Tag: Ask Me Anything February 2014

Oy…yeah, I suck. This month has been very hectic, folks and I lost track of this. Ugh! But, let’s get it done, shall we? (Not in one post, though. I think.)

Anyway, from Roger:

Still thinking football: what are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. favorite game you’ve ever watched? I assume I know #1.

Well, I’m not sure what #1 might be, although I assume it’s the Buffalo Bills’ “comeback game” against the Houston Oilers in the playoffs after the 1992 season, in which the Bills were down 35-3 in the third quarter before eventually winning, 41-38, in overtime.

Here’s the bummer part of that: I didn’t watch most of the comeback.

That game took place on the weekend I got back to college for the second semester. I watched the first half, and figured that the Bills’ collective geese were cooked, so I decided to go with The Girlfriend (now The Wife) to the grocery store to pick up some provisions. When we got back, the Bills were mysteriously only down 35-24, and immediately made it 35-31. Yes, I missed most of the furious comeback. But hey, at least I admit it; in the Buffalo area you’ll find about 200,000 people who claim to have been there that day. The stadium only held about 80000 people at the time and the game wasn’t even sold out! (Ha ha, no blackout for me since I went to school 800 miles away…and then I didn’t watch.)

I don’t know if I can rank the games in general, but here are a few that I really got a kick out of watching:

Bills def. 49ers in 1992: This game, early in the season, was awesome. It was played at Candlestick, and it was the first time in NFL history that neither team punted. Just a great game.

Bills def. Raiders, AFC Championship, Jan 1991: The famous 51-3 throttling. For one day, the best football team on the planet played in Buffalo. Nobody was beating the Bills that day, in that stadium.

Super Bowl XLII: Giants 17, Patriots 14. An astonishing game, an astonishing result, and so so so worth it to see St. Tommy and his hooded master come up short.

Super Bowl XLI: Colts 29, Bears 17. This is one of the weirdest games I’ve ever seen. It was just strange. At halftime the score was Colts 16, Bears 14 — and yet, the announcers were saying things like, “Geez, what do the Bears need to do to get back in this game?” It was either the closest blowout in football history, or the most lopsided close game in football history. It was easily the weirdest football game I can remember.

Super Bowl XLIII: Steelers 27, Cardinals 23. I rooted for the Steelers in this game, but it was really hard even despite the fact that the Steelers are my second favorite team, because Kurt Warner was the Arizone quarterback, and he’s one of my favorite sports figures ever. I hated seeing him lose a second Super Bowl, and he played pretty heroically. That game was full of amazing plays and individual performances; Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald put up numbers in the fourth quarter that most times would be great numbers for an entire game.

Vikings def. Bears, 1992 season. This was a regular season game that I taped on the VCR for my college roommate, because he was off doing something with the college choir. The fourth quarter began with the Bears up, 20-0, and when he finally got home to watch the game, I had cued the tape to that moment, telling him that he didn’t need to watch anything other than the fourth quarter. He turned pretty green when he saw that 20-0 score…and then he watched the Vikes’ comeback for a 21-20 victory, a comeback that was sparked when Bears quarterback Jim Harbaugh decided to call an audible at the line with disastrous results. (Guess what? You can actually watch the ESPN NFL Primetime highlights for this game on YouTube. God, I love the Internet!)

That’s a pretty good representation of games I loved watching.

Woody/Mia/Dylan – thoughts on whether it will, or should affect Oscar voting, seeing Allen’s films, being in Allen’s films.

I don’t really know what any of this was about. I’ve never been a huge Woody Allen fan, so I don’t usually bother to see his movies on that basis alone. I have no problem with someone deciding that Allen’s “squick factor” now looms to large to really enjoy his work. From what little I heard of this there was an awful lot of “He said, she said”, but the things getting said seem kind of bad….

OK, more to come. I promise. I also promise that I won’t screw up the August edition this badly! A lot of things in real life are in motion right now, though. Good stuff — I should probably blog about it all at some point….

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Time for some more answers to questions!

