mental toy:

1. Go to Google.
2. Type in the beginning of a common phrase (e.g., “how do I..”, “where are…”, “is barack…”)
3. Look at the drop-down list of suggested searches.
4. If appropriate, laugh riotously.

My result was, for me professionally, deeply disturbing

Read 'em and weep:

history of valentine's day
history of basketball
history of soccer
history of the internet
history of israel
history of mardi gras
history of st. patrick's day
history of computers
history of baseball
history of football

What comes up for you?

Yeah, I'm liberal.

You can take a 40 question quiz in which you rate policy issues on a ten-point scale to gauge your depth of feeling. archy put his score in comments. I'll do it in white, so you can highlight the post if you want to see just how liberal I am....

295 out of 400

Legacies: Recycling and Six Word Memoir Meme

via

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4. Tag five more blogs with links [I don't tag. But I will note that SMITH Magazine is collecting submissions.]

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Well, here goes nothing:

My history in history isn't history.

Well, OK. It's cute, but it's not quite me. I'll think some more.

56% of a hundred foods

I did the Australia-themed 50 Foods before. Here's a broader 100-food test, via archy:

Foods I've eaten in bold. Foods I'd like to try in italics.

1. Venison (deer and elk)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (Nastutiums, roses, artichokes, lavender)
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Privilege Test: 20/34

From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children's books by a parent.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 (swim)
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp (once)
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels (rarely)
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home,
25. You had your own room as a child
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 (But I was 2)
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

Unread books

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. (via)

Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you own and haven't read or started but didn't finish.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

There's an awful lot of Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson on this list. The latter I understand: his work is a lot easier to start than to finish. The former, though, I don't get.

Cult Classics: 14 out of 50

The list is from here, via. Books I've read in bold. Books I started or want to read in italics. Books I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole in strikeout.

1. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
2. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
3. A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
4. Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
5. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
6. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
8. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
9. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
10. The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
11. Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
12. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
13. Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
14. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
15. Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
16. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
17. Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
18. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
19. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
20. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
21. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
22. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
23. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
24. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
35. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
26. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
27. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
28. Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
29. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
30. The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
31. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
32. The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
33. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
34. No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
35. On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
36. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
37. The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
38. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
39. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
40. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
41. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
42. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
43. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
44. Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
45. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
46. The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
47. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
48. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
49. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
50. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Book Meme

I was tagged by Michael over at American Presidents Blog. Oddly, I think this is the first time I've been tagged by this, one of the oldest tag-memes in the blogosphere. The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Looking around, it turns out, coincidentally, that the nearest book is Nathan Miller, Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents (Scribner, 1998), which I had out in honor of HNN's latest Bush-rating poll.

The passage in question is

When the regular Republicans nominated Grant for a second term in 1872, the reformers, unable to stomach him for another four years, broke ranks and chose Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, as the candidate of the Liberal Republican party. Despite Greeley's antislavery record, the Democrats also nominated him with the forlorn hope of avoiding four more years of Grant. A Greeley victory was thought unlikely, but about six weeks before the election the nation was rocked by the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which should have improved his chances.

As a bonus, I've got to attach the two sentences prior to this

"It looks as though the Republican party is going to the dogs," said former senator James W. Grimes of Iowa. "It has become corrupt and I believe that it is today the [most] corrupt and debauched political party that ever existed."

If he only knew.....

I don't tag people, but if anyone happens to read this and look at the 123rd page of the nearest book and finds something worthwhile, by all means post it!

Censored Stories: Have you Heard?

As in the past, I give you the Project Censored and WorldNetDaily lists for most underreported stories of the past year or two. Like last year, I'm going to bold the ones I've heard of.

WorldNetDaily, "10 most underreported stories of 2006," January 3, 2007

1. Plans under way for North American Union:
2. Wave of murders and other crimes by illegal aliens
3. Female teachers sexually preying on their students
4. Mideast terror leaders favor Democrats
5. Manipulated war photos by major news outlets
6. New revelation showing that contrary to his claims, Sandy Berger deliberately hid classified documents
7. Iran leader's apocalyptic end-times vision
8. Two border agents face heavy prison time for injuring a drug smuggler they thought was armed
9. Mega-pastor Rick Warren praising Syria
10. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg snoozing for 15 minutes during oral arguments

ProjectCensored, "Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008,"

