Tell us about an event that changed your life forever.
Submitted by Miss Scotch.
In 2003 I messaged a girl who had an interesting profile on Friendster, asking her out on a date. I'd never asked a girl out directly like that before, online or otherwise. Later, we got married.
Growing up, my favorite arcade game was centipede. I was obsessed with it. I loved the concept, the blippy sounds, the incessant skittering spiders, the rollerball interface, the constant twisting of the centipede. And in Milipede, I loved clearing clearing enough space to get to the DDT. I always wanted a quarter to play centipede, and it's always something I did by myself. I rarely found myself in an arcade (or in the corner of a pizza shop) with many friends around.
Now, I love racing arcade games like Arctic Thunder that you can climb onto and race your friends in realtime, taunting all the way. I like the speed, the action, and the company.
honorable mention: Pole Position, Pin-BOT, Bust-A-Move
Design work. Sleep. Partying with my friend Jake all night tonight in celebration of his graduation from college (finally). Sleep. Design work.
I always liked those Little Ceasars pizza commercials in the late 80s.
Customer: Little Ceasars offers two pizzas for the price of one. Do you offer that?
Pizza counter guy: No, but we can give you one pizza and one empty box.
Customer: What am I gonna do with an empty box...?"
PCG: Ever hear of oragami?? [starts folding furiously]
Customer: What is that?
PCG: A teradactyl!
Customer: A what...?
PCG: CAW! CAW!
My sixth grade self loved that shit.
Yogurt. White creamy foods used to really freak me out. Now I live on the stuff.
I was a pretty good eater as kids go. I remember really enjoying salad bars and vegetables, even when I was very young. My siblings weren't so easy, though.
You know what I didn't like? My mother's bastardized versions of ethnic foods, Asian foods, and California type cuisine. Her attempts probably scarred my young tongue and left me a bit less open minded for a while. I love my mom, and I learned how to cook by watching her. I don't blame her - I blame her inability to escape the cooking culture and recipes of the 1970s.
See, New England traditions (especially 20 years ago) require that all dinners involve meat, potato or rice, and some canned or frozen vegetable. Unless it was hamburger day or Wednesday (aka Prince Spaghetti Day). Most moms around here seem to have been on a two-week cycle: pork chops, chicken, spaghetti, meat loaf, fish, Saturday out for Pizza, baked ham, tacos, burgers, stew, etc.
But from time to time, Mom would jazz up that schedule with "a great recipe I just found." It might be chop suey, or baked enchiladas, or shepherd's pie, or some kind of Hungarian goulash. And the result would be a soulless, bland version of whatever she was trying to make. So I grew up thinking that I didn't care for all sorts of foods, but really I was just put off by my mother's good intentions and fair execution.
Also: as a kid I never understood the big deal with mint chocolate chip ice cream. Now I think it's like the best thing evar.
I was born on December 14th, 1977.
The instructions:
- Go to Wikipedia.
- In the search box, type your birth month and day (but not year).
- List three events that happened on your birthday.
- List two important birthdays and one interesting death.
- One holiday or observance (if any).
Events
- 1702 - The 47 Ronin (master less samurai), under the command of Ôishi Kuranosuke, avenged the death of their master, Asano Takumi no kami Naganori, by beheading Kira Kozukenosuke Yoshinaka. Later the 46 surviving ronin would commit ritual suicide, seppuku (disembowelment), and would later achieve legendary status as the embodiments of the ideals of the samurai.
- 1977 - Releasing of Saturday Night Fever film. (w00t!)
- 1999 - Charles M. Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, announces his retirement.
- 1546 - Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer (d. 1601. Did you know that this famous astornomer had his own island kingdom and a pet dwarf named Jepp?)
- 1946 - Patty Duke, American actress
- 1788 - King Charles III of Spain (b. 1716)
- R.C. Saints - Memorial of Saint John of the Cross
I've got All the King's Men, a book I loved in 12th grade English. I'm trying to finish it before the new Sean Penn film version comes out this fall.
We have like twenty subsscriptions to magazines here, and I can never read them all. Time, Newsweek, Wired, Discover, and Entertainment Weekly usually pile up on the floor.
Plus, there's a sweet mini Etch-a-Sketch with little white knobs that I use to draw sometimes.
