I’ve been tagged by Robin to do that seven songs meme. The destructions read:

“List seven songs you’re into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring.”

Robin’s linked to YouTube renditions of most of the songs he likes which is a splendid idea and I’m doing the same as it just so happens that I can find all but one of the songs I’m currently into on their. Well, okay, all but two so I’ve dropped one (it was an 8th choice). Oh, and there’s a remix version of a song in there too but hey, you get to listen to my taste in, well, industrial noise and learn a bit more about me. As if you needed to.
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So have you seen the video for Weezer’s single “Pork and Beans?” You haven’t? Well it’s all over YouTube which is quite appropriate really seeing as how it features references (and the stars of) some of the most “famous” internet and YouTube celebs. We’re talking the Numa Numa kid, the Star Wars kid, Miss South Carolina, Afro Ninja, “All Your Base…” and loads more. 24 of them in fact. You can watch the video after the jump:
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I’ve been meme-bombed by Jon and Elinor to tell you 5 (five) things about me that I’m proud of but that others would consider lame. I’ve been struggling over this because I don’t know how to answer it. I’m most definitely not proud of a lot of the lame things I’ve done and most of the other stuff I’ve either blogged about already (which is no reason not to again) and I’ve no idea whether it would be percieved as lame anyway. Apart from anything, I find that if I hang around with people who think lame things are cool, I never do anything which is lame. Anyway, here it is:
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It will eventually be review day here at Tabula Rasa as I’ve been saving up some film (and book) reviews for your limited pleasure. In the meantime, via Annie, here’s a meme:

Go to Wikipedia. Type in your birth date (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post this in your journal.

So, 15th February:

Events
399BC - The philosopher Socrates is sentenced to death. (No idea how they know the date for this but anyway.)
1906 - The British Labour Party is organized.
1971 - Decimalisation of British coinage is completed.

Births
1564 - Galileo Galilei
1954 - Matt Groening

Deaths
1965 - Nat King Cole

And it’s also Flag Day in Canada.

Don’t you feel enlightened now?

Because I haven’t written owt today and because I’ve got very little that’s better to do, I’m doing a meme that Gordon and QE have done. I may have done it before. I don’t care. Feel free to do the usual blah and leave a comment when you have.

Read on if you want to know a little more about me.

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Via Matt and Annie comes a meme I can identify with. Except that each time someone asks me about this sort of thing, I can never provide a full list as I keep changing my mind and then later remember something that I really enjoyed but didn’t think of at the time.

Simply it’s list your top ten favourite films. This is meant to be distinct from your list of top ten best films. Cultural Snow’s Tim even goes so far as to say that the second list “MUST NOT INCLUDE ANY TITLE ON YOUR ‘10 BEST’ LIST”. This to me means that this can’t be my top ten because my top ten best films also has some films which are in my top ten favourite films. Regardless, here is a list of ten films I like a lot.
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A meme that I picked up from Matthew has got me thinking. Do I have five weird habits I can talk about? For that matter, do I have any weird habits?

I don’t think I do. In fact, I can’t think of much that I do that is habitual (apart from consume alcohol). I have some odd quirks - for example, I have difficulty with left and right. This is more a routing problem in my brain as I know which way left and right are and I have a pretty good sense of direction and rarely get lost. But if I’m directing someone in a car, I’ll point left and say “Go right” and conversely, I’ll point right and say “Go left.” My wife now understands that she should always go the way I’m pointing because it’s only the verbal direction I give that is wrong.

I have a similar problem when laying a table. I can’t seem to ever get the knife and fork the right way around. This isn’t because I was never taught it - I grew up in a restaurant and have been laying tables for over twenty years. But as much as I know the right way to eat, I tend to place the knife and fork the wrong way around when laying a table and I won’t ever notice.

When I started my degree I was doing a joint honours degree with Psychology. I remember one of the experiments we did was a cognitive test on “mental rotation”. The idea was that you were shown a series of pictures of a capital letter R that would be at different offset angles from upright. You had to press one of two buttons to say whether that R was a mirror image or not. The experiment is meant to show (and does) that the further away from upright the R is, the longer it will take to tell which way it is facing. A side result of this experiment shows that it takes longer for someone to tell a mirror image R from a normal facing R.

Not in my case.

I remember my lecturer being intrigued that I was the first person in fifteen years of him doing this experiment who could tell a mirror image R faster than a normal facing R. And I’m not russian. I have no idea whether or not this is related to my inability to correctly articulate left and right. But this isn’t a weird habit, it’s just something about me.

A habit I do have is only buying black socks. It’s a convenience thing. It’s rare that anyone will ever see your socks and I hate trying to pair them so it made it easier to buy only black socks so I don’t have to try to match them at all.

Other than that, I don’t like sitting in a room with an open door. This isn’t a hundred per cent but invariably if I’m sitting in my lounge, I have to make sure that the door nearest to me is shut. Perhaps it’s an acoustic thing or a privacy thing but it’s something I have to do.

I honestly can’t think of any other habits I have, weird or otherwise. How about you?

Via D4D and BSAG, I bring you snapshots of my life over the last 10 years.

