A Free Man

I’ve been a blogger now for a few months and in that time I’ve discovered that the blogosphere is a strange and wonderful place - full of all sorts of things I never understood nor felt the need to know about. One of those was memes. I had only heard of this term from reading Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene” in which he uses the term to describe cultural phenomena that represent self-replicating means of transmission - sort of the sociological analog of the gene in biology.

So, I was confused when I was tagged - invited to participate in a meme - for the first time as a blogger. I realized pretty quickly that it didn’t have much to do with Dawkins. In fact, I think that tagging people to do memes is sort of the cyber version of the chain letter - kind of seeing how far around the world your idea can get. But my bigger problem with doing memes is that I’m kind of a control freak when it comes to content on my site, so I don’t want to relinquish my editorial control. So typically I ignore tags when I get them, which makes me feel kind of like an asshole.

But, all that being said, I got tagged by Kathy at What Do I Know? the other day with a meme that was just too appealing to the science and music geeks in me to resist. In fact, while I was reading her responses before I realized that she had tagged me, I was thinking that it would be a fun one to do. So here you go - the Pharyngula mutating genre meme…

The Rules:

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.

The Path:

(I’m going to make a change in this section. When this was sent to me it listed parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. I think in a mutating meme it would be more appropriate to use genetic nomenclature, so…)

P: Pharyngula.
F1: Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
F2: Flying Trilobite.
F3: A Blog Around the Clock.
F4: archy.
F5: Why Now?
F6: Rook’s Rants.
F7: PSOTD.
F8: Kathy F.

The Questions:

The best alien encounter song in SF/Fantasy is: “Motorway to Roswell” by The Pixies.

The best “bad” movie in chick flicks is: “Sweet Home Alabama“.

The best non-pop song in pop is: I haven’t a clue what this means so I’ll use my own interpretation, which is just to give you my favorite song of late that you may not have heard on Top 40 radio. How about “Moonshiner” by Uncle Tupelo

Here’s my second change as I’m proud to say I haven’t eaten a PopTart in years. The best flavor filling in sandwiches is: Chicken, mayo, bacon and avocado as prepared by the Oxford Sandwich Company in the Covered Market.

The Victims:

I hesitate to do this after my anti-tagging rant, but I will tag a few fellow biologists who may appreciate the genetic nature of this meme. Jenelle and Jason need to do more blogging. I’d like to see what MOGLI makes of this odd meme. Strange Scottish Girl needs more distractions to slow down her D.Phil progress. Alex of esmon.net, does this interest your inner geek? Consider yourselves tagged. Enjoy.

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