Via your average bear:

Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein (No, but I have read Time Enough For Love as well as Job.)
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson (I’m sorry, folks. As a card carrying techie I’m supposed to love this one, but I just couldn’t get into it. Gibson’s style annoyed me.)
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley (I tried, Lil’. I really, really tried.)
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey * (Pern books are my anti-drug. