Inspired by
Brett and
Scott, I've made up my list of 50 things you (probably) don't know about me.
1. My wife is six inches taller than me. I'm 5'3".
2. I've never partaken of any sort of illegal or unprescribed drug, excluding second-hand joint smoke. Nor have I ever smoked a cigarette. I know one sibling who has, though.
3. For a long time, the biggest tragedy in my life was the loss of the dog. He was stolen. Our nanny and I saw the guy with our dog at a country store but by the time she called my parents, he'd taken off.
4. I wanted to be a garbageman when I was young.
5. In high school, my goal was to clone a mammoth. This was before PCR technology.
6. I've carried mammoth tusks, a Lambeosaurus skull, and other cool fossils. I found a tyrannosaur tooth at a hadrosaur dig.
7. I wear boxer briefs or boxers. I wore briefs until my mid-20s.
8. I think that I could have played at least college football if I'd grown a foot taller. I was a superb running back into my early teens, and played safety, too - then everyone else grew up. A new coach couldn't see past my size and all I was allowed to do was kickoff coverage. I couldn't stomach that and quit organized ball. All through high school, I was always picked first in pick-up tackle football games.
9. The only bone I've ever broken is the medial corner of the proximal end of the proximal phalange (shouldn't that be phalanx?) of my right thumb. In layman's terms, if you hold your hand in a thumb-up gesture, I broke a corner off the lower of the two thumb bones, the corner that faces away from the other fingers.
10. I told my mother I broke it taking a heavy book off the shelf while I was home sick from a half-day of school. In fact, I played sick and went to play football that afternoon. I broke it reaching back for a pass, which bent my thumb back. (Sorry, Mum.) I broke it again while tackled during a pick-up game at university.
11. I was a member of the
Pace Mannion Fan Club.
12. I once bought a couch for $10 and found $17+ inside it.
13. I represented my high school on Reach for the Top, an extinct Canadian high-school quiz show. We could never beat Jerry Michopoulos and the rest of the Malcolm Campbell team. I was teammates with noted eccentric/prisoner
Kenny Hechtman.
14. I was on Rice University's College Bowl team in 1988 and went to the national finals tournament in Chicago. We lost our first two games and spent the rest of the weekend drinking and watching the Cubs from behind home plate, courtesy of the Houston Astros' Bob Knepper (I think, I was drunk).
15. I got 1480/1600 on my SAT and 2320/2400 on the General GRE.
16. When I visited the Rice for an admissions interview, the first student I met was Babs N. She gave me a tour of the campus. Later, she appeared naked in Playboy as a Girl of the Southwest Conference.
17. I went naked polar-bear swimming in Long Island Sound with
Kirk Johnson.
18. My father and I discovered I needed glasses when I couldn't read the clock in the Montreal Forum during a Habs game.
19. I despise cilantro.
20. I'm not a big fan of beer and almost never drink it for pleasure.
21. I shave twice a week at most, and I use a beard trimmer to do so, so I always have stubble.
22. I went to LCC for two weeks, where I was paddled for not doing homework. I basically had to picket my parents every day before they agreed to take me out of there.
23. My wife's first husband and I were in the same class during my two weeks at LCC.
24. I took a creative writing class at Concordia before I entered the journalism program. Our class self-published a collection of short stories called "No Right Answers". I edited the thing.
25. I was one of seven partners who made up Tech Pubs, a company that wrote the technical manual for World War II Online. The game's first publisher, Strategy First, never paid us the $38,000 in royalties they owed us. We sued. Two weeks before our court date, the company entered bankruptcy protection.
26. I flew from Toronto to New York City in the flight deck of an El Al 747-400.
27. I tried to get into medical school, and I got great MCAT scores, but I never made it past the interviews. This was 1990-91. In Edmonton, they asked what I thought the biggest danger in the world was. I explained that the impending break-up of the Soviet Union would leave poorly disciplined daughter states in control of nuclear weapons. I think the answer they were looking for was AIDS.
28. My buddy Danny Frankel and I skipped school to catch the first showings of each of the first three Star Wars films.
29. I spent parts of two summers working in banana plantations in Israel. At Rice, I stole some ornamental banana plants from Baker College and grew them outside my room. The year after I graduated, they bore fruit.
30. When I was five, my brother dropped a five-pound can of crayons on my head for no reason at all. I got five stitches. I still have the scar at what used to be my hairline.
31. I made par on the first golf hole I ever played. I've only played three rounds in my life.
32. In college, I grew my hair long, just long enough to make a ponytail.
33. In my mid-20s, I had a gastroscopy at the hospital I worked at. The doctor let me steer and look at my stomach while I was hopped up on IV Valium.
34. My favourite Pokemon is called Farfetch'd. It's a duck who whacks enemies with his leek.
35. I need silence to work effectively. Music is too distracting.
36. I like doing taxes.
37. Mosquitoes seem drawn to me more than to other people.
38. My first AD&D character was Daedelus, a lawful evil cleric of Inana. I still have the character sheet.
39. My high-school yearbook statement was a Basic computer program that if run would print "FUCK. HAH. I GOT A DIRTY WORD BY THEM."
40. I attended the 1981 Blue Monday game that knocked the Expos out of their only playoff appearance.
41. The three longest road trips I've undertaken are, in chronological order, Houston-New Orleans-Boca Raton and back, Boca Raton-Montreal, and San Jose-Salt Lake City-Denver-Oshkosh-Montreal.
42. I once helped a gay man paint his gallery overnight. His lover showed up in the morning and punched him because I stayed over. Nothing had gone on, but I felt awkward.
43. I goosed my first girlfriend and threw her down a flight of stairs by mistake.
44. I've never played baseball, only softball.
45. I don't have a pilot's license and I don't know radio protocol, but I can fly a plane from start-up to shutdown, and I do fly my dad's Cessna. When piloting, I always get airsick, probably from looking at the gauges. I never feel nauseated as a mere passenger.
46. My favourite book is probably Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard".
47. One of my earliest memories is losing my Expos hat at a zoo. It fell into the bear pit. My brother laughed at me, so I took his hat and threw it in the pit after mine. I also remember going to Messina, N.Y. with my mother's aunt and uncle. I have a vague memory of going to Lake George, N.Y., and having our car towed up a hill in a rainstorm. And I remember my dad waking me to watch the Habs win the Stanley Cup against the Black Hawks in 1971. I was five. I can't place the others chronologically.
48. The painting in our dining room came from the basement of my parent's house. It still has dents in it from the floor hockey we used to play down there.
49. I name my hard drive partitions after dinosaurs and "Futurama" characters.
50. I exhibit mild
trichotillomania, which sometimes leaves me with sparse patches on my mustache or goatee.
