100 Things About Me

Apparently you're supposed to use your 100th blog post to share 100 things about yourself with your readers. I must have missed that tweet. Whatever a tweet is. Ah well, better late - 304 posts late - than never. Now the question is: who will get bored and give up first - you or me?

1. I love Nadine Coyle off Girls Aloud.

2. Except her speaking voice.

3. I always think that Irish people sound too whiny.

4. Except if they're from the Southern end.

5. Like Lisa Burke off Sky News weather.

6. That's the only thing I miss about not getting the Sky channels with cable any more.

7. I never watched Lost anyway.

8. Another thing I don't like is Brussels Sprouts.

9. I use to dislike apricots, because the fuzzy skin gave me the creeps.

10. Which is odd, because I always loved peaches.

11. But then, for years the only peaches I ever ate came from a tin.

12. Yes, I am that old.

13. I love apricots now, the skin doesn't bother me any more.

14. I still hate sprouts.

15. Does 14 count as a different thing from 8?

16. Do I care?

17. Yes, a bit. I'm way too analytic about trivia.

18. Haha. I said anal.

19. Did I mention I have a very short attention span?

20. Apparently not.

21. Also, did I mention I have a very short attention span?

22. Must resist temptation to click away and play that Aha song again.

23. Too late. *clicky*

24. That's better.

25. Crikey, a quarter of the way through already.

26. What can I nick off of Blissfully Caffeinated?

27. I could read by the age of five.

28. On my first week at school, I so astonished the teacher that she thought I must be reciting the reading book from memory.

29. So she fetched today's paper and got me to read that to the primary 7 (12 year old) class, just to embarrass them.

30. Never mind that it embarrassed me too.

31. Thankfully, I remember nothing of that episode, and only have my mum's word for it now.

32. And she's dead, so really you just have my word for it.

33. I wonder if she made it up or if I just imagined that she told me?

34. She also told me she was a witch, which I totally believed.

35. So you'd better not question the authenticity of 29, or you'll turn into a slug.

36. I'm an Aries.

37. But we're naturally sceptical, so I don't go in for that astrology crap.

38. Kind of negates 35, doesn't it?

39. The only kind of braces I've worn were to keep my trousers up.

40. I'm surprised I got this far through the list before resorting to html.

41. Oh. I forgot about 26¹. Told you I had a short attention span.

42. Right. I need a cup of tea...

43. I like Assam best.

44. Oh! Oh! Something slightly less boring. When I was 12, my class went on a school cruise on the Nevasa, which was so fooking huge it bumped into Leith docks on the way out and made a huge dent in our cabin. A bench which had been bolted to the wall inner hull snapped right off.

45. On the crossing from Embra to Norway I was sick as a dog.

46. Which is really not pleasant.

47. The only choice of drinks available to 12-year-olds was tea or coffee.

48. The tea was abominable.

49. The coffee? Slightly less so.

50. It was two years before I could look another cup of tea in the face.

51. Teacups don't generally have faces. I know.

52. Woot! Past the halfway mark already, and there's still plenty stuff I can steal off BC.

53. I have no idea why I used the word "woot" there. AFAIK it means "want one of those". Meh.

54. I get the feeling I'm being drawn into another culture, with its own language.

55. Like woot, AFAIK, Meh and awesome.

56. This is not how I was brought up.

57. I was told off at school for saying: "Ah ken!" when the teacher asked the class a question.

58. She said the correct phrase was: "I know".

59. But she kent what Ah meant.

60. Standards appear to have slipped somewhat in the past 45 years, I may have to write in to the Daily Telegraph and lodge a complaint.

61. I have never written in to any newspaper.

62. I did write in to radio stations a couple of times.

63. The first time was to BBC Radio 2. In green ink. For some reason I didn't put any address on the postcard. I think I may have thought the Post Office was clever enough to work it out for themselves from the text.

64. They didn't read it out.

65. I may have been stoned at the time.

66. Actually? Almost definitely.

67. After hearing Nick Drake sing the very short song Place To Be, late one night on the radio, I went out the next day and bought The Complete Recorded Works.

68. The other time (see 62) was to Radio Forth, as it was then known.

69. That one did get read out on air, but it was totally misinterpreted.

70. How it came out was: Modern marriages never last; we've been married six months; so play us a song before she chucks me out.

71. What I meant was: Even though modern marriages never seem to last, we've been married a whole six months already and we're still going strong, so nyah nyah nyah. Now play us a fooking record.

72. Maybe I should have used that exact wording, just to be totally unambiguous.

73. Shouldn't the opposite of ambiguous be monoguous?

74. This is harder than it looks. I'm off to steal another one. BRB.

75. Before that, BRB means "be right back". I should have looked that one up a long time before I did.

76. LOL.

77. I have three brothers, but my sister has four. I don't think that's weird.

78. Time travel is weird, OTOH. But I've blogged about that before.

79. Well, now I have.

80. And whatever happened to "I before E except after C"? Eh? Eh?

81. I'm a big fan of science. I love the idea that at any moment some amazing discovery will completely change our whole perception of reality.

82. Or destroy the universe.

83. Science is pretty scary, actually.

84. There was this science fiction story once about someone who invented a machine that allowed you to view any event at any point in space or time, but because of some stupid quantum effect like Heisenberg uncertainty the further you went back in time (or presumably the further away from here), the fuzzier the picture became, so people ended up spying on their neighbours in real time. I would buy one of those.

85. Also, computers? I've loved them since as long as I can remember. Which is about three minutes, but anyway.

86. In 1977 I read a report by the AAAS which predicted that within ten years scientists would have figured out how to implant tiny computer chips into our brains to make us all into super-geniuses. Yeah, way to go, youse boffins! You don't look so smart now!

87. Of course maybe all the scientists are super-geniuses now and they're keeping the technology to themselves. Selfish super-genius bastards.

88. You're not still reading this crap, are you?

89. This is post number 404. I was originally going to title it "Post 404 Not Found" and leave the text completely blank.

90. When I took my first "proper" job as a computer operator, it was a stop-gap thing until I learned my way around computers, then I would become a programmer.

91. I stayed in that job for fourteen years.

92. In that time, programmers went way down in my estimation.

93. All the good programmers are super-geniuses living with their scientist chums on a secret invisible island in the mid-Pacific.

94. With robot fembot servants.

95. And weather control, so they never get hit by hurricanes or that.

96. We get left with the dregs. Point. Click. Oops.

97. If they could do their jobs properly, I wouldn't have one.

98. So I suppose I shouldn't complain.

99. But man, I'd love to be on that Pacific island right now.

100. Oh. Finished. I win.

¹ I inserted the Aha link after reaching 100, so that doesn't count.