April 16, 2005

Get With The Program

We have been tagged by Rook's Rant to shuck and jive to these questions five:

Question One: If you were stuck in the world of Fahrenheit 451, which book would you would you want to memorize and preserve?

It's always tough to get it down to one essential book. We are going to pick Illusions by Richard Bach. It's pretty short (and thus should be easy to retain) and seems to generate quite a bit of pondering about life, the universe, and everything in our melon as well as some others whose opinions we respect.

Question Two: Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

While we have quite a bit of admiration for a number of fictional characters, we wouldn't consider them to be at the level of "crush". Most of the Heinlein women seem quite appealing to our imagination. Ditto a lot of the X-Babes - Psylocke might not have been at the top of your list, but considering her fictional experiences, we're amazed that she was as functional as she was (before being killed off by those heartless bastiches over at Marvel). You could rest assured of some interesting experiences if you hooked up with the Bond girls. And we are firmly convinced that the Vestal Virgins from Mel Brooks' History of the World could provide ample opportunities for social, political and geometrical possibilities beyond our wildest dreams.

Question Three: What is the last book you bought?

We are very happy to say that we just bought America the Book. Hopefully we'll get to it sometime this year...

Question Four: What book(s) are you currently reading?

We are currently reading Do It Anyway:The Handbook for Finding Personal Meaning and Deep Happiness in a Crazy World by Keith M. Kent and Beer Blast: The Inside Story of the Brewing Industry's Bizarre Battles For Your Money by (no, I'm not making this up!) Philip Van Munching.

Question Five: What five books would you want to be among what was left of your belongings if you were stranded with nothing but them to read on a desert island?

We probably wouldn't be reading a heck of a lot in that sort of situation right away. Plus, there is an underlying assumption that said books would be able to be kept in a readable condition for as long as you were stranded - which would be tough to do in a presumably humid and wet environment. But, for the sake of argument, let's make those assumptions. The five crucial tomes:

The Silmarillion by the Tolkiens;

The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A Heinlein;

The Callahan Chronicals by Spider Robinson;

The Stand by Stephen King;

and

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams.

Please note the lack of short works as well as the lack of connection to any sort of recognizable reality in the list above. We probably should bring along some sort of encyclopedia and/or some reference manuals so that we could build almost anything (except a way to get home) like they did on Gilligan's Island.

Also please note that we couldn't avoid cheating somewhat by having most of our books be collections of stories by the author. That's the way we buys them now, and we see lots and lots who go for the compleat Shakespeare in their lists, so we figure it's okay to use them in our list. If there was a compleat Asimov, it would have been on the list. If there was a single volume that contained all six books in the Foundation series, it would have gone on the list. We also had an extremely difficult time with the Heinlein; we think that Stranger In A Strange Land, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, The Number of the Beast, and Time Enough For Love merit consideration as well, but The Past Through Tomorrow is the only Heinlein set of novels that is available behind one cover. And the Guide is absolutely essential - all five novels in the Hitch Hiker trilogy plus a bonus Zaphod story which even now could have will be removed from reality unless you donate to the Campaign For Real Time at some point in the near future (we think).

Now, who to pass this off to? We'll have to do some digging and find the ones that haven't already played this game; we've definitely seen it on some of our favorite sites in the last little while.

We've chosen to tag uggabugga, Tina's Shark Tank, and Yar's Revenge. We wish someone would explain to us how we could use this link to find out who has and who hasn't accepted this particular challenge (other than scrolling through all of the recent contestants), and welcome all attempts to enlighten us in the comments to this post that do not involve party poker, erotic miscellany of any kind, or military (or Unitarian Jihad for that matter) recruitment strategeries.

Posted by (: Tom :) at April 16, 2005 03:51 AM