The Interview Meme

padparadscha hit me with five questions, which I answer below. If you want to participate, reply with "Hit me", and I'll come up with questions for you.

1. Describe a harrowing experience from your past.

When I was ten, I came home from school to find the garage door up, and the door from the garage to the kitchen left open. It was what turned out to be the first of a series of robberies, and at the time our house stood alone on its part of the street. To this day, while I am one of those people who will think "Don't go in there, you IDIOT" at characters in horror movies, I can understand why they do that because I went in there instead of trying to find a neighbor's house to call my parents from.

2. It is a grey, cold, drizzly day, and you have no obligations. What do you wind up doing?
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If I had the house to myself, I would most likely wind up playing Dragon Age II until I got hungry enough to gnaw my button-mashing thumb off. If Pix was home, we'd probably settle in for an afternoon of movies and pizza.

3. Do you have any completely useless skills?

I can vocalise a ridiculously vast number of sound effects. Not as much as the guys on Garrison Keiller's show, though, so between their greater range and my living many states away from Minnesota, I can't quite view that skill as all that useful for anything other than amusing myself. If you ever need an explosion or heavy guitar riff, though, I'm your guy.

4. How did Friday get her name?

Friday's a him, although he does have a sort of feminine voice to him. I was visiting my parents on Memorial Day 2004, and heard a tiny plaintive voice calling out from the bushes near their garage. When I investigated, I found a tiny kitten, barely the size of my hand. Since he had been abandoned by his people, a Robinson Crusoe reference seemed the way to go.

Now he's the size of my head and change, but he still has the tiny kitten voice. I wonder if cats' voices also change when they hit puberty, and my getting him fixed at about six months old is why he still sings soprano?

5. How did you come up with the brilliant term Big Dumb Stupid Music?

I was listening to Du Hast by Rammstein and decided that I needed a term for loud, overblown music delivered with absolute sincerity by the band playing it. And "Big Dumb Music" didn't quite do it justice. I've got a longer explanation (and a video of a perfect example of it) posted here: http://prodigal.livejournal.com/515048.html