Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Seven Somethings, Thanks Anthony

Anthony Venutolo recently handed me this little award.



The rules of the game are to provide seven outrageous facts about yourself. Six are to be lies and one is to be true, or alternatively six are true and one is a lie. I leave it up to you, constant readers, to guess whether most of these are truth or fiction, and guess which is the one that's not like the others. Is only one true, or false?

1. At age nine I turned down the opportunity to co-author a book about dinosaurs with a published author because I was, in my words, “busy working on other projects.”

2. I once took Dante’s Inferno out into the middle of a soccer field during a thunderstorm to see how it would read there.

3. I took a Jane Austen intensive at college because I thought it would be nice to get some of my reading done in the bathtub. Confessing this was probably the first, but far from the last reason that professor hated me.

4. Assigned to recite ten lines of Chaucer and completely unable to cognize Middle English pronunciation, I re-wrote a passage from The Miller’s Tale phonetically and practiced it over fifty times. I wound up doing the entire page, my accent swinging from New Jersey to Latin. I received an ovation.

5. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene convinced me that there was a God (at least one).

6. I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground while bedridden and alone on Easter weekend. I was alternately unimpressed and bemused, and have since felt its influence on literature is because too many healthy people read.

7. The last movie I cried at was Rambo: First Blood Part 2.

Any guesses? Leave them in the Comments section.

Any questions? Why not send them to my RAQ?


Now this award is also supposed to be forwarded on. I'll take a cue from Anthony and distribute it to just three twisted folk.


1. T.S. Bazelli springs to mind. She's been charting what constitutes weird fiction in her blog glossary, from Cyberpunk to Dark Fantasy to Urban Fiction. She's just started a Genre serial, so you can get on at the ground floor.

2. G.P. Ching won this award largely because her name is the most fun to say of any in the modern world. G.P. Ching. G.P. Ching. Say it fast enough and it sounds like you turned "Jeep" into a verb. She also won it because she's got a delightful take on the weird, like god parties and meeting your alien soul mate in the produce aisle.

3. Last is one of my favorite recent discoveries in #fridayflash. Rachel Blackbirdsong meditates on the macabre in ways that don't tick me off. That's hard these days.

15 comments:

  1. Good choices John! I'll have to check Rachel out. :)

    I guess your only lie is that you cried at Rambo. C'mon, Rambo? lol

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  2. Congrats on the award!
    I think #6 is true.

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  3. I'm guessing #2 or maybe #7. Is either true or false.

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  4. Thank you John! This means a lot because it comes from you.

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  5. Thanks John! I think #6 is true about you. Now off to write some lies...

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  6. I'm guessing number 7 is false. Are you going to reveal whose guesses are right sometime?

    Congrats on the award, and thank you for passing it on :)

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  7. I'd say #7 isn't true, unless you hated it that much. :-)

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  8. Checking in from the road. I'll certainly tell you who guesses correctly - once someone does!

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  9. I don't care if they're true, or not. They're funny.

    Actually, number five is clearly wrong. Nothing Richard Dawkins writes would convince a sane man of anything; except perhaps the nature of Richard Dawkins.

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  10. I know 4 is true. As for the others, most seem plausible.

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  11. Lillie is cheating by virtue of having actually been there for one of these. The others may still not be true, or most of them may be true.

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  12. John Wiswell, I think they are all true except number three, I can't imagine you reading Jane Austen in the bathtub.

    You are so funny, John. I dare say your logic is as odd as mine.

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  13. Jodi caught me. All of them are true except #3 - I read Virginia Woolf in the bathtub, not Austen.

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  14. 2. I once took Dante’s Inferno out into the middle of a soccer field during a thunderstorm to see how it would read there.


    Made me laugh out loud. I love that imagery. Lighting, thunder, torrential rain and a skinny kid engrossed in a book, tarp draped over his back, glasses steamed up, flashlight illuminating the page....

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  15. That one's true, Karen, except it was a fat kid with a t-shirt and no glasses, not caring that he was pelted by rain, comparing Dante's tornado-stricken lovers to the local weather patterns.

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