88 posts tagged “qotd”

What's your favorite song with "America" or "USA" in the title? Bonus points if you share it with us.

Song For America

Optiganally Yours

I happen to have just the thing.

What's the next album you're looking forward to buying?

Golden Delicious

Mike Doughty

If you live in a household of more than one, how do you distribute the household chores?

It sort of goes like this.  I cook, I sort of clean, I do the laundry, I carry things, and Bootsie yells at me when I let something go for too long without getting done.  It's a sort of funny arrangement, but it works. 

More and more people are working remotely these days. Does your job allow you to do so? How much face-time do you usually put in at the office during any given week?

I'm an office goer, and I have to admit that I'm still really happy about it.  It helps that the drive out to the office gives me an incredible view of the McDowell mountains which changes subtly from day to day and is always captivating, but the real reason is that I've done the "work from home" thing two jobs ago and I don't think it suited me, or that I was suited for it.

I waste plenty of time in my office-- at home this was even worse.  And not really feeling focused at home meant that even after the end of the official "work day" I felt like I should be doing work, to make up for it.  Basically, there was nowhere to go in order to put work aside.  I really thought I wanted to work like that, but I think that my environment ad my personality need a few tweaks before that's really productive or enjoyable.

How do you feel about your birthday?  Do you look forward to it and remind all your friends, or do you dread it and try to keep it a secret?

First off, I know there are Six Aparters in my hood.  Can any of you provide anything like a logical explanation as to why comments are now automatically turned off for Vox Hunt and QotD?  Seriously?  In what context does that decision make sense?

Okay, sorry, done now.

I don't usually tell people about my birthday, but it's not because I dread it or anything.  I just don't really think I want people to make a fuss about me.  I've been trying to get up the gumption to go the Hobbit route and give lots of little gifts to everyone on my birthday.  I mean, it seems like that's the perfect time for all those thanksgiving/turn over a new leaf sorts of things that go on en masse at different times of the year.  I sort of wanted to send out the "holiday letter" sort of thing on my birthday, but at the last minute I choked because a). I was being lazy and b). I didn't want to be seen as being so egotistical that I was mailing everyone to remind them that it was my birthday.  (Since, you know, mostly for us Americans a birthday means that I expect a gift or, at the very least, to be publicly humiliated in a franchised eatery.)

The root of the problem, of course, is that I am that egotistical.  Ah well.

If you could create your own National Holiday, what would it be and when? 
Submitted by John M.

Well, golly.  How could I miss this one?  As many of you already know, I am already trying to pioneer my first National Holiday, Hookermas, which has nothing at all to do with prostitution.  However, I was recently thinking to myself how much I would also like to observe Irving R. Feldman's Birthday.  According to Murray Burns (of Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns):

Irving R. Feldman's Birthday is my own personal national holiday.  I did not open it up for the public. He is proprietor of perhaps the most distinguished kosher delicatessen in this neighborhood and as such I hold the day of his birth in reverence.

Naturally, this begs several questions:

• If the holiday is not open to the public, should I celebrate it or should I celebrate something like it?
• How do you celebrate the birthday of a fictional character?  More importantly, how do you decide when it it?
• Should I, instead, pick the birthday of the proprietor of my favorite local eatery to hold in reverence?
• Should I just make up a day, make up a reason, and take the day off?
  

How far from your last home do you live? Why did you move and are you glad you did? 
Submitted by Matthew 25.

It looks like 2,706 mi. by highway, if you believe Google Maps.  We were seriously running out of money back in New England, and, really, all of my life I wanted to live somewhere other than where I grew up.  Not so much because I disliked the absurd cost of living, the armchair socialists, or the closed-door you-have-to-know-someone attitude of Boston, but because I wanted to get to know another part of the country.

My pops-- we'll call him E. B. Mook-- did a lot of traveling when I was a kid.  Mostly Europe, some Asia, some domestic, and the occasional trip to the Dominican Republic.  (Actually, I was more or less grown when his company was doing work in the DR, but that's neither here nor there.)  Anyway, he got to see a fair amount of sights as a tourist and business traveler, but since I'm that sort of contrary son, I always thought that the best kind of tourism was citizen tourism.  Go somewhere and really live there, as the locals do.  So, for no other reason, Cowboy Country is such a different experience from the Northeast that I'm glad I came.

What was your major or field of study in college? Did you wind up working in that field or using that degree? If not, what field have you wound up in? 
Submitted by sneuf. 

My degree:

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Fredric Jameson

What were your top 10 favorite songs or albums of 2007?

I forgot there was an easy way to answer this.  Ok, so it's not albums that came out this year, but this is what I listened to most in 2007.

Albums

1. OK Go – Oh No
2. Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
   
3. Puerto Muerto – See You in Hell
4. The Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs
   
5. The Fratellis – Costello Music
6. OK Go – OK Go
7. The Decemberists – Her Majesty the Decemberists
8. The Dresden Dolls – Yes, Virginia...
9. The Format – Dog Problems
10. They Might Be Giants – Mink Car

1. Puerto Muerto – Walking Boss
2. Puerto Muerto – Josephine
3. The Decemberists – Sons & Daughters
4. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife 3
5. Puerto Muerto – Stars
6. Tom Waits – Come on Up to the House
7. Death Cab for Cutie – Crooked Teeth
8. Iron & Wine / Calexico – History of Lovers
9. Belle and Sebastian – Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying
10. Eels – Hospital Food
11. The New Pornographers – Letter From an Occupant
12. Curtis Eller's American Circus – Sugar In My Coffin

What's your favorite kind of homemade cookie?  Share the recipe if you have it.

I used to be a pretty die hard Nestle's Tollhouse Cookie guy, but in the last month I've come to the dark side of Trader Joe's Frozen Cookie Dough because:

1. while "from scratch" is better, it's not that much better
2. little balls of frozen cookie dough are yummy on their own
3. you're less likely to gorge yourself on the little frozen cookie bites than the tube of raw dough.
   

The Ultimate Cookie Book (Better Homes & Gardens)

Other than that, though, I really dig my mom's snickerdoodle recipe (which I think is out of that Ultimate Cookie Book-- my mom's got an older edition, but I'm fairly sure it's the same) and Bootsie's grandma's molasses cookie recipe.  I likes me the old folks cookies now.