I answer some questions...

As I wrote yesterday, I was nominated for a Liebster Award.

One of the obligations attached to the award is to answer a list of questions posed by the person who nominated me (that would, of course, be Isobel DeBrujah, at Center Pull Photography)

1. What are you most passionate about?

Writing. But Anthropology (especially physical anthropology, and very especially fossils and human evolution) and Doctor Who probably come a close, mutual second.

2. Why do you blog?

Because I love to write, I have to write, I have opinions, and this is a good way to express those opinions without making my IRL friends want to strangle me.

3. What is your favorite meal?

Oooh. That's difficult. Lately, it's been chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes, corn, and country gravy. But again, there has to be a second place, and that would go to either prime rib and baked potato or lasagna. Now, if you're talking breakfast, that would have to be scrambled eggs and hashbrowns with bacon and toast.

4. What book or books do you think everyone should read?

I think everyone should read my favorite book in the world, The Longest Cave, by Roger Brucker and Richard Watson. It is about the efforts, which both men took part in, to find an underground connection between the Crystal Cave System in Kentucky with Mammoth Cave, which lie under karst ridges close by one another, efforts which were finally successful in the early 1970s, after at least a couple of decades of concentrated effort. It is a good book just as adventure reporting, but the reason I love it so much is that it shows how a group of people can have a good time, and an interesting time, working together to reach a goal, just for the satisfaction of having done the thing, and not because it's going to make them rich or famous. It's an important lesson for our times, I think.

I also think everyone should read Kage Baker's novels and short stories of The Company, starting with In The Garden of Iden, which somehow manages to successfully combine science fiction and romance in Mary Tudor's England. My favorite is Mendoza In Hollywood, which takes place before Hollywood was Hollywood, and in which there is a very large and vociferous pet California Condor, and in which they bring in movies from the future for a continuing film festival. Did I mention, there is time travel as well as immortality in these books? They are good science fiction and good fun, but with some wickedly on-point social commentary for our times.

5. If money were no object, how would you occupy the rest of your life?

Writing and traveling.

6. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

I'd like to hear God say, "Welcome, and don't worry. None of those people who thought they'd be here are here [as he glances meaningfully down toward the Other Place]. But all of your friends who came before you are here, and they're all waiting just inside to see you."

7. What is one thing you've never been able to/had time to/had funds to do that you still want to do?

Take a no-time-limit driving tour of the United States. I have been on one driving trip across country, that was confined mostly to the South, when I was still a teenager (in fact the trip ended on my last day as a teenager), but there was a time limit on that of just over three weeks. I could probably make the trip last close to a year.

8. What is your favorite television show and why?

Doctor Who (and the other shows set in the Whoniverse, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures). I love the Whoniverse because, as Craig Ferguson has said, it represents the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism. I'm kind of a cynic myself, but I wish I wasn't, or at least not as much of one as I am. Also, it is the only fictional world that I can imagine wanting to live in.

9. What is your least enjoyable chore?

Vacuuming. I'd rather clean the bathroom, and I hate cleaning the bathroom.

10. What one thing about you is cool?

That I'm known among my friends as "The Human Spell-Check". Which, of course, indicates how cool I'm really, really not.

11. Do you have pets?

Not currently, although my roommate is talking about getting a cat. As I told her, now that's something I'd be willing to vacuum every day for. That means I want a cat a lot.

Actually, I've only ever had two pets. There was Prince, the German Shepard my parents had before they had me, and then starting in about fourth grade I had an orange and white cat called Tiger.

As I also wrote yesterday, more nominations will be forthcoming as I can get the computer time to put the rest of the list together.