Kottke linked earlier this afternoon to a nifty site where they’ve taken some famous movie quotes and represented them pictorially.

Very cool, but the quote that immediately sprang to my mind wasn’t among them, so I decided to get in on the fun and create it here.

OK, I know I’ve been tagged on this one multiple times. Let’s see.

What does your music library say about you?
————————–
1. Put Your iTunes/MP3 on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name.
5. Tag at least 10 friends
————————–

[Note: I reserve the right to skip classical music, christmas music, and sermons.]

What do your friends think of you?
“Oh No” – Hem [hehehehe]

If someone says, “Is this okay?” You say?
“Dream Awake” – The Frames

How would you describe yourself?
“Beautiful Sorta” – Ryan Adams & the Cardinals [I swear I'm not gaming the system.]

What do you like in a guy/girl?
“Give Me Some Room” – Michael O’Brien [meh]

How do you feel today?
“Scared” – Waterdeep [HA!]

What is your life’s purpose?
“Cheers Darlin’” – Damien Rice

What is your motto?
“Things Have Changed” – Bob Dylan [niiiiiice.]

What do you think about very often?
“Happy” – The Frames

What do you think of your best friend?
“Real Good Thing” – Newsboys [Again, I swear I'm not gaming the system. AWESOME.]

What do you think of the person you like?
“Night Must End” – Sleeping at Last

What is your life story?
“Yawny at the Apocalypse” – Andrew Bird [ROFL]

What do you want to be when you grow up?
“Valerie” – The Zutons [????]

What do you think of when you see the person you like/love?
“The Grace of God” – PFR [Aw yeah.]

What will you dance to at your wedding?
“Once” – Harry Connick, Jr. [Good song.]

What will they play at your funeral?
“Your Own Private Love” – Harry Connick, Jr.

What is your hobby/interest?
“I’ve Just Seen A Face” – The Beatles

What is your biggest fear?
“Always Returning” – Brian Eno

What is your biggest secret?
“Light In Your Eyes” – Sheryl Crow [or maybe people finding out I have Sheryl Crow in my music library]

What do you think of your friends?
“Mothers of the Disappeared” – U2 [um, OK?]

What will you post this as?
“I Still Miss Someone” – covered by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash

If you’re looking for a little bit of amusement you could do worse than checking out YearbookYourself.com. It is pretty much what it sounds like it is – you upload a picture of yourself and it gives you some idea of what your highschool yearbook photos might have looked like any year from the 1950’s through the 1990’s. I had a little bit of fun this afternoon.

For reference, here’s the picture I gave it to work with:

Here’s my 1962 yearbook photo. My face is a little oversized in this one, it didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped.

Here’s 1968.

Here’s 1970. This is definitely my favorite.

Most of the rest of the 70’s didn’t work out too well because of the hair it tried to put on me. So, we fast-forward to 1984. Now, this hair isn’t that great, either.

By the time we get to 1988, it starts to get to something almost believable…

And then here’s 1994. I started my senior year of high school in 1994. The scary part: I had one of those cardigans, and I loved it.

Being the voracious reader that I am, I was happy to steal this from Kari and Roger. The story is that apparently the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that the average adult has only read six of these books. Here are the markup guidelines:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Mark in red the books you LOVE. – I’m skipping this step.
4) Reprint this list in your blog

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – This sure seems like a duplicate to me!
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – I’ve started this one three times and can never seem to finish it.
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – Started it, but just can’t get in to Rushdie’s writing style.
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So, looks like I’ve read 28 off the list, which barely puts me ahead of Roger, but finds me far, far, behind librarian Kari’s 50. I do enjoy this, though, because it gives me a list to work from. Now if our library could ever get their online catalog back online after the flood, I could start reserving some of these.

Well, I haven’t done a meme in a while, and Jeff tagged me for this one, so I’ll give it a go.

The rules of the “game” are simple:
1. list your top ten favorite films (in no particular order).
2. if you’re tagged, you’ve got to post and tag 3-5 other people.
3. give a tag back (some link love) to the one who tagged you in your post
4. give a hat tip (HT) to Dan (I have no idea who Dan is, but hey, there ya go).

This is gonna be a challenge for me, because I haven’t watched that many movies lately, and really, how do you go about choosing favorites? Simply by number of times watched? At least you’ll get 10 from me here that I really like. Maybe not the 10 greatest movies I’ve ever seen, but 10 that I’d be happy to sit down and watch again semi-regularly or would recommend to a friend. Oh, and off the top, I’m not gonna say Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, because they’re almost prerequisites for this kind of list, and it seems boring. So, in no particular order…

1. The Princess Bride
An oldie but goodie. Yes, I can quote far too much of it. But to leave it off the list would be, well, inconceivable. And how can you dislike a movie with Andre the Giant?

2. Lost in Translation
Bill Murray. So good. Scarlett Johannson. Amazing. Slow, light on plot, heavy on atmosphere. I loved it.

3. That Thing You Do
So I’m a sucker for a movie about musicians who briefly make the bigtime. Tom Hanks is such a fantastic character in this movie, and yeah, if I’m one of the guys in the film, hands down, I’m the drummer.

4. Fiddler on the Roof
I really need to include a musical on here somewhere, and Fiddler is a great musical. It’s been far too long since I’ve watched this one. But Topol captures Tevye so well, and the songs are classics.

5. Once
OK, so I’m gonna include a second musical on here, and it’s gonna be a film that I’ve only seen, well, once. Low-budget, first-time actors, but the story feels real in a way that very few films seem to manage. I need to buy this one.

