9 posts tagged “qotd”
What's your musical horoscope? (Put your player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)
- Rolling Stone by The Psalms
- Slow Jam by Four Tet
- Flying by The Beatles
- After The Smoke Is Clear by Ghostface Killah
- Tradition by Burning Spear
- Spiders by Wilco
- At The Feast by The Congos
- Get It Together by The Beastie Boys
- Destruction by Vex'd
- The Weaker Soldier by Palace
Is that ten? I am too RAF to actually interpret this into some semblance of a horoscope. Seems to me like this "predicts" I just like a lot of reggae and hiphop and I am trying to be cool by having some dubstep on my iPod but actually I always skip the tracks when they come on.
I think these questions of the day are a bit stupid.
What do you have, what do you need and what do you want?
Submitted by Miss Scotch.
I have everything I need and yet need everything I want.
What decision changed the course of your life?
Submitted by Ally.
I don't think I have made it yet.
In your ultimate dream house, what does your favourite room look like?
I think that when I am old I would like to live there.
What was your favorite game to play at recess in grade school?
Submitted by Elisheva Chana.
My favourite game to play at playtime in primary school was probably skipping. We would do very elaborate things to very un-politically correct rhymes which were direct descendants of the things our mothers and grandmothers also skipped along to. I was quite a good skipper and rarely got caught out so I wasn't an 'ender' very often. I expect that most of the girls who were serial enders probably wouldn't cite skipping as their favourite playtime sport.
When it rained or snowed I also liked it because we had to stay inside, and were minded not by a teacher but by one of the big girls from Primary Seven. They seemed ancient. We would run riot, move all the desks around, and do a lot of dangerous things. One day a girl put her teeth through her lip tripping over a pile of desks. It was very dramatic, blood-wise. But she was a trooper and lied about how it happened so the desk games were never very well policed.
In the summer we practiced a lot of handstands and cartwheels. I could walk on my hands until I went to High School. We tucked our summer dresses into our knickers, which was supposed to be more modest than just letting your dress hang over your head when you were upside down. It made perfect sense at the time, but now I think about it, it wasn't logical at all.
Other good games were: burying dead birds and the elaborate funeral arrangements that went with them, hide and seek, sardines, British Bulldogs (which was banned every year after we played it once just to test the water that it was still banned,) and the very basic but still fun tig (tag in other English languages.) I was always very pleased when I fell over, especially if it made a hole in my tights and the blood dried on my tights which then made the cut bleed again when I took my tights off. I have scars on my knees even now from picking the scabs I got from falling over.
Another good activity was going to the toilet in threes or fours and telling rude joke stories. This was a good activity when it was raining, but not wet enough for Rainy Day Duty. Two of us would sit on the toilet, another would balance on the old fashioned 'Braxo' toilet roll holder, and the other would lean against the door. The teachers were very much against us spending much time in the toilets, but we didn't do anything bad like the girls who liked to make paper towel mush and throw it at the ceiling.
The game I liked least was Kiss, Cuddle and Torture, because the boys I liked never wanted to kiss or cuddle me.
What's the best way to get on your good side?
Submitted by Manon-It-All.
Buy me a Creme Egg or give me ten pounds.
What are five things you're good at?
Submitted by HapaLove.
Five things I am good at:
1. Handstands
2. Cartwheels
3. Skipping
4. Drawing ballet dancers
5. Staring into space
This was true when I was eight. It is equally true twenty-two years later.
What method do you use to prepare your coffee or tea?
Submitted by AgentBouche.
Methodology is my new favourite thing. Before I did any postgraduate work I had only the vaguest notion that there were different methods available. I just went in there, hammer and tongs, and did the best I could with whatever I had to hand. Now, when I make a cup of tea or coffee, I alternate my approach depending on what sort of tea it is.
Normal tea (at the moment, TeaDirect Fairtrade tea)
I like a Marxist approach when I make a cup of tea. I like to blame my need for tea on economic circumstances and enjoy running the tea-coffee dialectic in my head while the kettle is boiling. When I was younger the Marxist thing was particularly pertinent, as I loved a builder's brew, strong enough to hold your spoon up in it, with lots of sugar. I felt Real. Now, I prefer my tea slightly weaker, as I gave up sugar when I gave up smoking the first time around. The fags came back but the sugar has remained off the list. This perhaps reflects the fact that I started out in the Socialist Workers Party but now am a card carrier for New *spit* Labour.
