Monday 15 February 2010

Zombie Chickens are Kreativ-ly Bankrupt




I have been remiss...

About a month ago, fellow bloggers Kimberly (at the wondrous Cinebeats) and Mad Hatter (at the always fun The Dark Of The Matinee) were both kind enough to bestow upon me one of those meme awards floating around. And I'm finally acknowledging it.

Though he only lives a single subway stop away from me, Hatter still delivered the Kreativ Blogger award to me electronically. Don't go out of your way there Hatter...I guess it's OK though - he's a newlywed and I don't think he gets out much.

So here are the rules for the Kreativ Blogger award:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.
2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.
4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.
5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers.
6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.
7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated

Kimberly had received both the Kreativ and Zombie Chicken awards, so when she tagged her recipients, she gave us the option of choosing either one. Chicken it is. So here is the one simple rule for the Zombie Chicken award:

The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken – excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their inspiring words. As a recipient of this world-renowned award, you now have the task of passing it on to at least three other worthy bloggers. Do not risk the wrath of the zombie chickens by choosing unwisely or not choosing at all…

Though it may disqualify me from both awards, I will skip nominating others this time - it's already late in both memes' life cycles and I just can't whittle down the list of great bloggers I follow to a few select candidates. If you're on my blogroll (or even if you aren't - I haven't updated it in awhile, so I may be following your blog through RSS and just haven't added it yet), then consider yourself worthy. I only follow the best.

However, I will still take a stab at the 7 things about me. A warning though - the likelihood of them being "interesting" is pretty freaking small.


1. My son's interest in Lego (and the sprawling collection that has taken over our basement) comes to him honestly. The Lego Mindstorms robotic kit in the house is not actually his - it's mine. I bought it before he was born and though I haven't quite created anything as intricate and sophisticated as you'll find out on the net, it's provided a great deal of amusement. It's also a pretty amazing educational tool. About a decade or so ago, a co-worker and I managed to get funding from our work to purchase 6 of the kits and use them for Take Your Kids To Work Day (it was actually his idea). We figured it was probably enough for the 14 year-olds to shadow their parents for the morning, so we developed a competition challenge using Mindstorms for the afternoon (each team would have to build a Sumo-bot and try to push the other robots off of a mat). The event also became part of the EXITE Camp that is hosted annually at our site - it stands for Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering - and is focused on middle school girls (usually around 12 years-old). The EXITE Camps were typically much more fun as the girls already had an interest in the topic and were much easier to engage in the challenge (we eventually changed it to a Sweeper-bot project - which team can clear out blocks from their area of the playing field first - and it has now evolved into a robot dance competition now that we've turned over the reins to it). Our Communications folks brought the media in occasionally and one year a short piece ran on the evening news. They interviewed a young girl who excitedly exclaimed that she didn't know programming could be this fun and she wanted to be a computer scientist when she grew up. Call me crazy, but that made me very happy.

2. The words "home renovation" give me hives.

3. One of my favourite places in the world is a small section of a brook in northern Vermont. Located near the beautiful Lake Willoughby, we called it "The Falls" because the water had smoothed out the rocks at this point and made for a great 3-section slide. We'd spend hours there on warm sunny afternoons as kids and then hours there on chilly summer evenings as teenagers. Short of being with my wife, it's the closest thing to being at "home".

4. Even though I feel that one of the fundamental flaws of humanity is the overwhelming need to feel superior to others (which keeps a variety of "news" commentators on the air), I am hopelessly addicted to FailBlog.org. At least I can recognize the inconsistency.

5. If I could, I would eat chips (just about any flavour) every meal of every day for the rest of my life. However, given my body's propensity towards collecting high levels of cholesterol, the rest of my life wouldn't be overly long if I followed that regimen.

6. My wife and I took part in the National Geographic Genographic Project a few years ago and I learned that my Scottish ancestry came up through Spain. This may explain my complete fascination with Antonio Gaudi. As for my Quebecois roots, I'm told that my Mom's side goes straight back to Charlemagne.

7. I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but I'm going to be published (along with many others) in the upcoming Directory of World Cinema: Japan (published by Intellect). It's not like it's a paying gig, but since editor John Berra has somehow cobbled my jumbled thoughts together into occasionally coherent paragraphs, I'm pretty psyched to get my copy in the mail (soon apparently...soon).


Once again, thank you to both Kimberly and Hatter for even thinking of me in the first place.

By the way, if you've been thinking "Damn...Zombie chickens...What a great idea!", Lloyd Kaufman beat you to it with his movie Poultrygeist. All the good ideas are taken already aren't they?

3 comments:

Castor said...

Congrats on the award!

Anonymous said...

#3!!!!
the falls...oh yeah! same here. As children we spent HOURS, as teenagers we spent HOURS...now as adults we take the kids up and show them...see...its not as dangerous as it looks! (actually...when my brother Mike and I were maybe 10 and 11 he went down first and caught a stick on his leg and ended up at the No. Co. Hospital in Newport for 30 some stitches! and then there was the time my cousin Ken went down face first and put his tooth through his lip) But really kids...its safe and fun! I have pictures of the falls hanging in my house. I now only live 1 hour away...but never seen to get up to Willoughby enough! thanks for the memory! and congrats! jo in vt.

Bob Turnbull said...

Thanks Castor..."It's a major award!"

Joie, thanks for the comment! Wow, if there's one comment I did NOT expect it was someone saying "Oh yeah, I know The Falls!". We used to stay at Willoughby Lake Cabins (right across from the road that led up to The Falls and across from the Westmore General Store) and would be there for most of July. As we got older and went without our parents, we would go down the week before Labour Day as well as scattered weekends throughout the summer (most of us were from Montreal, so it was no more than a 2 hour drive).

Man, I miss that place...