Meme

Okay, normally I resist this stuff, but I see that big name serious politics bloggers like Ezra Klien aren't above a little memeage, so okay, count me in.

First, my own mother hits me with the Nearest Book Meme.

1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
4. Name of the book and the author
5. Tag three people

I'm cheating and stealing a little work time for that one. Reaching over my desk, I find Colin Ware's amazing book Information Visualization: Perception for Design (2^nd ed).

Often, color selection palettes are laid out in a regular order according to one of the color geometries defined previously. It is useful to provide a facility for the user to develop a perosnal palette. This allows for oconsistency in color style across a number of visualization displays.

Consider yourself tagged if you've always wanted to do this meme, but just haven't had someone hit you with it. I should have at least three readers who qualify.

Second, Cynsimone offers twenty random facts about herself, and demands that I do the same. Twenty is a lot, so those are going behind a cut ...

1. I have a scar on my arm from a bumper cars accident.
2. When I was studying piano as a child, I was discovered to have perfect pitch because I insisted that I could not play an unfamiliar piano because it was out of tune.
3. However, I now cannot play the piano or any other musical instrument.
4. I have a superstition about my birthday, and never plan birthday activities in advance.
5. As a result, I celebrated my 31^st birthday on the roof of an abandoned hospital.
6. At one job, I managed to win a recruiting bounty for hiring both my brother and my best friend.
7. As a child, I wrote a letter to Richard Scarry suggesting an idea for a book he should write. He wrote back telling me that he was retired, so I would have to write the book myself.
8. I once confronted a cult leader in front of a few hundred of his screaming followers, resulting in a few would-be disciples seeking me out immediately afterward.
9. As a result of a summer job wearing a funny costume, there are probably more different photographs of me in the possession of people who don't know me than in the hands of people who do.
10. I once chaperoned teenagers on a tour of Europe.
11. I once ran into a friend from San Francisco, completely at random, on a streetcar in Amsterdam.
12. When I was a college freshman, many people assumed I was a junior or senior because I arrived having already let my hair grow long.
13. I wear a necktie almost every day.
14. I can speak extemporaneously in iambic pentameter.
15. I wrote short stories as a teenager, but gave up on them because I discovered that I just don't have an ear for dialogue.
16. At my first job out of college, I had a microfiche reader on my desk.
17. I don't get seasick.
18. When I mention the poet Edna St. Vincent Millet, I reflexively rap the table twice because my high school English teacher insisted that his class do this because it made her name more metrically correct.
19. My motorcycle is named after Lauren Bacall, and I call her “Betty” after Ms Bacall's real name.
20. I live across the street from my retired father; I say “it's like a sitcom.”

In deference to a tradition with this meme, one and only one of those “facts” is a lie.