It seems the knower has become... the knowee.

My Secret Hospital teammate Michael Hartney has "tagged" me on his blog, which apparently means I have to post eight random things about myself. I'm not sure that any of you who know me don't already know these things about me, or that those of you don't know me would care, but I guess that's the point of a blog, right? I talk about myself and assume someone out there is listening. Whoever you are, prepare to have your world rocked.

1. I speak Esperanto.
Really. I picked up a book on it when I was in Japan. It was something I'd been curious about since I first heard read about it, and having spent some time trying to learn Japanese, I was attracted to the idea of a(n almost) perfectly regular language. And it is easy to learn: check it out yourself.

What's more embarrassing—even more embarrassing than the fact that I can't spell the word embarrassing—is that I've recently picked it up again, after having lent the book to my friend Stan. "I'll just brush up, in case he wants to practice speaking with someone," I told myself, probably out loud. And now I'm studying it again. For the record, I have spent some time trying to learn the following languages (in order of how much time I spent studying them, from most to least): French (which I speak assez bien), Japanese, Esperanto, American Sign Language, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Ancient Greek, German and Indonesian.

2. I don't have any wisdom teeth, and never will.
My dentist always thought that was cool, and I agree. Something like 95% of adults have at least one wisdom tooth... or did before they were rudely ripped from their mangled gums. I am very thankful to be in the wisdom-deprived 5%.

"I guess that means you're not wise," the wiseasses quip. "Or I'm more highly evolved," I retort. Turns out the wiseasses may be right, according to Wikipedia:

In dentistry, hypodontia is the condition of naturally having fewer than the regular number of teeth. In Caucasians, the most commonly missing teeth are the wisdom teeth (25-35%), the upper lateral incisors (2%) or the lower second premolars (3%) The congenital absence of all teeth is called anodontia. Hypodontia is often familial, or associated with ectodermal dysplasia or Down syndrome.

3. I wrote the tagline to the film Erin Brockovich.
I've written lots of taglines for movies and TV shows, but that's one of the more memorable examples. "She brought a small town to its feet... and a huge company to its knees." More recently, Cinderella Man used a very similar tagline for its poster.

Some of my co-workers at the time complained that it reminded them too much of oral sex, I guess because of that famous incident where a woman forced a utility company to give her head.

4. I am related to President William Howard Taft.
...supposedly. My grandmother's maiden name was Taft, and is supposed to have been related to the Ohio Tafts who gave us the fattest president in US history.

I feel sorry for the guy. He wasn't a very good president, apparently, but he never really wanted to be president in the first place. He wanted to be on the Supreme Court, and only after leaving behind the White House and its impossibly small bathtub did he finally get his wish.

5. I was on Jeopardy! and Project Greenlight.
Lost both. (My screenplay Skeletons was in the top 50 screenplays for the latter.)

Ashley Ward, who is also on Secret Hospital with me, was on Jeopardy! too. She won.

6. I've always wanted to be in a band.
I'm sort of the same way with musical instruments as I am with languages... I fiddle with learning lots of them in a half-assed way. I started out playing clarinet, which led to bass clarinet and sax. Then, in college, I had the good sense to learn guitar, which is much better for getting girls than a saxophone, no matter what Lane Myers* thinks. In my room now, I have two guitars, a mandolin and a flute someone was getting rid of. I always dreamed of being that guy in the band who plays everything, like Brian Jones (without the dying), or one of the guys from Camper Van Beethoven.

Also, I've always wanted to name a band Midwife Crisis.

7. My grandparents had a cottage on Lake George in the Adirondacks, and as a kid I went there every summer.
I sometimes focus on the bad or weird parts of my childhood, but man, was I lucky to have had this place. Everything about it is so vivid in my memory. The smell of coffee in the morning, Grandma and Grandpa at the table doing the Jumble. Spending days swimming, waterskiing, jumping off the upper deck when we were old enough, canoeing to a nearby island for a picnic. Showering up for cocktail hour, playing pitch and munching on peanuts (my cousins and my sister and I brandishing our sophisticated Shirley Temples). Buying comic books at the tiny market, gray days playing miniature golf, Freihofer's chocolate chip cookies, Borg vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon on the TV....

I think if I had three wishes, one would be that for one week a summer, I could take whomever I wanted back to Lake George, and everything would be exactly the same.

Except that I could drink real cocktails.

