{"id":2746,"date":"2005-03-29T19:36:32","date_gmt":"2005-03-30T00:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/03\/29\/2746.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:48:10","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:48:10","slug":"is-it-a-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/03\/29\/is-it-a-meme\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it a meme?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>OK, now in the category of Least Meme-y Thing that somehow seems like a meme anyway, Your Humble Blogger, in Wikipeding Bobby Short, clicked over to the list of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Category:1924_births\">people born in 1924<\/a>, and was entertained, in a Book of Lists way, for long enough to decide to make a list of 26 of them, all alphabetical and whatnot. My criterion was pretty much whichever name most made me think about the person the name was attached to, or at any rate most caught my attention. Try it yourself, Gentle Reader, but with some other year (you could try using a d6 for the decade and d10 for the year, or use two d10 and add to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Category:1861_births\">1861<\/a> or something to avoid having to decide between Shia LaBeouf and Lindsay Lohan). Anyway, here&#8217;s mine for 1924:\n<ul><li>Lloyd Alexander. An easy win over the evocative Joan Aiken and Chet Atkins, so I suppose actually being in a room with the man counts for something.<\/li>\n<li>Lauren Bacall. This was hard, as I was tempted by Billy Barty, Marlon Brando, Jack Buck, and Poppy Bush, not to mention James Baldwin. But I had to go with Lauren Bacall.<\/li>\n<li>Truman Capote? Wally Cox? Jimmy Carter? No, I&#8217;ll go with Shirley Chisholm.<\/li>\n<li>Stanley Donen. Doris Day was second. Larry Doby was third.<\/li>\n<li>E is a bit scarce. I&#8217;m going with George Economou, who turned out to be who I thought he was. If I had remembered who Billie Sol Estes was, he clearly would have been the selection, but I&#8217;m pretty sure I don&#8217;t want to count people I have to look up.<\/li>\n<li>Sad but true: Norman Fell<\/li>\n<li>Even sadder: I didn&#8217;t recognize a single G. Having been clued in, it&#8217;s probably a toss-up between Bill Grundy and Bette Nesmith Graham (who should be an N, right?)<\/li>\n<li>I gotta go with Buddy Hackett in a tough competition over Al Haig, Benny Hill and Charlton Heston. On the other hand, I&#8217;ve never heard Al Haig tell the joke that starts &#8220;Two faggots were fucking a dead alligator on a city bus...&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>I go for Daniel Inouye over Lee Iacocca. I&#8217;m that way.<\/li>\n<li>At the moment, Maurice Jarre is on the first page, and he&#8217;ll be tough to beat ... Hm. J.J. Johnson edges him.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m going with Ted Kluszewski over Don Knotts and Ed Koch. I still think that baseball card image was foreshortened.<\/li>\n<li>Frank Lautenberg over Sidney Lumet, but ask me again tomorrow. Minority report for Jean-Francois Lyotard<\/li>\n<li>Robert Mugabe, although he has competition even among crazy African dictators. In other categories, it hurt to pass up Rocky Marciano, and I suspect in a weaker year, Mssrs Mandelbrot, Mancini, Marvin, Mastroianni and Murphy, would be in with a chance, not to mention Big Maybelle<\/li>\n<li>Lyn Nofziger. So sue me.<\/li>\n<li>O is a weak one. Yuri Orlov? I&#8217;m going on to P<\/li>\n<li>Bud Powell. Geraldine Page was second, Jacques Pepin third<\/li>\n<li>No Qs<\/li>\n<li>Hard to turn down Nipsey Russell (not to mention Bill Rehnquist), but for me it&#8217;s Al Rosen by a country mile<\/li>\n<li>Allen Sherman is in the lead, I think, although Bobby Short got me here in the first place, and then there&#8217;s Telly Savalas, Phyllis Schlafly, and George Segal. And Rod Serling.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m surprised that Margaret Truman rose to the top, but there was limited competition.<\/li>\n<li>Leon Uris wins by default, but it&#8217;s hard to imagine him out of the top five anyway, right?<\/li>\n<li>Atal Bihari Vajpayee edges out Sarah Vaughn and Gloria Vanderbilt in a surprisingly tough letter<\/li>\n<li>The Divine Miss W (that&#8217;s Dinah Washington) wasn&#8217;t bothered by serious competition here, although the likes of Slim Whitman and Ed Wood might disagree<\/li>\n<li>No Xs. No surprise<\/li>\n<li>I haven&#8217;t heard of any of the three legitimate Y names, and I refuse to consider Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia a Y. It&#8217;s not just that I don&#8217;t recognize their names (like Yuri Orlov), but I seriously had never heard of them. Can I substitute Sal Yvars?<\/li>\n<li>Finally, Muhammed Zia ul-Haq wins by default, although I had heard of him. He&#8217;s no Benazir Bhutto<\/li><\/ul>\n\nOK, that&#8217;s that. If you have as much fun reading it as I had compiling it, well, I&#8217;ll be surprised.\n\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK, now in the category of Least Meme-y Thing that somehow seems like a meme anyway, Your Humble Blogger, in Wikipeding Bobby Short, clicked over to the list of people born in 1924, and was entertained, in a Book of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17356,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2746\/revisions\/17356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}