These from an anonymous reader:

Have you read anything that you didn’t expect to like, but did? Any genres that you expected to not like, but did like at least some of them?

Oddly, I don’t think I ever have! I never read anything not expecting to like it. Which obviously doesn’t mean that I will like everything I read, but I always expect to like it.

Now, I do tend to lean toward some genres and away from others, but even that can change. It’s been a number of years since I found an epic fantasy that I really liked, and of late I’ve been kicking around dipping my toes into the mystery genre somewhat. We’ll see.

(By the way, any mystery recommendations? I’d like more contemporary, urban stuff. Or crime writing.)

Do you sing at all? In church? In the shower?

I tend to be moderately embarrassed to sing, and I’m not sure why…I like to think I have a decent voice and can carry a tune, but I have no idea, really. I do like to sing when I’m alone, and when I’m driving myself, I can belt showtunes with the best of ’em. I also tend to have a song somewhere under my breath as I go through my day at work. I’ve never sung publicly, for some reason. Probably some weird blend of cowardice and introversion!

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Continuing the cavalcade of answers!

From one of my anonymity-preferring readers:

Do you ever lie in bed unable to sleep? (Either waking in the middle of the night or simply unable to get to sleep in the first place.) If you do, does your brain run through all the things that make you anxious or stressed? Or embarrassing things that happened to you? What works to get you back to sleep?

I’m lucky that I don’t get insomnia much. But it does happen sometimes, almost always when I get stupid and drink caffeine too close to bed time. I try to avoid caffeine after 5:00 or so. What will happen is this: I’ll lay there all groggy and stuff, but not falling asleep; frustration will build as I wonder why I can’t sleep; then, suddenly, I’ll snap awake with a furious realization: that damned Pepsi I had!!!

I do wake up in the middle of the night a lot, but I rarely have a great deal of trouble getting back to sleep. I’m pretty lucky, that way. Anxieties about things can weigh on me, though. But mostly, when I’m not asleep and the lights are out, I’m often thinking about writing stuff — either plot details or I’m running through scenes in my head or I’m fantasizing about my inevitable Hugo Award win. That sort of thing. Stress, things that anger me, goof-ups I’ve made — I try to avoid thinking about these kinds of things when I’m trying to drop off to sleep.

When you are home, do the cats follow you around?

Lester follows me around. He thinks he’s my cat, but he’s really not. I don’t know why on Earth he would ever think that he’s my cat.

Yeah, that’s a mystery. No idea why he thinks he’s my cat.

Julio will also follow me around, but he’s the more traditional type of “cat following the master around”: “Oh, you’re going to the kitchen! And my food bowl is empty-ish! Or it’s less full than it was! Hooray! Thank you, fine food bowl filler guy!” Julio’s not much for following me around. Although he does like his cuddlin’ now and again….

Sigh.

More answers to come! And feel free to ask, if the mood still strikes!

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Time to answer some more of the questions from Ask Me Anything!, the February 2014 edition! These are from a couple of readers who wished to remain anonymous.

How much time do you spend out of doors in winter? Do you find that you get through winter better when you spend more time outside? What do you like to do outside?

Well…I suck at getting outside in the winter. I really need to, and yet every year, I don’t. Ugh. This is something that needs to change…next winter. (Too late this winter, I suppose.)

What would I like to do? Well, when I tried them in the past, I enjoyed both cross-country skiing and snow-shoeing. I suppose I wouldn’t completely rule out downhill skiing, but I’ve never done that before, and in any event, I’d be limited by what I can spend on gear. I’m really not the type of person to have tons of gear around.

So, yeah: I need to get outside more in winter, and I have things I’d love to do. So what’s the holdup? Who knows. So I think that’s a good goal for next year: come up with something to do outside. For one thing, I can buy a pair of quilted overalls!

How often do you have to buy a new computer? Do you budget in advance for technology purchases by saving up for them?

