Meme

Okay, I'm going to be honest, here. I don't really understand these Meme things. But Sween seems to like them and had the grace of "tagging" me with this one. I don't really know what these things are...as best I can tell it's an excuse to write stuff. Which I guess kind of fits into the whole blog thing. But still, I've been dreading the day when I'd be asked to do one of these things. I will, however, at least honour the request of whomever sent it my way by doing my best to respond.

I guess if I'm to do this right, I better do some research. It turns out that the term Meme (pronounced "meem") is "a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another". The term was invented by the acclaimed science writer Richard Dawkins who has written books including The Selfish Gene and Unweaving the Rainbow. It's an interesting idea, and I think I've heard it talked about in seminars about different pods of whales exhibiting different cultural behaviour.

The general idea is that memes are things like paintbrushes or catchy jingles or new ways of making tires...basically the social/technological equivalent to genes. I'm not sure if the meat of this document counts as cultural information about me that will be passed on, thereby making the world a different place.

Okay, I'm done dragging my feet. Let's get this over with.

6 things that you probably didn't know about me, but won't change your life now that you do

I was once given a wooden eggplant as a gift during a courtship. It worked.

I have only had one concussion in my life. In happened while playing pool. It did not involve a ball flying off the table, as people usually expect. Rather, it involved a ceiling fan and a pool cue. It basically happened like this: four of us were playing pool. We had invented a never-ending game that we dubbed "doubles pool". It requires four players, two teams, and two tables. If you're playing solids, your partner is playing stripes on the other table. Every time you sink a ball, it goes onto the other table. The goal is to clear all the balls of your table and sink the 8-ball but in order to do that, your opponent on the other table must be unable to sink one of fifteen balls on the other table, hence a never-ending game.

Anyway, my opponent and I were waiting for a round on the other table to finish, when I got smacked on the head and fell to the ground. I tried to get up and couldn't. It took me three tries before I successfully climbed back up to onto my feet. After trying to figure out what happened, I theorized that my friend's pool cue got into a ceiling fan, flew down and hit me in the head, and bounced back up. All that happened without my friend noticing. It happened without anybody noticing! My friend thought he almost lost a grip on his cue but there was no way it could have hit me on the head like that. Nobody at the table believed me until my friend checked the end of his cue and saw a 2 mm dent in its side that wasn't there before.

Nothing annoys me like a pen that doesn't have a cap. Not even a cap that doesn't have a pen. After years of training, I've learned not to let this govern my life, in fact I've learned to ignore it most of the time, but it's been difficult.

On a related note, I have four sharpened pencils on my desk so that if I'm scribbling something in the heat of the moment and my pencil gets too dull, I don't have to take the time to sharpen it right away.

I recently thanked somebody for giving me an excuse to read an applied mathematics textbook.

I love olives, except for canned olives. Canned olives are to me what garlic is to a vampire. I absolutely loath them. If I was given the choice of eating one cup of canned olives or one cup of dry flour, I'd pick the flour.

I have never met another oceanographer that gets nearly as seasick as me. I am fine on small boats, but on ships I suffer near-constant nausea. Everyone else seems to get over seasickness after a couple of days (if they get sick at all). I was once at sea for three weeks and didn't get over being sick. When I wasn't working, I was lying in my bed. When I was working, I was dry-heaving. Drinking liquid on an empty stomach would make me throw up, so to stay hydrated, I ate fruit between meals. Until we ran out of fruit. Then it was cucumbers. Then carrots. Then lettuce. Then olives. Canned Olives.

Despite this weakness, I still love being at sea.