Wednesday, January 30, 2008

20 questions (part 4)

Don't make us wait!
Okay.

16. Do you feel guilty that school was canceled today and you got to stay home with Charlie while your wife had to go to work?
Absolutely not. Maybe if my wife worked on Fridays, or in Wisconsin where we don't take a day off every other week to celebrate stuff like Chester A. Arthur's birthday. But probably not even then because she is so fond of mocking me on days when I have school and she doesn't. It's called karma, dear. Now I have to finish this up so I can go take a nap.

17. So what did you do with your day off?
First, I lay on the couch for about an hour watching SportsCenter while Charlie played because it was cold and I didn't want to get out from under my blanket. Then I finally got myself (and Charlie) dressed, and we had breakfast. Special K for me, bananas and a bar for him. Then we watched Sesame Street--a great blog about that forthcoming--before getting bundled up to go out to Menard's. We picked up some light bulbs and yogurt-covered pretzels (which Charlie inexplicably called "eggs" all morning), then stopped by McDonald's for lunch. After we got home and Charlie played while I changed the lightbulbs downstairs, he got a snack of corn dogs and crackers before taking a nap. Now I intend to do the same (minus the corn dogs). Outstanding morning.

18. Tell us something interesting you learned in college.
There's one story that always sticks out to me more than anything else:

In the 1950's, Borneo was having some trouble with mosquitoes spreading malaria, so the World Health Organization decided to help by flying in lots of DDT with which to spray the crops. And it worked, but now there were a bunch of dead insects full of DDT, and these gecko lizards were eating them, so the lizards were dying too. And then the cats would eat the lizards (!), so the cats would die. And without any cats, the rat population sky-rocketed, so the sylvatic plague and typhus were spread all over Borneo. So do you know how the World Health Organization helped to fix this problem? They parachuted cats into Borneo. 14,000 of them! And I know this probably isn't the way it actually happened, but I always imagine a bunch of cats in individual parachutes floating down, then landing and scampering off to eat a rat.

Isn't that a great story? It's so great, in fact, that they made a children's book out of it. You can find a PowerPoint of the out-of-print book here. Anyway, I learned that from Skip Wittler in Environmental Studies. And I'm sure that all of my English professors are thrilled that the only thing I remember from college is something I learned in a science class.

19. What's the strangest headline you've run across on the Internet today?
Clay Aiken knows he's "not cool," but still a panties magnet.

20. Now that you're obsessed with the CMT's 20 Questions web site (which you came across by Googling "20 questions" in an effort to come up with material for this blog), have you come across any more factoids as interesting as Taylor Swift's Deff Leppard obsession?
Indeed. For example:

Bucky Covington loves Eminem.
Kellie Pickler thinks she's "very intelligent."
There was, at one point, a rumor that Barbara Mandrell, Dolly Parton, and another similar artist were going to star in a show that was "much like The Golden Girls." (Unfortunately, Barbara doesn't know anything about it.)
Trace Adkins describes his wife as "ultra-cool" about all the beautiful women in his videos.
Garrison Keillor thinks that "the younger generation is forgetting what a tomato tastes like."
Ron White thinks that all comedies on mainstream TV right now "suck" except South Park and The Family Guy.
If Carrie Underwood had to choose between animals and men, she would choose animals.

For more stunning revelations on the country music scene, check out CMT.com.

That was fun. Maybe we'll do it again sometime.

Until then, later gators.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just clicked on the Clay Aiken link, and Internet Explorer had to "inexplicably" shut down. Coincidence???