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Thursday 1 November 2007

Just Passing on a Meme

Right. I give Stephen Matheson the coveted PEDEBA award for October, and what do I get in return? An infection. Stephen has tagged me with an evolving blog meme. Go to Pharyngula for an overview of this meme's origin. The rules are as follows:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
  • You can leave them exactly as is.
  • You can delete any one question.
  • You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
  • You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
  • You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My Ancestors:

My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My great-grandparent is The Anterior Commissure
My grandparent is Laelaps
My parent is Quintessence of Dust

My Questions (and Answers):

  1. The best scary movie in sociopolitical dystopias is: Children of Men
  2. The best sexy song in pop rock is: “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by the Barenaked Ladies covering Bruce Cockburn
  3. The best classical story in Historical Fiction is: “I, Claudius” by Robert Graves
  4. The best book appealing to both children and adults in Science Fiction is: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

(Ok, I think I bent the rules a bit).

The Ongoing Infection:

The intent of my blog was to interact with other evangelicals grappling with the evolution / faith issue. This has been rewarding. However, it has also been stimulating interacting with those who may not share my evangelical perspective. So in the spirit of sharing, I’m passing on this infection to 4 of these bloggers, bloggers who range from "I might be an Evangelical depending on your definition" to "I am definitely not an Evangelical":

  1. James at Exploring our Matrix
  2. Stephen at Emerging from Babel
  3. Martin at Sun and Shield
  4. Henry at Threads from Henry’s Web

4 comments:

Stephen Matheson said...

Think of the "infection" as a term of endearment! :-) BTW, will the prize money be automatically deposited in my PayPal account, or should I expect a cashier's check?

Steve Martin said...

Hi Stephen,
Paypal seems to be having a problem with the amount equivalent to 10% of our monthly income. Still looking into that. You may want to consider keeping your teaching and research position, and least for the short term.

James F. McGrath said...

Thanks - I felt a bit left out never having been infected...

http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2007/11/expelled-and-infected-all-in-one-day.html

stc said...

I've just noticed this post. I'll try to have a go at it over the weekend, but I think I'll shift it over to my "secular blog" (coincidentally called Outside the Box, not to be confused with OutsideTheBox).