{"id":431,"date":"2005-12-26T00:01:24","date_gmt":"2005-12-26T00:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=431"},"modified":"2005-12-26T00:01:24","modified_gmt":"2005-12-26T00:01:24","slug":"meme_of_fours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2005\/12\/26\/meme_of_fours\/","title":{"rendered":"Meme of Fours"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My employer has generously given me the week off, so between now and New Year&#8217;s, I hope to clear the decks around here by blogging about a whole mess of topics and links that I&#8217;ve been gathering over the past few weeks.<\/p>\n<p>First up is another of those list-style memes I occasionally run across, this one based around the number four. For your post-Christmas, Monday-morning amusement, I present the following bits of trivial information about yours truly:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four jobs you&#8217;ve had in your life:<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Movie-theater projectionist<\/li>\n<li>Customer service representative (a.k.a. phone-drone, a.k.a., damned soul suffering in the blackest pits of hell)<\/li>\n<li>Technical writer<\/li>\n<li>Proofreader<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four movies you could watch over and over:<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Bet you can&#8217;t guess the first title on my list&#8230;<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><i>Star Wars<\/i> (by which I mean the film most people now think of as &#8220;Episode IV: A New Hope&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li><i>Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/i><\/li>\n<li><i>Casablanca<\/i><\/li>\n<li><i>Ferris Bueller&#8217;s Day Off<\/i><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four places you&#8217;ve lived:<\/span><\/p>\n<p>This is a tricky one, since I&#8217;ve technically lived in the same place my entire life &#8212; the same town, the same house. However, I have visited other places, some for several weeks at a time, and I have of course continued to live during those visits. So I&#8217;m going to fudge a bit here and list my hometown and three of the more memorable locations I&#8217;ve called home for very brief periods of time.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Riverton, Utah<\/li>\n<li>Cambridge, England (I spent a month here in 1993 while attending the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cont-ed.cam.ac.uk\/IntSummer\/\">International Summer School<\/a> at Cambridge U.)<\/li>\n<li>Reno, NV (I lost a week of 1991 here while my father brushed up on his firefighting skills)<\/li>\n<li>Los Angeles, CA (ten days of heavy-duty tourism back in &#8217;99)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four TV shows you love to watch:<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Another tough one, at least when it comes to <i>current<\/i> TV. There are lots of classic shows that I own on DVD and love watching, but not many still-in-production series that I view on any consistent basis. Still, I&#8217;ll give it a go and list the current shows that I <i>like<\/i> to watch&#8230;<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><i>Lost<\/i> (yeah, I know, everybody loves this one &#8212; so sue me for hopping on the bandwagon)<\/li>\n<li><i>CSI<\/i> (the original, Vegas-based edition; the spin-offs don&#8217;t do much for me)<\/li>\n<li><i>ER<\/i> (the show has now lost all of its original cast and long ago started repeating its earliest, best stories, but it remains reliably entertaining)<\/li>\n<li><i>Rick Steves&#8217; Europe<\/i> (an odd choice, you may be thinking, and I suppose it is, a PBS travel series hosted by a guy who looks like a high-school math teacher, but I genuinely do love watching this one. Rick goes to all the places I&#8217;d like to visit myself, and even some of the places I&#8217;ve been&#8230;)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four places you&#8217;ve been on vacation:<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>San Francisco<\/li>\n<li>Phoenix, AZ<\/li>\n<li>New York City<\/li>\n<li>Munich, Germany<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four websites you visit daily:<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>John Scalzi&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scalzi.com\/whatever\/\">Whatever<\/a><\/li>\n<li>James Lileks&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lileks.com\/bleats\/index.html\">Daily Bleat<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Wil Wheaton&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/wilwheaton.typepad.com\/\">WWdN: In Exile<\/a> (an offshoot of the [temporarily?] broken <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wilwheaton.net\/\">wilwheaton.net<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/\">Boing Boing<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four of your favorite foods: <\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Pastrami burgers<\/li>\n<li>My mother&#8217;s stuffed bell peppers<\/li>\n<li>Spaghetti with mizithra cheese and browned butter (made famous by The Old Spaghetti Factory, but I&#8217;ve also got a pretty good recipe for doing it at home)<\/li>\n<li>Key-lime pie<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Four places you&#8217;d rather be: <\/span><\/p>\n<p>In the lap of luxury? I don&#8217;t know &#8212; I&#8217;m not even entirely sure what this one is asking. Does it mean places I&#8217;d rather live than where I currently do? Or is it more of a fantasy thing, i.e., wouldn&#8217;t you rather be on a beach than sitting at the office or whatever? If you&#8217;re going for the fantasy approach &#8212; and I think maybe that&#8217;s the object &#8212; couldn&#8217;t you include time-travel in the equation, too? If so, then here&#8217;s my list of places &#8212; and times &#8212; I&#8217;d rather be than sitting here at the old &#8216;puter in the final minutes of Christmas Day, 2005:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Mann&#8217;s Chinese Theater, May 25, 1977 (if you don&#8217;t understand the significance of that date, you haven&#8217;t been reading this blog long enough&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>Times Square in New York City on V-E Day (now that must&#8217;ve been a party!)<\/li>\n<li>Trekking through Europe with a notebook in one hand and a camera in the other<\/li>\n<li>That alternate universe where I got everything right and I&#8217;m living a life of incredible fabulousness<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My employer has generously given me the week off, so between now and New Year&#8217;s, I hope to clear the decks around here by blogging about a whole mess of topics and links that I&#8217;ve been gathering over the past few weeks. First up is another of those list-style memes I occasionally run across, this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memes-and-quizzes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}