Me, me meme! :: 08:27 PM :: easyjetsetter

Via

Seven Things To Do Before I Die
1. Be in a motorcade. And not as an outrider.
2. Take the Trans-Manchurian Railway while reading A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
3. Eat at the French Laundry in Napa Valley. And someone else pay.
4. Take a class from either Harold Bloom, Stephen Pinker or Niall Ferguson.
5. Learn how to plumb and wire a house.
6. Have the self-discipline and the money to read both the New Yorker and the Economist weekly. I tend to be in the mood for one or the other, even when I can afford to spend £10 plus on magazines every week.
7. My own tax return.

Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Cut in a straight line. Not even with a guillotine paper cutter thing.
2. Cry in front of you. That's the worst thing I could do.
3. Sew. But MTF can. Or knit. But the wife can.
4. Directions. And take measurements. And counting.
5. Throw, catch or bat. Ball games are dead to me.
6. Woodwork. See 1.
7. My own tax return. See 4.
I'm basically a chocolate teapot. Utterly, utterly useless.

Seven Things That Attract Me to… books
1. If they have that nice, musty, old, papery smell. And little white flakes falling out of the inside...
2. If the words "tour de force," "journey," "thriller" and "powerful" are not in the review blurbs. In fact, no review blurbs is best.
3. If there is no photo of the author.
4. If there's an inscription inside from the original purchaser for the original recipient.
5. Large font
6. Lots of pictures
7. Chewable.


Seven Things I Say
1. I'm such an idiot.
2. I don't let fashion get in the way of being stylish
3. Natch. (short version of naturally)
4. Generally speaking (followed by anecdotal evidence)
5. Pfft. (With pout and shrug)
6. I have no problem being selfish. The world would be a nicer place if more people admitted that they were selfish.
7. I can lose weight any time I feel like it.

Seven Books That I Love (and a pithy moral for each, so that you get the gist)
1. House of Mirth - Edith Wharton: Pride in your beauty may cause death from laudanum overdose.
2. Washington Square - Henry James: It's better to be loved for your money than not to be loved at all. No matter what your Father thinks.
3. Arcadia - Tom Stoppard (Yes, I know, it's a play): Despite entropy, the world is nevertheless a fascinating place.
4. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman: Humans are touched by the divine, animated by their own consciousness, but there's no such thing as God and anything else is an anthropomorphic delusion
5. The Leopard - Guiseppe Thomasi di Lampedusa: in order for civilisation to remain the same, everything must change
6. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov: what morality condemns, poetry can redeem.
7. Any Asterix from before Goscinny died. Ostensibly Gauls resisting Romans but actually, in my opinion, a metaphor for the French cultural struggle agains the cultural empire of the American export of globalization and commercialism. Honest.

Seven Movies That I’ve Loved (at different times and in no particular order)
1. Royal Tenenbaums
2. Election
3. The Sound of Music (a masterpiece, and anyone who says otherwise is horrid)
4. Apocalypse Now (and accompanying documentary)
5. Rear Window/Charade (a tough one this, basically, any film with jimmy stewart or audrey hepburn)
6. Amelie
7. Being There

Seven People To Tag (in no particular order)
1. Petite
2. Armin
3. Antipo
4. Small Town Diva
5. In Actual Fact
6. Just Dazzle
7. Justin