Vox Argutiae

What's your middle name?  Is there a story or history behind it?

It's Louis, and yes, I suppose there is a little story there. At birth, it was Lee, a name my mother gave me, she says, "to balance out that horrible last name." It was kind of an allusion to her own middle name, Leona, which is an unfortunate but hereditary name. She was named after an aunt, who was named after her mother (my mom's grandmother), who was in turn named after her mother. So it's kind of the done thing to saddle one unfortunate girl out of each generation with the name—or middle name—Leona. That tradition has thankfully been broken.

Louis, however, comes from my maternal grandfather. When I decided to change my last name, I figured I would no longer need the short middle name for balance. And, you know, there's Jason Lee. In choosing a new one, I wanted something from the family, something with a history that actually meant something. My paternal grandfather was named Hiram Asa, so no help there. Thus, my mom's dad's middle name, the inexplicably frenchified (we have no french heritage whatsoever) Louis.

What song or lyrics are stuck in your head at the moment?  What album is it from?
Submitted by Lox Ly. 

War! huh-yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
   
War! huh-yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again y'all
   
War! huh good God
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me!

Now just try to get that shit out yo' head. Available on 20th Century Masters: The Best of Edwin Starr

What's the nerdiest thing about you?

I'm generally agreed to be a pretty huge nerd, with the not-watching-TV and constant reading and always winning trivia games and all. It's pretty hard to distill all my nerdiness down to even a few examples, much less one. But that was not the question.

The nerdiest thing about me is my very nearly complete (up to 1999) collection of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager paperback novels. I have them all, and have read them multiple times. Imzadi I have read twenty-five times. Though there are moments of brilliance (Peter David and Michael Jan Friedman wrote a lot of good ones), by and large these books are absolute crap. So now you know my terrible secret. I have horrible taste in literature. *cries*

If you had a band, what would you call yourselves?
Question submitted by Zoot.

Lost in MySpace.

I was having a generally crappy day, and then this arrives on my phone.

What are the 5 words that best describe your life right now?
Question submitted by mojito.

stagnant, routine, wearisome, monotonous, educable

What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?

(I missed this question, but because I just got my new RAZR and have been busy pimping it all day, I'm going to answer this one anyway.)

The first 32 seconds of Elastica's Connection, right up until the vocal begins. I made this myself, using Audacity, for free. Why anyone on earth would pay up to $2 for a ringtone of a song they've already paid for is truly beyond my comprehension. The RAZR even has a USB port right on the damn phone! For the cost of a $5 cable and a free download of p2ktools (or Motorola Phone Tools if you prefer applications that just work, even though they don't do much and cost money), you can put whatever you like on your phone. You could upload 7 megabytes of lorum ipsum if you wanted, though I have no idea why you would — the point is, it's totally easy to do and you are completely within your rights as a consumer to do so. What happened to the hacker spirit in this country? Why was it so (relatively) difficult for me to find information about uploading my file onto my phone?

Deep breath. Anyway, that's my ring tone. And this is what shows up on the outside LCD of my phone when it's open, instead of that tacky spin art motorola logo:

Thundercats, HOOOOOO!

What is your current computer desktop image? Let's see it!

It's a photo of the historic St. Philip's church in downtown Charleston, by local photographer Rod Pasibe. You should totally check out his photo stream on Flickr, he's captured some amazing and beautiful shots of this old, tired, decaying city.

Play any instrument or speak any language, which do you choose?
Question submitted by cruftbox.vox.com.

If I could speak every language in the world fluently, I would basically be unstoppable. Any government or multinational would pay top dollar for that skillset, but I could probably come up with my own way to put the talent to use. I'd be a great deal of help to the effort towards real-time machine translation, if I so chose. I might travel the world. I may end up sainted for my efforts to bring about world peace. Or maybe I'd just have a few thousand more words to cuss people out with in traffic.

What was your favorite candy when you were a kid? How does that compare to now?

Oh man did I love me some caramel creams when I was a kid. I remember being able to eat a two-pound bag by myself. Same thing with Rolo's. They come in these little tubes, and I would always have to buy two if I expected to have any left by the time we had driven home.

Now, of course, I don't eat refined sugar of any sort. I weigh 24% less than I did when I was 16, I've probably added fifteen years to my expected lifespan, and I'm a much happier person. Right?

Damn I could go for some Rolo's right now.