It appears that I may be an unthinking blogger, having been missed by the more flattering of the two meme thingies that have been floating around the cinemablogosphere. But now I’ve been tagged both by Culture Snob by good ol’ Burbanked for the other meme, an experiment in radical self indulgence they’re calling the “Eight Things” meme.

Apparently the first rule is that I must post the rules, so here goes:

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts
2. I have to start with eight random facts/habits about myself
3. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules
4. At the end of this post, I need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. My Chicagoan grandparents on my mother’s side claimed to have known all the main players in the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case — the families of the two younger killers as well as the family of the victim, Bobby Franks, and the lawyers including the legendary defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. Nevertheless, I haven’t much cared for any of the films drawn from the case.

2. The first two (vinyl) albums I bought with my own money were ELO’s A New World’s Record and Bernard Herrmann’s score to Obsession. A classicist even then — though I’m oddly still not really a big fan of most classical music, unless you count Kurt Weil and Scott Joplin.

3. I love a piano. However, I can’t play a piano. (Not yet, anyway. There’s this guy on the PBS pledge drives….)

4. I wrote produced, and directed something called “Three Days of the Fanboy”, back before the term “fanboy” had made it into the general lexicon. It failed to rock either the comedy or geek world, but if an in-joke gone slightly out of control from the mid-nineties and jokes about Paul Tsongas are your thing, this might be for you. It’s also got a really terrific narrator in my old friend, Scott Brick — so terrific, in fact, that he is now a real live audio book superstar. Really. On the other hand, as I recall, our best review had the words “not quite the Mercury Theater” in it. You can see my cartoonist pal Randy Reynaldo’s great art for it, and even order it if you’re a real sucker for punishment — about three quarters of the way down on this page.

5. My first real hero was Groucho Marx.

6. This one’s for fans of C-SPAN writer interviews. I almost always write exclusively at a keyboard and have been composing at the keyboard (typewriters too) since I was about 14. This is fortunate because my handwriting is terrible, though my pre-computer typing wasn’t much better — lots of strikeouts. My highschool newspaper editor signed my yearbook “to the only person I know with illegible typing.”

7. Embarrassment-based comedy scenes sometimes cause me to change channels or stop the TiVo. The early seasons of “Frasier” and now “The Office” seems to bring out this reaction fairly regularly. If it’s a movie, I sometimes reach for an imaginary channel changer.

8. I have been the object of random violence in at least three student films (one was my own) and one more upcoming indie film. If you would like me to be object of random violence in your film, feel free to contact me.

TAG YOU’RE IT

Please note: Some of these people are undoubtedly being tagged multiple times. Also, I absolutely, positively will understand if and why if any (or all) of these good folks ignore this meme. This is not some obnoxious chain letter. On the other hand, I have heard that one film blogger refused to accept it and, two days later, he accidentally put his winning $97,000,000 Power Ball lottery ticket through a paper shredder. True story.

Here are the (un)lucky taggees:

Critic After Dark

Filmscreed

Hell on Frisco Bay

Joes Movie Corner

Mirror/Stage (aka Andy Horbal’s new blog)

Ogg’s Movie Thoughts

The Self-Styled Siren

Windmills of My Mind