The five questions meme (Snagged, this time, from gordon_r_d)

[capri0mni]

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song or some movie/TV quote (or example of your favorite figure of speach) or something.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.

gordon_r_d asked me

1. Which Doctor would you choose to travel with and why?

That's easy. Two. Because even though he had, at several moments, dark and manipulative turns, he's also the one who most clearly treated his companions as family. And the characters of Two's era are really the only ones I can imagine easily having an existance outside or beyond the one we see on-screen. I can imagine them playing Scrabble, or washing the dishes. I attribute this to the Troughton/Hines chemistry.

2. You're holding a dinner party with any five people dead or alive, from any point in history, who would you invite?

Only 5? So there will be 6 people around the table, right? Okay that's what I'll assume. Hm. I think this one will be an all-women's dinner:

1. My Grandmother, Josie, so I can ask her about the life I never knew she'd led until after she died: what was it like to be one of the first women in America to teach athletics to women students (She was a college basketball coach in 1905)? What was it like to work in the women's suffrage movement, and where did she think her job as a communtiy organizer have gone if she hadn't married and given birth to eight children (seven of whom survived beyond childhood)?
   
   
2. Susanah Shakespeare Hall (without famous father and moderately less famous husband), because, apparently, she was a remarkably intelligent woman who never got a chance to speak for herself, through history (if I were allowed 12 guests, I'd invite her mother and sister, and grandmother, too)



3. E. Nesbit, another agitator in the suffrage movement (In Britain), who, instead of throwing rocks and going to riots, wrote children's novels with strong, funny, intelligent girls, and thereby planted subversive ideas in the heads of eleven-year-olds (she also played hostess to some pretty wild parties).



4. My mother. Because.



5. Murasaki Shikibu, who many have said, wrote the first ever psychological novel in human history, pretty damn close to 1,000 years ago (I'm assuming we'll have a TARDIS-like Translation Engine running, along with the heater, yes?).

3. Which song have you really been singing along to a lot recently?

Actually, when I've been listening to music, it's been the classical radio station, these days. So not many lyrics (When I first sat down to answer these, it was Beethoven's 4th Symphony for Piano and Orchastra (which my cousin, Martin Andrews, gave me on cassette tape for my 16th birthday, iirc).

4. Have you ever solved a RUbik's Cube without switching the stickers or taking it apart and putting it together again?

Yes. Maybe. Probably (trying to remember if I ever solved it, once upon a time). Actually, the idea of dismantling it never occurred to me (am not mechanically inclined).

5. Favourite pizza?

When I'm in a nostalgic mood (and want a taste of being < 7 years old, and going to the pizza parlor in our neighborhood with my parents): Sausage, pepper, onion, mushroom. When I want to be original: crispy eggplant cutlets, garlic, onion.

Comments

[jekesta]

Oh, your meal guests sound brilliant. I can't help thinking that mostly I'd be interested in meeting your mother and grandmother quite a lot more than the famouser people, though. They both sound wonderful.

I don't think I've ever had enough time with a rubik's cube to solve one. I don't remember, anyway.

Mmmmmmm, pizza.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yes. Both Josephine and Mother were wonderful. Perhaps I should clarify that Josie was my Father's mother (so this is not all my maternal line). And the dinner guests would be all women, this time, because if there were men there, it might be kind of awkward, being candid and talking about our lives in "mixed company."

Okay, now your five questions:

1) Do you ever argue, or hold conversations with, fictional characters (in your head) after their books / tv shows / movies, are over? If so, who's your favorite, and what do you talk about?

2) If you were to be the hero of a fairy tale, would you rather be the good-hearted fool, the handsome love interest, or the dogged adventurer (climbing glass mountains, fording rivers of fire, that sort of thing)?

3) How did you come to fall in love with snooker?

4) What's your favorite flavor of cake?

5) What was your favorite tv show when you were six (or thereabouts, seven or eight, or five is okay, too)?

[jekesta]

I totally forgot that I would get questions for commenting! I will answer them, though, they're spiffing. Thank you:)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's the importance of taking the instructions seriously ;-)

No rush, though. These can be your fallback when all other words fail you, in LJ.

[pedanther]

I can't fully participate, because, as you know, I don't have a livejournal, but if you want to ask me five questions I'll answer them here.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Okay. A pre-list question: May I post your answers in a new entry?

Now the list:

1. How did you befriend your blue duck friend?



2. How did you develop your persona of the Pink Pedanther?


and a rewording of questions I asked jekesta:


3. What kind of cake would you like for your birthday?



4. Which kind of character trope in stories do you most closely identify?



5. Is there a story or series (Book, comic, or television, radio, whatever) from your childhood that still echoes in your memory?

[pedanther]

1. How did you befriend your blue duck friend?

I first met Donald the Duckling in the form of a small fluffy toy given to me by a relative one Easter when I was a boy. It wasn't long before he joined in the exciting adventures I invented for all my toys -- in his case, exploring the universe in a TARDIS of his own, which is why he ended up in my public Who-fan fiction. (The TARDIS was just found one day, abandoned in a wood. Never did find out whose it was, or what happened to its pilot. I'm confident it wasn't the Doctor's, though, because its chameleon circuit works.)


2. How did you develop your persona of the Pink Pedanther?

More or less by accident. I've always had a tendency toward pedantry (also hair-splitting and nit-picking, although I realise this is a distinction only observed by other pedants, hair-splitters, and nit-pickers). One day on Usenet, after admitting to a particularly pointless bit of nit-picking, I began singing a pedants' anthem consisting of the word "pedant" sung repeatedly to the tune of "The Pink Panther Theme", thus:

Pedant, pedant; pedant pedant pedant pedant pedannnnnnnnt...

One of those also present announced that henceforth I would be known as "the Pink Pedanther"; and henceforth I was.


3. What kind of cake would you like for your birthday?

My mind keeps wandering toward what kind of cake I wouldn't like, because I've had several of those in the past few years. (Not at the family celebrations, but at work, where they tend to go for bought cakes with deficiencies like being decorated with so much cream that there's more cream than cake.)

So: something simple and difficult to get wrong. The lemon madeira cake was nice.


4. Which kind of character trope in stories do you most closely identify?

There's that trope where a character will do something, and then it turns out that they've misunderstood the situation and just embarrassed themself in front of a whole bunch of people, and we're expected to laugh. I always identify way too closely with that character; I never hid behind the sofa when the monsters came on TV, but I was -- and still am -- out of the room like a shot at the first hint that one of the characters might be about to do that. And there are several otherwise-excellent books that I have put down and never picked up again for the same reason.

(On the other hand, I once saw it done as a horror device, where it wasn't that the character misunderstood the situation but that the situation was changed out from under him by malicious magic, and the consequences were much worse than mere embarrassment. And it was one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen.)


5. Is there a story or series (Book, comic, or television, radio, whatever) from your childhood that still echoes in your memory?

Apart from Doctor Who?