8. I don't have any tattoos, but I often think about what tattoo I would choose.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against them per se. I've gotten as close as going into a parlor and leafing through the books. The two things that stop me are that I have no idea what I would want on me forever, and that I'm not all lean and muscled. And also that my entire body is covered in freckles and moles. What if I got a mermaid and a big mole appeared in the middle of her face? People would be all, "Why did you you get a tattoo of a mermaid with cancer?"

I think, if I had to get a tattoo now, it would be of Drinky Crow. I love love love Tony Millionaire's comic strip Maakies, and Drinky is one of those characters you just want to draw again and again in your notebook during a boring lecture. And, for some reason, I find pathetic alcoholics really funny. Sorry, pathetic alcoholics.

I had a neat idea recently. I was looking at my back and thinking how there are way too many freckles for me to get a tattoo. It's like a starry sky at night. Then I imagined Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby at the bottom of my back, looking up at the stars. Or Uncle Gabby would be looking at the stars, anyway. Drinky would be drinking. Or holding a gun to his head. And no, that would not count as a "tramp stamp."


I'm done! Those are my eight random facts. Now I have to tag eight people with blogs, which for me is hard. (Do I even know enough people with blogs?) I tag Sarah, Rob, Annie, Michele, Glennis, Erika, Jen, and, what the heck... Jonathan Coulton. I predict a 12.5% rate of return.

*John Cusack's character from Better Off Dead. And anyway, you can totally tell that a) his fingers are not in the right position for him to be playing that saxophone, and b) you're really hearing a synthesizer on the "sax" setting.

Of Sinecures and The Bangles

Wow. I have really been slacking when it comes to writing this blog (which actually means either that I have been slacking less, or that I have found other ways to waste time, such as solving the 5 x 5 "Professor's" Rubik's Cube several times a day.)

I've decided that I need to write shorter, more frequent entries to this blog—not everything has to be a complicated mystery that needs to be solved. It could just be the dozens of things I look up on any given day.

For example, today I have looked up that a sinecure is, according to Webster's, "an office or position that requires little or no work and that usually provides an income." (Something I could use right now, incidentally.) It comes from from the medieval Latin sine cura, or "without cure of souls," apparently referring to ecclesiastical offices, the officeholders of which do not have the ability to, er, cure souls.

Also, my girlfriend was right: The Bangles did not write most of their big hits. (I've recently been enjoying two of their earlier songs, which appear on the Children of Nuggets compilation...one performed as The Bangles and one as The Bangs.) I knew "Manic Monday" was written by Prince (under the pseudonym "Christopher"), and that "Hazy Shade of Winter" was a Simon & Garfunkel song. I was willing to hope, though, that they'd written some of the other big ones. Turns out...no.

"Walk Like an Egyptian" was written by Liam Sternberg, a veteran of the Akron, Ohio "scene" which gave us Devo and The Waitresses. He offered the song to Toni Basil, but she turned it down. (This, in turn, led me to look up something I've been wondering since high school. Yes, it was the same Toni Basil responsible for "Mickey" who choreographed David Byrne in the "Once in a Lifetime" video.)

"Eternal Flame" and "In Your Room"? Written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, two songwriters I'm just hearing about now. These hit machines also wrote Madonna's "Like a Virgin," Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors," Whitney Houston's "So Emotional," The DiVinyls' "I Touch Myself" and Heart's "Alone," and co-wrote The Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" with Chrissie Hynde.

Even earlier, pre–Top 40 singles were written by others: "Hero Takes a Fall" was a cover of a 1966 single by The Grass Roots, and "Going Down to Liverpool" was a cover of a Katrina and the Waves song. (I was horrified to learn that Kimberley Rew, who wrote "Liverpool" and the execrable "Walking On Sunshine" was the guitarist for my beloved Soft Boys. Hate? Meet Adoration.)

They did write many of the songs on their albums, though. If I'm not mistaken, the highest charting song that the band actually wrote was "Walking Down Your Street," which hit #11. And you know what? I still kind of like them. "Eternal Flame" is one of the best karaoke songs around, and "Walk Like An Egyptian" holds a special place in my heart because my friend Mike's dad, an ex-cop, couldn't wait for the DJ to play it at Mike's wedding so he could bust a hieroglyphic move. Also, I'm still kind of in love with Susanna Hoffs.

I actually came back to this blog because I got "tagged" in one of those "tell us about yourself and pass it around" Internet memes. I'll do that in the next entry... coming soon, I hope!