10 things

[trochee]

I got "tagged" by this meme from writeanya some time back. 10 things you might not know about me.

1. I never dated until college.
2. I had terrible fear of speaking in public until I was about 15, when I blossomed. I wound up delivering the serious valedictorian speech.
3. I have a secret fanboy desire to learn to scratch records.
4. As a pedestrian, I treat running cars -- all of them -- like a threat. This is occasionally annoying to the people who are pedestrianing with me.
5. My parents got a call from the school once in fifth grade because I wrote a story that sounded like I was thinking about hurting people or myself. (It was alienated SF, about someone picking up his little blue spinny marble, wiping off the damp green goo, and going home.)
6. I have never broken a bone.
7. I've shaken hands with Fidel Castro.
8. I was deaf for several months in my very early childhood.
9. I used to confuse George Orwell and Orson Welles. I mean, get them mixed up.
10. My middle name is my mother's maiden name, and my last name is my father's last name. My brother's middle name and last name are the same as mine, only swapped. We went to the same university, but because of this unusual arrangement, it was not obvious from our names that we are siblings. (Somebody once found us chatting at a party, and asked "oh, so you guys know each other?" "Yes," replied _dkg_, "we went to the same high school." I choked on my drink laughing.)

I'm killing the exponential growth of it by not tagging anybody, but if you like it, please consider yourself tagged.

Comments

7

[general-jinjur.livejournal.com]

backstory, please!

!!!

everyone always wants to know about that...

[trochee.livejournal.com]

at the end of 1993 I went to Havana with the Center for Cuban Studies. The State Department rules about traveling to Cuba were (at the time) that one could travel there as a journalist or as a researcher, but not for tourism. I went as a freelance reporter for my college paper, and my dad -- a public health researcher -- took the same trip as a chance to learn more about a public health system on a very different model from the USA.

Our group of about 60 Americans was effectively the biggest cultural embassy of the US at the time, and we got to visit with lots of bigwigs all over Havana. One afternoon we all got rounded up from the various other activities and told "wait for us in the hotel." We all got on the buses they provided, and they took us all to the CP headquarters. They shunted us down a long wide fancy hallway with lots of (presumably one-way glass) mirrors) and there around a bend was Castro with an interpreter, who introduced each of us as we walked in.

(The interpreter introduced me as "a film producer from Los Angeles", which was the other young white guy on that tour; this meant that I got what was probably the longest introduction of all 60, because she had to introduce me twice.)

After we'd all gotten a chance to shake hands with him, they sat us in the assembly seats and had a two-hour talk with Castro himself, who sat on the dais and answered questions. (I think he understood most of the questions pretty well, but he was clearly using the translation time and repetition to think about how to answer the questions.)

[lunacow]

I love the story about you and DKG!

[writeanya.livejournal.com]

schweeeeet!

thank you. fabuloso.

back story, too.

and i can totally see you as the dj. :)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

that's a classic violation of the Gricean maxim of Quantity, isn't it?

[lunacow]

Um? I have looked up the maxim, and I still don't know what you mean.

that's because it's interesting

[general-jinjur.livejournal.com]

thank you for telling the story.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

erm, the positive Gricean maxims amount to "be as informative as possible" [the negative ones: "... and no more so"] -- by making a statement that was substantially weaker than possible (e.g., _dkg_ could have said "we're brothers") he's not being as informative as possible.

[Nerd alert] the humor comes from the listener's Gricean inference that our shared high school is our closest connection. The humor would still be there had he made any other statement that was weaker than the (presumably) strongest possible:

"we went to the same elementary school", "we had a bunch of friends in common", "we're both from Atlanta", or even "we share a mother" -- the Gricean inference there would be that we're half-brothers, though we're full brothers.

[lunacow]

Oh oh oh! I was absolutely convinced for some reason that you were saying my comment ("I love the story about you and DKG!") was a violation of the Gricean maxim, rather than what happened in the story itself. Duh. Okay, makes perfect sense now.