Random information.

Taking a page from Arianna, here is a list of 100 things you may or may not have known about me:

1. My first name means “He who is like God” in Hebrew. Cool, huh?
2. I am the sixth of ten children, the youngest three of which are adopted.
3. I have thirteen nieces and nephews, all of whom I love dearly and spoil as much as time and finances permit.
4. While raised Episcopal, I am not currently a believer in any religion.
5. Well, MAYBE I believe in the Church of the SubGenius, since I’m a member. Or maybe I joined just in case they’re right, and the world will end on July 5th.
6. Ethnically, I am Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh, and German. I am a Paleface American.
7. I can’t stand cold weather. I am glad beyond measure that my forebears chose to move away from their homelands, to somewhere with decent weather.
8. I am a packrat. I hate throwing things away, because there’s always a chance that I might need them some day.
9. My best friend is my eldest brother Robert.
10. As for my brother George, I would cheerfully cripple him and bury him in a shallow grave, without bothering to put him out of his misery first.
11. I am almost 29 years old. Where the Hell did my youth go?
12. I dropped out of high school to go to college early, at Simon's Rock.
13. During my first semester in college, I went by the name “Bill”, since there were so damn many other “Mike”s.I sometimes with I’d kept that pseudonym.
14. I deeply regret not being a bit more wild in my youth. Now that I’m a legal adult, there’s so many things that I never tried that I simply couldn’t get away with now.
15. I used to hate “They Might Be Giants”, because my first roommate played them loudly and incessantly. Years later, they became one of my favorite bands.
16. I did not drink alcohol until I was 19.
17. I didn’t discover Tori Amos until I was in Bosnia in 1998. To my infinate chagrin, I later learned that several of my friends at Simon’s Rock were big Tori fans, yet I somehow missed hearing her there. To my even greater horror, the album “Boys for Pele” was a Featured Selection from one of those CD-of-the-month clubs, which I received, and RETURNED UNOPENED, in 1996. :-(
18. I find my current job to be utterly and completely dull, beyond my ability to describe. I like my platoon, though. Working HumInt was very interesting, but I didn’t like having to spend all day translating for semi-educated inbred barbarians who would just as soon chop my head off as look at me. (and then there were the Iraqis...)
19. While I aknowledge that the domestication of the horse was a very important development in human history, I still think the dumb brutes are stupid and smelly.
20. I don’t believe in the catagorization of toys into “Girl Toys” and “Boy Toys”. I think of them as “sucky” (dolls, little ponies, etc) and “Cool” (Legos, Transformers, G.I. Joes). Unless my nieces specifically ask for a certain sucky toy, I buy them cool ones!
21. I am firmly of the opinion that, while the cookie part of the Oreo is utterly revolting, the cream filling is one of the most yummiest things ever. I solve this dilemma by twisting the two halves of the Oreo apart, and scraping the filling off with my teeth. I am then forced to discard the rest; I don’t like to be so wasteful, but for some reason, no one else wants the remnants.
22. I really _try_ to avoid swearing when visiting family members, honest I do!
23. While I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment, I do not currently own a handgun.
24. I loath all cooked vegetables. It’s not the taste, it’s the texture that I find completely disgusting. Raw vegetables aren’t as bad, but they still grow in the dirt. Ick. :-P
25. The second and third toes on my feet are webbed together. I like to think that this means my Spirit Totem is the Friendly Bonobo, and I strive to live my life accordingly.
26. I am a cat person.
27. I own a wide variety of DnD and other gaming books, but I haven’t played in years.
28. I am a Lego Maniac.
29. I cannot dance without the aid of alcohol.
30. I still have no idea what I want to do when I grow up.
31. I am in fact an idealist; I try to cultivate cynicism to avoid flying into a murderous rage whenever people act too stupid or selfish.
32. I am a pyro, but a very careful one. Fire is good,, but too much of a good thing, is an awesome thing. But too much of an awesome thing, is really... really... dumb.
33. I am a carnivore, but I accept that I will eventually have to change my diet.
34. Steaks should be cooked rare, but not still cold in the middle.
35. I don’t really ‘regret’ having joined (or rejoined) the Army. Based on what I knew at the time, it seemed the correct thing to do. If I knew in 2001 what I know now, I wouldn’t have rejoined.
36. I hardly ever watch TV shows.
37. I am in no way a morning person.
38. Years of unpredictable sleep schedules have completely ruined my internal clock. Without an alarm to wake me up, I’ll sleep 18 hours straight.
39. I refer to my glasses as “Eyes”.
40. I cannot stand to be without a watch.
41. I have to hold back the urge to snarl at watchless people who ask me what time it is.
42. I have nine tattoos. (yeah, this one hurt a bit)
43. I have no piercings, or serious plans to get any.
44. I absolutely hate rap and country music. I’ll listen to almost anything else (Johnny Cash ain’t country, neither is Elvis. Damned redneck philistines.)
45. My artistic skills are just about non-existant. I used to think I was capable of writing decently, though...
46. I have some native ability at math, but I hated it in school.
47. I find my army boots to be the most comfortable footwear I’ve ever worn.
48. Unless I’m actually going out to a club, I care almost nothing about what my clothes look like.
49. I am not particularely adventurous when it comes to food. Good ol’ bland american microwaveable cuisine is adequate sustenance for me.
