So I was contacted by Robert Silvey to join in this game. His entry is here. Well, truth be told, Sean was contacted, he declined, and so I was picked next. (No doubt this reminds some of us those days in the playground when they were picking teams…. or dates for the school dance….)

Anyway. I’m supposed to do lists of four. This will take me a while, but I need a break after my first two hour class of the season, explaining the procedures of how the course will run (and why we have three separate websites for different course components, and that I have nothing to do with the labs, so please don’t ask, as I can’t help……), and the 6 hours of preparing all the new course material that went before it….. So here goes:

Four Jobs You’ve Had

1. Newpaper delivery boy
2. Janitor/Porter/Dogsbody for BHS
3. Researcher in network design for HP
4. Staff Physicist for Institute for Cancer Research

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over

(This is just not fair to ask me for only four….. ok…at random:)

1. Brazil
2. Bladerunner
3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
4. Whisky Galore!

Four Places You’ve Lived

1. Montserrat (West Indies)
2. London, UK
3. Lexington, KY
4. Santa Barbara, CA

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch

(Random old favourites that jump to mind first)

1. The Office (The UK original)
2. Babylon 5
3. Fawlty Towers
4. Samurai Jack

Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation

(You mean a real vacation? Where I don’t take physics or other work with me? We have a problem then….)

1. One of my hideout islands off the coast of Scotland.
2. Dominica, West Indies
3. ?
4. ?

Four Blogs You Visit Daily

(I don’t really visit any blogs daily…..except for the first two….. the others ocassionally)

1. Cosmic Variance (to find out what the others are up to!)
2. A blog, “cvjlab”, if you like, that I use to run discussions, etc, in my research group of students, etc… which I’ll tell you about some time. It’s not ready for prime time…..
3. The blog that lives on my laptop, called “cvj’s diary”. Yeah, it’s just a personal diary, run using wordpress. Very useful. Definitely not for prime time!
4. Pharyngula? Boing Boing? I don’t know. Too infrequent to say…..

Four of Your Favourite Foods

(Sorry, I had to correct the spelling in the fourth word.) (This is tough, again…..)

1. Almonds and other small, simple nuts. Maybe mixed together….but heavy on the almonds. and peanuts. and cashews.
2. fresh fruits cut up and put together in a bowl, on a warm day… must include guava, mango, passion fruit, peaches…..
3. Good beef noodles from a small, excellent restaurant in Taipei or (preferably) Tainan.
4. A properly done simple roast-meat-and-two-veg dish (perhaps pork or lamb), which the British are among the best at doing…..

Four Places You’d Rather Be

(I’m very happy where I am, and tend to make the best of wherever that is. But here are four random places that I could imagine spending some happy times)

1. England, spending some time with my parents and siblings.
2. Tainan (Taiwan). For the food, and excellent friends…. and the food.
3. In the garden.
4. The Village Vanguard, with a glass of the 16 year old Lagavulin….listening to…oh, I don’t know….. Nicholas Payton play “Weather Bird” the way he did all those times I saw him in many places….. at least as well as he did on Gumbo Nouveau. Clip here, but it fades before the fireworks begin…..

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without

(Again…no fair!)

1. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
2. Beethoven’s Late Piano Sonatas, played by Mauritzo Pollini
3. John Coltrane, Blue Trane
4. Billie Holiday, Billie’s Best

Four Vehicles You’ve Owned

1. That old bike (made of many bits of other bikes) I used to disappear with and ride up from Preston to the Forest of Bowland, or other such place at random.
2. That bike (again, a hybrid?) that got me around Princeton for three years, bought at Kopp’s Cycles… is that store still there? I installed some great panniers on it…They were so useful.
3. My first car, a red stick shift 1986 Ford Escort station wagon. One previous owner who drove it mostly highway miles, so the gear shifts were still crisp in 1994. $500.
4. That excellent 1996 red Toyota Corolla I bought new off the lot. (Back when I bought new cars…. I wonder what happened to it?)

Ask me this tomorrow, and I’d have completely different answers….. sigh.

Now I am supposed to nominate four bloggers to carry on the meme, apparently. Well, Robert already took PZ Myers, so I can’t nominate him again. Some of the other people I’d nominate aren’t running blogs that woud do this kind of thing: Any one of the inkycircus bloggers (I don’t know them well enough to know who is whom yet)… How about Juan Cole? Wrong kind of blog again. Oh, I know…Christine Boese! And how about Pyracantha?

You know what? I think that I’m going to create a new meme of this list-variety. It is going to be a science-based one, since I’ve not seen one before.

4×4 (so as not to spend way too much time on it):

Four scientists (living or dead) you’d like to have a long dinner conversation with.

Four favourite research papers.

Your four favourites of your own papers/ideas.

Your four things you’d like to do in your field before you die.

Hmm…… might need to refine/rethink those….. Does anyone want to run with that? I’m too tired from the above meme to have a go…..

-cvj