# 1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”
# 2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
# 3 AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources
# 4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
# 5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy in Iraq
# 6 Operation FALCON Raids
# 7 Behind Blackwater Inc.
# 8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
# 9 Privatization of America’s Infrastructure
# 10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nations’ Debt Relief
# 11 The Scam of “Reconstruction” in Afghanistan
# 12 Another Massacre in Haiti by UN Troops
# 13 Immigrant Roundups to Gain Cheap Labor for US Corporate Giants
# 14 Impunity for US War Criminals
# 15 Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code”
# 16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11
# 17 Drinking Water Contaminated by Military and Corporations
# 18 Mexico’s Stolen Election
# 19 People’s Movement Challenges Neoliberal Agenda
# 20 Terror Act Against Animal Activists
# 21 US Seeks WTO Immunity for Illegal Farm Payments
# 22 North Invades Mexico
# 23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq
# 24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President
# 25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?

I've heard of seven of the ten WND stories, a strong majority, and about half -- twelve of the twenty-five -- PC stories (six of the top ten, though, which is comparable to the WND list). Most of the WND stories I heard about through mainstream sources, and heard debunked through sources like Orcinus. Most of the PC stories I read through Tom's Dispatch (via HNN) or progressive blogs like Progressive Historians and Sideshow, though a lot of the top ten were reported by mainstream outlets (just not hammered into the ground).

We now return you to your regularly scheduled hiatus.

One Book Meme, but with two books

I'm sorry, but I read way too many books....

One Two book(s) that changed your life?
I can think of several. Interesting, both of these were early grad school experiences.
Yoram Binur's My Enemy, My Self radically altered my Jewish political identity
Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft crystallized my historical professionalism.

One Two book(s) you have read more than once?
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and I've read Richard Adams' Watership Down probably a dozen times.

One Two book(s) you would want on a desert island?
Well aside from a really good survival guide, what I'd really want are some really big multi-volume series.... An English translation of the Talmud and Mishnah, and the Durant History of Civilization. I suppose I'd settle for Abraham Cohen's Everyman's Talmud and the Durant Scientific Revolution volume.

One Two book(s) that made you laugh?
Almost anything Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett or David Lodge wrote. (I don't think of myself as an anglophile...)
Also Ogden Nash's poetry, Michael Bond's Paddington books and A.A. Milne's Pooh stories, but you have to read them aloud.

One Two book(s) that made you cry?
That's a tough one. The first one that comes to mind is the play "Mr. Roberts" -- I went through a serious play-reading stage.
I think I also cried when I read Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories for the first time. More than once.

One Two book(s) you wish you had written?
Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell
In my first year of graduate school, I read a book which was almost exactly the book which I had in my head; it was better than I could have done at that point, better than I could do now.

One Two book(s) you wish someone had written?
A Social History of Banking in Modern Japan
The Impeachment of George W. Bush and Collapse of the Republican Party

One Two book(s) you wish had never been written?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Book of Revelations.

One Two book(s) you are currently reading?
Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

One Two book(s) you have been meaning to read?
Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures
Kyle Ward, History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years

Now tag five people: No. But I will note the bloggers which I read who have done this meme already, many of whom have also declined to tag: Another Damned Medievalist, Terry

How do you read? (an original meme)

In honor of Harry Potter Day, here is a list of twenty metaphors for reading: Bold the ones that best apply to your professional reading; underline the ones that apply to leisure reading; italicize the ones that turn you off

1. Reading is grafting, and the reader connects new text to another text read.
2. Reading is dancing, and the reader follows the lead and steps of the text, including its rhythm, music, lyric, genre, and flow.
3. Reading is sorting, and the reader puts knowledge and experience and dramatic elements of text into categories.
4. Reading is surveying, and the reader examines the territory of the book, its surface, size, structure, scope, distinguishing features, divisions, boundaries, etc.
5. Reading is integrating, and the reader incorporates new knowledge into other knowledge; blending and kneading together.
6. Reading is counting, and the reader is concerned with the number of pages in the text or how many pages are left until they can escape the text (also envision the image of a prisoner marking off days on calendar).
7. Reading is soaking up, and the reader absorbs the text like a sponge.
8. Reading is a vehicle, and the reader travels to another place.
9. Reading is eating, and the reader consumes and is nourished (or poisoned) by the text.
10. Reading is a mirror, and the reader sees reflection in text.
11. Reading is a machine, and the reader feeds the text through a mechanical process.
12. Reading is a transaction, and the reader and text exchange value: the reader receives knowledge and experience, the text receives meaning, and the newly produced response is the receipt or proof of the transaction.
13. Reading is exercise, and the reader gains intellectual agility and strength.
14. Reading is mining, and the reader digs into the text for answers.
15. Reading is a good investment, and the reader’s efforts pay off.
16. Reading is planting, and the reader receives seeds of knowledge that grow into new understanding.
17. Reading is unwrapping, and the reader opens the text to reveal a hidden message.
18. Reading is translating, and the reader moves the meaning from one language to another.
19. Reading is a friend, and the reader enjoys the companionship of the text.
20. Reading is wrestling, and the reader struggles with the text.