For cheaper tech stuff — like my tablet — I buy that sort of thing when I have the money to buy it straight-up. Ditto the videogame systems: I find that if I know I’m going to want something, it doesn’t take too long to sock away the money to get it, especially since I’ve long been in the habit of saving a chunk of each paycheck.

Computers are more expensive, obviously, so those I tend to buy on payment plans, currently through Dell for the existing computers at Casa Jaquandor. This doesn’t tend to be terribly painful, as in a lot of cases I don’t need a new monitor or whatever. Frequency of purchase? Well, I tend to be really resistant to Ooooh shiny! as a factor, because there’s always a new batch of Ooooh shiny! to contend against. Today’s state-of-the-art machine is hopelessly outdated so quickly that trying to stay caught-up makes no sense. I know people who have literally owned every incarnation of iPhone, and I think, why?

I tend to treat computers as cars: I use them until it is simply no longer tenable to do so, when performance suffers to a high enough degree that there’s not really a choice anymore. The shortest period we’ve managed to get out of a computer is two years (a real lemon of an HP desktop we got four years or so ago); the longest is five, and we tend to get at least four. I got five years out of my first laptop, and in reality, it was still functional when I replaced it — in fact, I still have it, so I could probably still use it as a strictly writing machine. It was getting really slow for Web stuff, but running Open Office was just fine. It’s a Windows Vista machine, and in honesty, I might have kept it going even longer than I did but my hand was somewhat forced by the arrival of Windows 8. I knew that Windows 8 was likely to be problematic at first, and I didn’t want to jump on board the new OS so soon after release, so if I wanted a Windows 7 machine, it was then or never.

In terms of future computers, who knows…hopefully this machine lasts me until 2016 at least, and by then, who knows what will be out there. I love using a laptop this size, and I hope that the constantly-predicted “death of the PC!!!” doesn’t come to pass. But who knows? When I get my next tablet, probably next year I guess, I’ll likely get an eight-inch model (my current one is seven inches), and then maybe I get a USB keyboard to use with it, if there’s an OpenOffice app by then.

From a different reader:

Don’t you feel weird wearing overalls when they’re out of fashion?

Well, obviously I don’t! Fashion is a pretty dumb concept, really — just taking overalls as an example, they were common in the 1970s and the 1980s before they became really popular in the 1990s, and then they disappeared in the 2000s, a casualty of the sudden decision by the fashion world that clothes are supposed to cling and reveal. Baggy and big went out the window in a pretty big way.

But here’s the thing: I’ve never bought into the idea that something can “look good” one year and then “look bad” the next. I get that tastes change and we get tired of stuff, but the idea of clothes becoming laughable is downright silly to me. I have zero interest in adhering to what the “fashion” people tell me is OK to wear. And besides, the fashion people are telling me that overalls are fine now, anyway. So there’s that…but really, do you actually need societal permission to wear what you want, anyway? Sheesh!

Funny, though: I recently bought a bright yellow fleece pullover that I like a lot. My preferred winter attire is a nice warm fleece under a pair of overalls, topped with a scarf. Warm, but no pesky heavy coat to remove every time you go in our out. But then I realized that I can’t wear that particular yellow fleece under any of my pairs of blue overalls, because then I end up looking like a long-haired hippie version of one of these guys:

Hey, I love the Minions as much as the next person, but I’m not doing Minion cosplay.

A third reader:

How does a pie in the face not hurt??!!

Heh! Well, I suppose it could hurt, if you’re getting hit with a frozen pie that you didn’t thaw. Or maybe you didn’t close your eyes just before impact. Or maybe someone put some kind of caustic chemical in the whipped cream. Or maybe the person hitting you is a dumbass. Geez. You should never have to say “Ouch!” in the course of being pied.

Now, if you’re asking just why a standard-issue pie in the face doesn’t hurt, well, I don’t know. It’s probably something to do with physics and stuff, the force of the impact being absorbed by the cream and custard as it smooshes all over. I’m sure you could do all kinds of math and stuff, with coefficients of the viscosity of whipped cream and that sort of thing to figure it out.

More to come! And feel free to ask more questions, either here or on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. I’m always open to queries!

