Internet meme #1: Seven things you might not know

It’s the attack of the internet memes! I’ve been tagged by two good friends, so I’ll take a few moments on a cold, dark January day to answer questions you may not actually want answers to…

Joi Ito recently tagged me with a blog meme with the following rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So… seven things you may not know:

1. I used to be a pretty competent musician. I spent much of my time in college playing hand drums as part of the college’s African music ensemble. My first trip to Africa in 1993 was on a scholarship to study Ghanaian music. While I’ve still got two xylophones and half a dozen drums in my house, I rarely play these days, mostly because I remember how if felt to be a competent drummer and I’m usually disappointed by how I play these days.

2. I’m a good cook, and my kitchen is generally filled with cooking experiments, some of them more successful than others. My latest experiment is a homemade mustard that features a heavy dose of Otter Creek Stovepipe Porter – it’s very yummy.

3. While I write a lot about journalism, I haven’t worked in a newsroom since I was sixteen years old, writing for the sports page of the Lewisboro (NY) Ledger, a weekly. The story I remember best was a feature on a game of donkey basketball that took place at the local high school.

4. I was a dreadful athelete in high school. Unfortunately, the school I attended made sports mandatory, and I spent a lot of my teenage years running on the school’s cross country team. I was so bad that I recall my parents celebrating a race in which I didn’t finish last, perhaps the only one of my career.

5. I ran a freelance graphic design business in college, accepting work from professors to lay out their books for publication and from college organizations. I probably learned more about the Internet by looking for pirated graphic design software, fonts and clipart online in the early 1990s than from any other aspect of my education.

6. I love accordians, though I don’t play as well as I’d like. There are two accordians and a concertina in my living room, and I firmly believe there is very little music that couldn’t be improved by adding an accordian line to it.

7. I collect bad movies, and have a special fondness for terrible musicals. Gems of my collection include “Big Meat Eater“, Psychos in Love, and Tongan Ninja. Recently I acquired the late Brandon Lee’s “Laser Mission“, which is rapidly becoming a favorite.

All right, and now to spread the joy. I hereby tag Lokman Tsui, Daudi Were, Mike Stopforth, Georgia Popplewell, Amira Al-Hussaini, ThaRum Bun and Rachel Barenblat.

And now, to write the post I was tagged about weeks earlier…