Yes, I answered multiply to several of them, especially where leisure and work reading overlap. You can, too. If you don't see metaphors you like here, you can go to the master list of 150 metaphors.

This is my meme, but I don't tag people. Just give me credit where credit is due, please.

Am I as nice as all that?

Mingle² [via]

p.s. I'm going to be doing Open Threads over at Progressive Historians for the next few days.

Thinking Blogger Award

I don't usually covet memes, or awards. But I've been having little qualms of envy watching this one make the rounds: it's exactly why I got into blogging in the first place.

Though the blog isn’t updated as often as I’d like to see, A. consistently shares thoughtful comments with us here, bringing a much needed infusion of logic to my thinking and writing. When A speaks, I listen.

I'm very pleased to accept the designation and the tag: thanks very much, Terry! (Terry definitely deserved her award: she's a great blogger and I definitely find lots to think about over there!)

The rules of the meme are simple.

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).

I thought it would be hard finding good thought-provoking bloggers who hadn't been tagged, but it turned out that there's a lot of folks on my reading list who haven't gotten the credit they deserve yet:

Sepoy at Chapati Mystery -- He is leading us historians into the digital wonderland. Also a kick-ass writer and historian. Reading CM is a continuing education in all things South Asian. I can't believe nobody's tagged him yet!

Brandon Watson at Siris -- Philosophy, theology, original poetry, logic, and, sometimes, other interesting things. Plus an even disposition and civil approach that makes disagreement a pleasure, though it's very difficult to win.

Sara Robinson at Orcinus -- It's Dave Neiwert's blog, originally, but the long-time commenter known as "Mrs. Robinson" joined him as a co-blogger a while back and it's been great. She's a futurist-in-training, a fantastic social analyst.

Ralph Luker at Cliopatria -- Tirelessly feeding our need for history news, trenchant commentary, and mentoring bloggerly connections, not to mention being a fine historian in his own right.

Nonpartisan at Progressive Historians -- Really, the whole collective community there deserves a nod, but Nonpartisan is the founder, the lead blogger, the one who recruits fantastic crossposts from all over the political and historical blogosphere. Also a nice guy, with interesting ideas. I can't wait to see what comes out of his sojourn in grad school, and his commentary just might make this next election cycle tolerable!

I think it's a euphemism for "caffeine overdose"

You'll die from a Heart Attack during Sex.

Your a lover not a fighter but sadly, in the act of making love your heart will stop. But what a way to go.

'How will you die?' at QuizGalaxy.com [via]

Self-Reported Self-Test Results

I Am (apparently):

