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John went and tagged me with the silly-yet-clever 4 things meme. I learned some things I didn’t know about him from his, we’ll see how well he knows his boss…

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Retail Store Designer (VideoWatch, now Hollywood Video)
2. Do-naut, John’s Space Age Donut Shop
3. Puppeteer, Kansas City Toy and Miniature Museum
4. Bubble Expert, Kay-Bee Toys

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Baron Munchausen
2. Spirited Away
3. The Muppet Movie
4. Hudsucker Proxy

(the only) Three places I’ve lived:

1. Indianapolis, Indiana
2. Leawood, Kansas
3. Ann Arbor, Michigan

Four TV shows I love:

1. Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends
2. Fairly Oddparents
3. Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law
4. Daily Show

Four places I’ve vacationed:

1. Disney World
2. Alaska
3. Amelia Island, Florida
4. Chicagoland

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Eggs Benedict (or Deep Fried French Toast) at Angelo’s
2. Vermicelli with Beef and Spring Rolls (#15 at Dalat)
3. New York-style Pepperoni Pizza (NYPD!)
4. A Northside (the Northside Grill’s signature breakfast sandwich)

Four sites I visit daily:

1. metafilter
2. boingboing
3. kotaku
4. axis.aadl.org

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Kosmo (closed for remodeling!)
2. Northside (closes at 3)
3. Angelo’s (closes at 3)
4. Cafe Marie (closes at 2)

Man, I didn’t realize I was so obsessed with Breakfast.

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. Clam Chowder
2. Hidden Peanuts
3. Notational Slurry
4. matth

One thing remarkable about this very webby 2.0-ish exercise is something that is missing, something you would expect to find in lists of people’s favorite things… most versions of this meme do not include 4 favorite books! As someone pretending to be german used to say, very interesting. However, that will never do, especially as this meme winds its way through the library world, so, let’s put it back in this strain.

Four books (or series) I love:

1. Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket
2. The Galactic Milieu Saga, Julian May
3. The Culture Novels, Ian M. Banks
4. Anything by Vernor Vinge

Four Videogames I can (and do) play over and over again:

1. Mario Kart (Doubledash or DS)
2. Pikmin (1 or 2)
3. Dance Dance Revolution (Max2 or higher)
4. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Off you go, silly little meme. Write when you infect a brain!

8 comments

A challenge facing Library 2.0 is how to adequately explain the types of breakthroughs it might bring us all; but now that we have what some might call Web 2.0’s first killer app in the best blonde joke ever, we have a shining example of Web (and Library) 2.0’s potential, with which to illustrate the breadth of possibilities.

For some reason, the joke reminds me of this absurd, inexplicable Sega CD title called PANIC, perhaps because Nemo and I have been playing it lately. You play as a generic, but undeniably japanese little boy in pink overalls who gets sucked into the global computer network when a virus infects the ‘Computer Network Server’ that controls all the electrical or mechanical devices on earth. You have to find your way through hundreds of rooms, each with several unmarked buttons, to the Computer Network Server (which, you discover, looks like Siddhartha) to deliver a program, called PANIC, that will wipe the virus out worldwide, stopping the malfunctions such as elevators that drop Easter Island heads on waiting passengers, speedometers that vomit, and monuments that blow up spectacularly around the world if you push the wrong (right?) button.

I got PANIC after renting it 3 times in 1995, just as I was was starting to poke around the web on some NeXTs we had at the architecture school. And thus, I was, by sheer luck, in the right place at the right time to create the first ever home page of the Michigan Marching Band Tuba Section. Because we were playing so much PANIC at the tuba house, one of the features of that page was a PANIC-style control panel of 16 buttons with colored ascii symbols on them which took you to some of what passed for weird websites in 1995, although I ran out of weird sites and used a very early uroulette for four of them.

The pure brilliance of the best blonde joke ever honestly makes me think about the web as I haven’t thunk since those heady days when I was first discovering it, when it seemed so much like PANIC, with its interconnected and crosslinked rooms and unpredictable buttons; the web was so deep and recursive. Until recently, the web had begun to seem so familiar, incapable of surprising even with extreme content, which is now totally expected. It’s nice to be surprised again, to have a sense of wonder and disorientation, so different than the numbing comfort of daily browsing.

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