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Yes indeed, it is time for ANSWERS! Wheeeeeee!!!

My ever-entertaining high school mate Andy asks:

I have thought about your response to my question about ‘The Dukes of Hazard’ question I asked last time. Do you think the reason for all the dirt roads in the county was that Boss Hog was embezzling the funds that the federal government was giving to the county to pave the roads? Or do you think he was funneling the money to buy all the cop cars Roscoe and Ennis were tearing up?

Heh! Either or both! But I’ve always had this odd notion that Hazzard County is like an American version of Brigadoon, that Scottish town that is magically enchanted to only emerge from the mist into the real world every 100 years. Hazzard exists in its own little world, with its own laws of physics and traffic and fashion.

Andy adds:

I can tell you one thing that is for sure!!! Boss Hog wasn’t putting ANY ebezzled money into his bar, ‘The Bore’s Nest’. That place was a DUMP!!!!!!

He didn’t need to, though, did he? That joint was always packed! But really, what the hell did Boss Hogg spend his money on? A new white suit every day?

Paul asks:

Winter or Summer Olympics… and which sport?

Oh, Winter, most definitely. The Winter games are prettier, and their events always look like something I’d like to try for the heck of it. The Summer games is a combination of stuff that reminds me of gym class. Which isn’t to say that I dislike the Summer games, because I love the Olympics in general. Even if they’re corrupt as hell and even if the expense of putting on the Olympics is really hard to justify at times.

Which sport? I’m a figure skating fan, although I’ve missed most of it thus far this year. I didn’t even know there was a “team event” now until I saw that Russia had won the thing! Most of the Winter events look really neat, with one major exception: I must come to grips with the fact that I will simply never, ever, ever love hockey. Never ever. I tried, I really did.

As I write this, I’m watching two-man bobsledding coverage, and I’ve always loved all these various ice-run sports: bobsledding, luge, and skeleton. I’d love to ride one of those bobsleds one day!

Summer sports? I could watch swimming all day, as well as the track-and-field events.

And I am bummed that Olympic pie-throwing never came to anything. Alas!

Ben asks:

How are you supporting yourself until the writing ship comes in?

The day job — for ten years now, wow — is Maintenance at a large grocery store in the Buffalo area. I don’t like to name the chain, simply because I don’t want anything I write here to be taken as a statement by “a representative of the company”, but of the two major chains in this region, it’s not the one that rhymes with “Schmops”. I’m responsible for the upkeep of the physical plant, making sure that things work, and ensuring that our warp field maintains integrity and doesn’t do anything to disrupt the space-time continuum. You know, like Scotty.

More answers to come! And feel free to ask more, if you like — I always accept questions, and follow-ups are welcome!

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Yar, what ye be waitin’ for, mateys! Ask Me Anything! (Leave questions there as opposed to on this post, because it’s easier for me to keep ’em in one place.)

Or ask via Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Flickr or parcel post.

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Ask Me Anything! Leave questions in comments here, or Tweet them, or Facebook them, or e-mail them (jaquandor AT gmail DOT com), or whatever!

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Just a reminder that I’m taking queries for Ask Me Anything! for this month, so get ’em in! Leave them in comments to that post, or submit via e-mail or Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

In other news, I’m posting light for the rest of the week because I’m tired and I need to regenerate. No, wait, that’s the Doctor. I need to reenergize. Yup, that’s it. I did a lot of marathon editing over the weekend to get the second draft of Princesses In SPACE!!! II done, and now it is…but I’m still a bit worn out from that. I’ll likely start returning to normal tomorrow, in terms of writing…I need to get back to Lighthouse Boy, which I put on the back burner a few weeks ago. Time to start that thing simmering again!

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Wow, it’s February already! And that means it’s time for another fun round of Ask Me Anything! Get your questions in now, folks — either in comments on this post, or in e-mail, or on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or…wow, I’m on a lot of stuff. Anyway, Ask Me Anything!

(I do answer questions anonymously, if that is preferred.)

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