Lapsang Souchong
Lapsang is my favourite afternoon brew, something to sip and take stock of the world. Therefore it is a most revisionist sort of cup. All the thoughts of the morning are turned on their head. No, I say, it was not like that at all, and conveniently forget the difficult and awkward arguments, hide away the uncomfortable evidence. Breathe in the bergamot, babies!
Earl Grey
With Earl Grey one must be solid and empirical. Do we have the documents? Do we have the data? Are we qualified to be drinking this tea? The best cup of Earl Grey I ever had was last week, at Kember and Jones. It was a truly perfumey experience.
Stove-top espresso
I love to make coffee in one of those stove-top things. It comes out heart-stoppingly strong. I think it must be a postmodern experience, so one must approach it without any grand narrative in mind. Of course, you might argue that postmodernism is yet another grand narrative, but that is not my problem. Add some hot milk, and you have a latte of sorts. I love how it forms a skin. We can think of the skin as one axis of analysis, the milk as another, and the coffee as a third. How sad that it must all be confined within a cup.
Herbal tea
Herbal tea must be the psychoanaltic approach to history. It's rather like a dialectic approach, and yet it's not. There are so many types of tea, and yet they all taste pretty much the same. I don't think they add much to our experience and understanding of life, and yet they are probably quite necessary.
Instant (CafeDirect instant)
See Normal Tea (see above)
What are five books that changed your life?
Inspired by Ms. Genevieve.
Can a book change your life? What does the phrase, change your life mean anyway? How do you know what the course of your life is going to be before it's taken place? If you read a particular book and certain things start happening differently, who's to say that it was the book that did it? Maybe it was some other factor.
Right, I will stop being facetious. But I think I have a point. I have been looking at other people's choices randomly, and they are all basically the same: The Bible, The Communist Manifesto, The Celestine Prophecy, Harry Potter and the Forty Thieves... I can't say these books changed my life because a) The first two were always on my bookshelf, along with Little House on the Prairie and A Tune A Day, so I took them for granted and b) I vowed never to read the other two or books of a similar ilk to them. But there were books that made a big impression on me and here they are.
1. The Bunty Annual circa 1962 and similar girl's annuals
I loved my mother's annuals to pieces. They are the things I am most excited about inheriting. These annuals are full of stories about girls who care about things and who chase their dreams. There are also helpful tips about deportment, making toilet roll holders, and how to wear false eyelashes.
See also Little Women, Jane Eyre, and any novel by Noel Streatfield
2. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
Och, it makes me so cross when people say feminists have no sense of humour. They obviously haven't read any of the books. If you read this it makes you feel really happy about being a woman, but also quite angry. Germaine wants you to enjoy sex. For a long time my cousin thought this book was called the Female Unch. That is less relevant.
See also Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly (hilarious), Love Your Enemy by Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group (side-splitting), anything by Adrienne Rich or Andrea Dworkin (may she rest in peace), and Woman's Estate by Juliet Mitchell (they just don't make them like that anymore.)
3. How We Can Save The Planet by Mayer Hillman
The Breakdancer and I were in Paris for the weekend. It was his birthday. We flew there, from London. I bought him this book. We never flew again. Buy it and feel guilty for the rest of your life. Although you might not want to.
See also any other book that tells it like it is, smacks you across the face and says, 'Get a grip, there's only one planet and we're not going to solve it by flying to a ski resort, moaning that there's no snow, and planting a couple of puny trees to make ourselves feel better.'
4. Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scott
This is the book that taught me to learn to stop worrying and love postmodernism. Or maybe it's poststructuralism. No, I think she is postmodern. Oh, who cares, we shouldn't apply labels to anything. Gender is a construct, and it is only one axis along which to analyse history, alongside a bunch of other concepts. (You can tell I am a great teacher, can't you?) Anyway, Scott is a smartarse, and in some of her articles she gets a bit nasty with those who don't 'get' her work, but for any historian who wants someone they want to be as clever as, then she is probably the woman.
See also anything by Hobsbawm (for the Marxist pinnacle of excellence) or Studs Terkel (oral history genius.) Hmm, I should have another female in there, but I can't think of one right now.
5. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
No-one really needed to bother writing another novel after this one. It is so modern, so epic, so real, so wonderful, I am only sorry that I was 29 years old when I first read it. If you haven't read it, read it as soon as you can! Argh, that sounded like a primary school book review. Humph.
Actually, there are plenty of novels that have been written since that I rather like. You should all read Austerlitz by W G Sebold because it is also ace and makes you wish you could read it all over again. No other book has made me think so much and made me feel so strung out and emotional.
See also: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (OK I'm joking...)
So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed reading about my selections.
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