Thanks, Chris

1. Of all the books that you have eventually finished after many starts & stops, which one took you the longest and how long did it eventually take?

Oh, good heavens. See, the problem with this kind of question is that it presumes the memer wanders around with such information readily on tap in their brain. With the exception of a few categories of data, my mind doesn't work that way. In order to answer it, I would have to wander through a library -- an actual physical library -- filled with every single book I have ever read in my entire life, and look at each and every one of them to see if a memory about it being difficult to read and get through surfaced. My mind is excellent at responding to memory triggers; it sucks at pulling up such data out of thin air. This is also why I loathe memes about favorite books, most disliked books, ten books a person must read, etc.

That said, I wandered my current library and came up with two:

Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment by I. G. Simmons, and John Bidwell and California: The Life and Writings of a Pioneer 1841-1900 by Michael J. Gillis and Michael F. Magliari. The first was impossibly dense, which was awful, because I'd assigned it to a class of inexperienced freshmen. I was having to write explanatory glosses of every damn paragraph; I hate to think what it did to my students. The second I read for a book review. It took me for-freakin'-ever, because it was filled with lots and lots of facts about a guy I wasn't that interested in, and the two authors kept overlapping, and I couldn't tell the point of the book beyond that Bidwell was nifty-spifty-keen, and it was really poorly organized, and it talked far more about Bidwell than his writings, and was crap about context. Then, after all of that, the reviewers decided to run with someone else's review of the book, and never told me (I learned this by seeing the other person's review when I went to see if mine had been published).

2. What great band (or album or song) have you heard so often, you wouldn?t mind never hearing again even though you still think the band (or album or song) is great?

See rant, above. Then add in that I am absolutely horrible at knowing or recognizing popular bands of any kind. The artists I know best are weird and small-scale and little known. I exist in a pop music bubble of sorts -- I recognize names of groups, but if a song plays on the radio, I have no idea who wrote it, nine times out of ten. I am the person who did not know who Pink Floyd was until I went to college. I am the person who, in high school, was well-liked because they could put anything on the radio (except most heavy metal and a lot of jazz) and I wouldn't care. Unless I'm singing or dancing with it, music is aural wallpaper for me most of the time. If there's something else to compel my attention, music awareness goes right out the window.

How about any of the Agical-May Evor-Tray ones? (And if any o' you mention this name, or even its abbreviation in the comments, without scrambling it first, you run a very very high risk of having your comment deleted. I am very sick of people coming here looking for the damn lyrics!)

Although perhaps not. I don't think it's really all that great. It's my answer more because it annoys me than because it's good. (Ducks to avoid the rotten tomatoes from hordes of fans.)

3. Which cliché or often cited quote needs to be placed in quarantine for a few decades?

Agh, agh, agh! See, rants 1 and 2, above.

"It's a free country" perhaps?

4. During the 1990s "Compassion Fatigue" received a lot of press, now the media is giddy with "Donation Fatigue". What will be the next trendy fatigue?

Fatigue fatigue. More seriously, how about Conservation Fatigue? (I'm thinking peak oil here.)

5. What percentage of respondents will answer "meme fatigue" to question #4?

Well, presumably anyone who chooses to respond likes doing memes, so I'm guessing the percentage will be low, perhaps even zero.

Inflicted by Chris Clarke

Comments

[Scrivener]

Do you seriously get lots of hits for those cartoons that shall not be named by me in this thread? I would guess that all of those people would get plenty of hits elsewhere--just in our corner of blogland, I'd guess pgrrrrrrrrrrrl would get more of that traffic. Hmm. The internets are a strange place.

I hope you're wrong on Conservation Fatigue. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for GOP Fatigue.

[Rana]

GOP Fatigue would be utterly awesome. It would be delightful if they couldn't get the time of day -- though if it meant the press wasn't covering them, even when they were being criminals, I'd pass.

My thought on Conservation Fatigue was that (hopefully) the press will begin drumming it at us night and day, tiring us out. (I'm doubtful though, since it's not a sexy topic.)

I don't get the hits for the cartoons, but for the lyrics, especially for the second song's. For some reason, people are inspired to drive by and leave inane comments about what they think the lyrics are, and other people drive by and say, that they're wrong. I had to re-write the post and close comments to stop it -- but they still show up regularly on my hit list. (All because of one stupid post about a year ago - I bet Jimbo knows how that works!)