• Harry Potter Character Remus Lupin (if you extend the character list to more fictional milieux, I actually come out as Harry Potter), a graduate of Ravenclaw. And if you want to know which of Rowling's men I'd fall for first, it's Severus Snape.
• Going to Die at age 63 (in bed) and only going to Heaven if I'm lucky.
• Good at using Latin phrases
• Like some hard-core programmer website and file extension that I've never heard of; I once was .tar and now I'm .inf, but I still never heard of it.
• Orange! However, this blog should be green; it's my power color. If I'm blue, at least I'm royal blue.
• Einstein, or at least pretty smart. I was a geek in school and in school for the long haul. Talent, Lifer? No, Mandarin.
• sensible shoes
• Les Miserables: Within that story, I'm several characters simultaneously
• Tarot Card: Hierophant or Chariot
• Medieval Society: Monk (also my prefered D&D character type)
• Deadly Sin: Sloth
• talking like a Southerner (or is that "sudina"?). Oh, not really
• Movie type: SF&F naturally. If I'm a Johnny Depp character, I am Ed Wood. Insofar as I am classic leading man material, I am Jimmy Stewart, of course. As classic leading ladies, go, I'd be Carole Lombard
• Knowledgeable but not terribly typical American
• QBasic and OS X
• worth 22 points at Scrabble
• well suited to live in Atlanta in spite of my accent
• Agnostic, bordering on humanist (they're exclusive?), though clearly a theist at heart. Because of this, according to the secular humanist quiz, I'm a muddle-headed handholding humanist.
• postmodernist: Theory Slut, or Grassroots Activist, depending on who I'm dating
• Cultural Creative, aka agnostic...
• Chewbacca, and I know what that means. Though, if I must be a Jedi, I am a pillar of the Republic
• a Rationalist and/or Traditionalist personality.
• born in a time of terrible pop music, but my taste in Rock is pretty good
• elegant, withdrawn and brilliant; Creative but slow-burning
• INTP mostly (also ISTP and ENTP, so the first two categories are clearly borderline)
• the Roman Emperor Augustus
• The United Nations, though I was almost Palestine
• Annoying B-list celebrity Anne Robinson, probably.
• a socialist or social democrat, also known as an old school democrat and a Reality-Based Intellectualist. My political philosopher? John Stuart Mill, of course.
• Mythical Beasts: Angel (fiery?) and Wizard (yeah!)
• Astrological Planet: Venus
• Phlegmatic
• An Abhorrent Hideous Insanity-Spurred Townsfolk-Obliterating Redhead-Injuring Creature from the Arcane Labyrinth
• Italian Food and Chocolate Ice Cream, also Caramel Crunch Donuts and Salt.
• The Wolf, personality-wise. Also my Hellenic Nobility Animal
• Superhero: Superman, still. Or maybe Magneto?
  
• Very Good, not evil. Or perhaps neither?
• Kanga and Gonzo
• sort of clean, self revealing, open, organized, outgoing, social, enjoys leadership and managing others, dominant, makes friends easily...traditional, tough, likes to fit in, conforming, brutally honest, takes precautions
• Winter sport: Curling
• 25% blog-owned
• Boston and Irish Coffee. Yum.
• Weather: rain
• A Generous Thinker
• well suited to write science fiction, probably in the style of William Gibson
• 59% Quirky
• A slightly scary Snickers named Hurley
• LSD and Cytosols
• A Dodge Viper on a road trip
• I belong in Dublin, and I'm Anna of Cleves, if I must be a wife of Henry VIII, that is.
• 66% Loser, and a famous movie pirate
• Chess Piece: Black Knight
• Literary Form: textbook
  
• Logical, Classic Rock Veteran, Sniper, or Commando for the French Resistance
• Ethical Relativist or existentialist
• an obsessive-compulsive reader who got a good basic education and is destined for academia. You think? Also, I'm a literary nerd, not one of the other kinds.
• Poetry Form: tanka
• This blog is Rated G but written at a postgraduate college level
• Dr. Seuss book: Oh, the Places You'll Go!
• Lots of Quizzes: Emperor -- Augustus Caesar (again), Civil War Gen. -- George McClellan, Mythological figure -- Orpheus, Nerd -- Kinda Dorky High Nerd, Grammar Geek -- yes, and worth almost 5 grand as a cadaver
• Philosophically: a metaphysical Non-Reductionist, an epistemological Absolutist, and (kind of) a moral Objectivist

I am not:

• Republican
• a visioning/exploring thinker or anything like this
• neo-pagan, though UU and Quaker are conceivable. Reform Jew is more like it.
• a viking
• white trash
• Tigger
• Dwarvish
• an average American
• Milk chocolate
• A Christian Heretic, specifically a Pelagian
• someone who looks like a Matt Groenig character
• A good fit to the Battlestar Galactica milieu
• Teal Green, or Black. But I am stressed.
• An Idiot or a Punk
• a pet person
• a Mai Tai drinker (except on airplanes)
• clear about my gender, on this blog, for good reason.
• a strong supporter of the War on Terrror

Memes:

• Five Things that make me who I am
• My word cloud
• Four Things I've done, worked, had, enjoyed, etc.
• Pseudonymous Academic Blogger questions
• banned books: I scored 19
• A blogchild of Ralph Luker
• Two Things
• Five Senses: Favorite Things
• Sleep Habits
• One Song...
• Obscurity in my collections
• Blogopedia Survey
• LJ Self-Quiz
• Random quotations and six random facts meme
• Alphabetical Meme
• Fifty Foods meme
• Reading Metaphors Meme (original)
• Two Books that... meme
• Book Meme (page 123, etc.)

Noteworthy:

• I was influential in 2006
• Thinking Blogger Award