6. Apollo 13
Jeff mentioned this one in his list, but I’m gonna include it here, too. Sure, Tom Hanks is great in the starring role, but Ed Harris is the guy that makes the movie for me. And how can I not love a movie where the true heroes are nerdy engineers? Can you build a CO2 scrubber from this random assortment of parts?

7. Heat
Michael Mann at his best, and Pacino and DeNiro to boot. A big crime drama, spread across Southern California, with the atmosphere and expanse that Mann seems to do so well. Oh, and did I mention Pacino and DeNiro?

8. The Matrix
Can we just forget that this is supposedly the beginning of a movie trilogy? This movie works so well by itself – the cyberpunk genre, the stop-action camera work, the ridiculous action scenes… so much fun.

9. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Too many of the old song-and-dance movies were very weakly plotted, with just enough plot to string things together between musical numbers. Mitty isn’t one of those. Yes, it provides ample opportunity for Danny Kaye to mug for the camera, do some hilarious song-and-dance routines (how can you not love Anatole of Paris?), and generally cut up, but they actually belong as part of the plot. Lots of fun.

10. L.A. Confidential
It was harder than I thought coming up with a tenth film, but this one deserves a spot here. A gritty film noir filled with all the elements you could want – dirty cops, femme fatales, Hollywoord in its heyday. Add in Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and James Cromwell, and you’ve got a great film.

Now, then, who to tag? Rae. CanaDan. Bridget.

Having been tagged by Jeff for the latest interweb meme to filter around to these parts, I suppose I should play along.

The Rules:
(1) Link to the person that tagged you.
(2) Post the rules on your blog.
(3) Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
(4) Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
(5) Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

So, the six non-important things/habits/quirks about me:

1) The Soundtrack in my Head
Other people talk about having an internal dialog going all the time – I have an internal soundtrack. If I hear some word or phrase or phrasing that trips a memory in my brain, I’m likely to start singing the line from the song. (This drives my wife nuts.)

2) I have a propensity for spoofing song lyrics.
Think Weird Al, just less talented, and without the accordion. The fun part is to try to do it on the fly in real time. Sometimes it works. Most of the time I just end up breaking out in hysterical laughter after about five lines.

3) I hate hate HATE asking people for things.
Don’t know how this one got started, but I would rather put myself out than ask someone for something, even something that I know they’d gladly be willing to do/give. This maybe doesn’t belong on this list because it verges toward the important – this can be a real flaw at times that I need to work to correct.

4) I see chord structures.
I don’t know of a better way to describe it. If I hear a song, I’m working through parsing the chord structure in my head. Usually I assume what key the song is in, and then work it out from there, but if I find out it’s actually in a different key, I can easily make the switch. I feel it in some combination of what the chord feels like when played on the piano and when played on the guitar. I will drive myself nuts sometimes if I don’t get a song figured out right away. I remember sitting in the parking lot at a Subway waiting for Becky to get a sandwich and trying to work out Simon & Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson. I was so proud when I finally got it.

5) I go to the same restaurants and order the same things every single time.
I hate trying new places. Once I find a place and a dish that I like, I will order the same thing every time. This goes so far as to extend to business trips; last fall I traveled to Oklahoma City for two days and once I found a movie theater and restaurant nearby that I liked, I hit them both two nights in a row…. it’s just easier than having to try something new.

6) I have a huge memory for music and lyrics… but my repertoire is limited.
Yeah, if I were on that Don’t Forget The Lyrics show I would fail miserably… unless they limited themselves to CCM from the 1990’s and indie-Christian-folk-rock from the 2000’s. I somehow missed all of the other stuff growing up and have been trying to fill in holes as I go along. You know, in some areas I didn’t miss much at all, but I wish I would’ve found U2 a lot earlier on.

Now, then… who to tag?

Rae Whitlock
Daniel D
Bridget
Roger
TK
Nate

Fun, fun.

http://andys.org.uk/countryquiz/

I got 71 of the 192, and would’ve gotten a couple more had I figured out the correct spelling.

HT: Richard

Yeah, 4 words, huh Geof? Hey, I haven’t done a meme in a while. Nice to be thought of, too. Anyhow… here goes.

• Penalty. Nobody likes penalties. But they make me think of football. My local Hawkeyes are 3-0 so far and are looking forward to a prime-time matchup with Ohio State next week.
• Vacation. I just got back from a vacation, but it still never seems like it is enough. I’m taking a day of vacation next weekend to go to the Desiring God conference in Minneapolis. Woohoo!
• Competition. I’m only competitive to a point. Yeah, I like to play to win, but I’m usually the one saying hey, give ‘em the benefit of the doubt on the close play, rather than making a big stink about it. Now my brother Andrew, there’s competitiveness for you.
• Spelunking. Oh, sure, Geof. Spelunking?!? Back in high school we went with the youth group one time to a place down in central Texas whose name escapes me. There was a big rock to climb, and we did some rappelling, and then a little sorta quasi-spelunking, though I don’t think the bit of crawling we did underground really counts as such.

Now to perpetuate this Friday-afternoon meme to four others…

1. Dan. He should have something interesting to say.
2. Roger. If he ever comes back to blogging…
3. Dana. She blogs all the time, but I don’t know if she’ll see this…
4. Rae. Have fun, buddy. See you next week!

And the words:

1. Passport
2. Auditorium
3. Odor
4. Enthusiasm

I need to get to the northeast and the west, I guess…

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

[HT: Stephanie]

I need to get to the northeast and the west, I guess…

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

[HT: Stephanie]