10 Years Ago…
I’d just graduated with a Desmond in Philosophy from Leeds and just started working in a temporary job doing data collecting for Yorkshire Water. This was in the exceptionally hot summer of 1995 when Yorkshire Water was the Big Bad for it’s mismanagement of repairing leaks, standpipes, hosepipe bans and suchlike. However, it was ace - all I had to do was drive around the Yorkshire countryside and sit around in the sun collecting data. Halcyon days! Also about the time I met my Big J. who ended up being my best man, and I his. Ironically, we met because I started dating his ex-girlfriend - although he had been uninformed at the time that she was his ex-girlfriend and he decided that he wasn’t going to like me. The second time we met, he said “I tried to not like you but I couldn’t. You’re a top bloke, let’s have a drink.” It was the beginning of a beautiful thing.

5 Years Ago…
I’d just started seeing the woman who would eventually become my wife. I’d been diving in Egypt (very much like this year and just happened to be five years to the day after I’d last been there) and a mutual friend had stealthily convinced us to get together. So we went for dinner. And then we started seeing each other. And then we moved in. And then we got engaged. (You can see where this is going can’t you…)

1 Year ago
Pretty much the same as now. A year ago today I sent around an email to just about everyone I knew asking for sponsorshiop for my participation in Tough Guy. Big J. was in the last throes of preparing for his wedding (and being very disappointed by early reviews of Alien vs Predator) and, well, not a lot seems to have changed.

Yesterday…
A non-event. Forgot to get the car tax sorted. Have to go and do that in a minute. Had also planned to see War of the Worlds but didn’t. Walked the dog in the rain, drank a bottle of wine (my training abstinence begins today, as it turns out, and not the beginning of this week like I originally thought). I spent time worrying about the future and then doing nothing useful or organised that might allay those worries and surfed the internet. Procrastinated paying credit card bills and cancelling Sky subscription.

Today…
In the words of a recent Nine Inch Nails song, “Every day is exactly the same”. Although I have now paid the credit card bills. Stopped drinking for the month of July so that I will be fit and healthy and an all round lean, mean, tough guy running machine. Trying to ignore the fact that I am surrounded by incompetents - something that after four years in this job, I still struggle to do. Going to sort out car tax this afternoon (in the theory that the queues in the post office will be shorter - a theory which has been disproved time and time again!)

Tomorrow…
Trying not to think about it. Can’t imagine it will be very exciting and will prove to be a day full of domestic chores. Another fun filled weekend in the Stalker household.

• The total number of DVDs, videos, and films I own.
  Um, lots. Well over 200 DVDs (some of which are TV series, some of which are short film compilations, some of which are documentaries) , videos I haven’t looked at in ages - used to have 300+ but some are duplicated on DVD now (hell, I have 3 or 4 different versions of Star Wars) and loads more films copied from the television (2 or 3 boxes worth) some of which have been duplicated with originals since. So, er, the answer is lots. Number of films? Anything between 300 and 600 easily.
• The last film I bought.
  Not entirely sure. Recently bought “Clone Wars:Series 1″ but that’s not a film and can’t remember if I’ve bought anything since. I know that it’s not long since I got “12 Monkeys”, “Vertigo”, “Once Upon A Time In The West”, “THX 1138″ and “Ran” which I may well have bought on the same day. (Closing down sale at a cheaper than chips place…)
• The last film I watched.
  At the cinema, “Revenge of the Sith”. (review perhaps coming soon)
  On DVD, “Memento” (modern classic!)
  On TV, “Ice Cold in Alex” (they don’t make ‘em like the used ta!)
• My favourite five films of all time, ever.

You what? Five? I can’t do five! And any five I give you will have changed by tomorrow. They certainly won’t be in order. But alright, if you insist.

1. Blade Runner (’nuff said)
2. Star Wars (the original, pre special edition version. My fave is Empire but for reasons I can’t be bothered to go into here, I’m putting the original original. You may take it to mean the saga - or at least the original trilogy - if you like.)
3. Casablanca (so cool, so classic, so great)
4. erm….
5. err….

Seriously though, this is really hard. How can you make me choose between Fight Club and Se7en? Where do I rank Citizen Kane or The Seventh Seal? Oldboy is by far the best film I’ve seen this year? Can that go on? Pah! Take your favourite films and shove them where the monkey hides his nuts!*

• Tag three people and have them blog this.
  S.
  Briggy
  BF

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of DVD collections, I’m going to add a couple of questions you can either answer on your own blog or in the comments here:
1. What’s the film that you own that you’ve never taken the wrapper off since you bought it? How long have you had it? (I’m not sure at the moment - but I think I had one for over a year)
2. What’s the most embarassing film in your collection? (For me, probably “Queen of the Damned” which I was given - yes, truly! - and it’s so awful that I couldn’t bring myself to even try and sell it on eBay!)

*I promise that I’ll try to give this some more thought…

I’ve never started a meme before but while I was down at the gym (leching(sp?) at the lycra rather than working out) I had a great idea for a new meme, inspired by the copious amount of adverts for downloadable mobile phone ringtones on the telly. Seeing as I was down at the gym, I thought there could be a physical, outdoorsy side to this but read on before that puts you off.

Okay, the task is this: go out and find someone who has one of those fucking annoying and insipid downloadable ringtones - you know the ones I mean, that sodding frog on a motorbike, the singing chick, that sort of crap. Snatch the owner’s phone and destroy it in the most imaginative way possible (extra points of it involves ramming it any of the chav’s owner’s orifices), take a photo and publish it on your blog. Of course, it doesn’t have to stop there - feel free to take a picture of the owner too but it has to be in a famous and recognisable style (such as an “Abu Ghraib prison” photo for example, or a “forensic photographer in Ted Bundy’s flat”).

You know it makes sense.