cleolinda would put it):1. I habitually touch the edges of things while walking: walls, doorknobs, metal cabinets. This came from living in Northern Virginia, which gets extremely dry in winter and so you're always at risk from static, so I was always grounding myself. Otherwise, you'd get a visible blue bolt shoot from your fingers sometimes, like a welding arc or that energy that shoots out from Sith lords' fingertips:
Sith Lightning, you're burning up the Jedi knights
(Sith Lightning, go Sith Lightning)
Sith Lightning, you're good to have around in fights
(Sith Lightning, go Sith Lightning)
I am supreme
My victims scream
From Sith Lightning! (Written by Peter David in the comments thread of this Star Wars post)
2. As much as I pay attention to song lyrics, I can be pretty clueless about some of them sometimes. It took me years to realize about Blazing Saddles that there was a joke to the line "He rode a blazing saddle..."
3. My online published writing includes at least one "Googlewhack" (i.e. a phrase that, when searched for, results in only one hit in Google). Type the phrase "fighter pilot sympathy" (including the quotes) and you'll get it.
4. I once convinced myself in third grade that I'd run so fast that, briefly, my feet were pumping but not touching the ground. I was a weird kid.
5. Back in college, I once started a phone interview while half-naked. Same as my then-girlfriend (in the same room, even).
6. One of the first photos (maybe the first) I ever took was when I was 10, during Spring Break 1984 at Epcot Center at Walt Disney World. I borrowed my Grandpa Irv's camera while our family waited to enter the park and I angled up towards the bottom of Spaceship Earth. It was an awkward shot, frankly, but already I was going for odd camera angles...
7. My first published article was for a school newsletter when I was in fourth grade. I polled some fellow students on their favorite flavors of ice cream.
8. One writing indulgence I allowed myself when on the Hermiston Herald was to incorporate song lyrics or titles into my articles. A profile of a high school student who'd raised ducks for their eggs for an FFA project had the lead "He was the egg man." I worked the Oingo Boingo song titles "Just Another Day" and "Wild Sex in the Working Class" into a review that mentioned Kevin Smith's Clerks. I even did this with the Beastie Boys' "The Sounds of Science" ("These are the sounds of science in the field...").