50. While I speak half-decent Arabic, I want nothing to do with the language or culture when I get out of the Army. When I visit my old college, I’ll teach the beginning students a few, ahem, ‘choice phrases’, but that’s it.
51. I think that Ultima 5 was the greatest turn based computer RPG ever, and am overjoyed that the fan remake is almost done.
52. Citizen Kane is the best movie ever, but it still deserves to be Mysted, and you can’t watch it too often or the magic wears off.
53. The most complex, well-crafted and information-dense comic book ever is Grant Morrison’s “The Invisibles”. I still think his “Flex Mentallo” mini-series was a better story.
54. My ability to sew is limited to replacing buttons.
55. Other people claim to find it difficult to tell whether I’m joking or being serious. I _try_ to make it obvious for them.
56. I am now fairly certain that our current war will end poorly, and cause great (perhaps even irreparable) damage to our national interests (Good luck getting the right-wing ideologues to ever aknowledge this, no matter how bad it gets). I think that’s why our current Administration makes a point of never punishing incompetence; they hope to avoid the public punishing them in turn.
57. I try not to be too snarky around other soldiers, as it would be bad for morale. I don’t _respect_ the current idiot in the White House, mind you , I just don’t want to make things any worse for the other poor bastards that are stuck here with me.
58. I was in Cub Scouts as a child. I will never encourage, or even suggest, any other child join. If a future shild of mine wanted to, I’d allow it, but reluctantly.
59. I’m not sure how old I was when I started reading, but I know it was before Kindergarten.
60. The best grades I ever got in high school were the year my French teacher let my do self-paced study using the next year's text-books. When I had to rejoin the rest of the students, my grades plummeted again.
61. Some years, I made a deliberate point of getting miserable grades on my homework, and acing the tests. Sometimes, I took it a little further, and only aced the finals.
62. I bought a set of throwing knives right before this deployment, but never got around to learning how to throw them properly.
63. I can cook, but only microwaveable things.
64. I regret doing a lot of things, but I regret not doing a whole lot more.
65. I think that there are probably aliens out there, either in space or in other dimensions, but I doubt that any of them have had contact with us Humans. I think “Ancient Astronaut” theories are an insult to the intelligence and determination of our ancestors.
66. I like video games, but try not to play them too much. I tend to play one or two games compulsively for a few weeks, then lose interest entirely for a while before moving to the next game.
67. I can’t wait till I can grow a beard again.
68. Leslie Fish is my favorite Filksong writer, but I’m fairly sure her singing voice is outlawed under the Geneva Conventions.
69. I’ve never done ANY illegal drugs. People find this hard to believe for some reason...
70. I think that apes should be considered “people”, in the same sense that children and mentally impaired adults are. Cetaceans, not so much, but they should still be protected more than they are.
71. I once had a migraine headache so bad I thought I was having a stroke (the food poisoning I was suffering at the time didn’t help either).
72. My English handwriting sucks, but I can do half-decent calligraphy in Arabic.
73. I designed two tattoos for a friend once.
74. I absolutely abhore Cristmas music. It ought to be against the law to play &*(^ing “Jingle Bells” before Christmas Eve.
75. I love children, and absolutely hate people who mistreat their own. Child abusers and unfit parents should be sterilized, not for eugenic reasons, but so they can’t pass on their corrupt memes to future generations.
76. I don’t really _believe_ in any sort of afterlife, but I _hope_ that something more than this life exists. If nothing else, our hyperevolved descendants could take pity on us and recreate us as their hyperdimensional equivalents of laptop screen savers (Maybe that's already happened. It would explain a lot...).
77. I am a devoted reader of Fortean Times, but mostly for entertainment purposes.
78. I think there are lots of people who the world would be better off without, but I, personally, have no plans to remove any of them (But if a certain Texan were running past with his head on fire, I wouldn’t urinate on the flames either).
79. I like the Libertarian philosophy, but I have come to the twin conclusions that a) Most actual Libertarians are raving nutjobs, and b) any Libertarian ‘utopia’ would very rapidly fall into anarchy and then despotism. It was a nice pipe dream, but no more practical than socialism or theocracy.
80. I really don’t like most other males that I know. Almost all of my close friends are women.
81. I think that the “Clash of Civilizations” isn’t Jihad Vs. McWorld, but Rational Secularism Vs. Medieval Fanaticism. In this fight, the Falwells and Bushes of our own country are on the same side as Al-Qa’ida and Hizballah, and are as much a threat to our Enlightenment heritage as any bearded Jihadi.
82. I’ve always been partial to petite girls. 5’ is a nice height, I think. Tall girls can have their own charm, but short ones have just always seemed more feminine
83. I am fascinated with "Magical" belief systems, but I see no compelling reason to believe that any phenomena in the universe requires anything more than naturalistic explanations. In other words, I like the idea of magic/psychic powers/whatever, but I don't believe in any of 'em.

OK, so it's not 100 yet. The rest will be filled in as they occur to me.

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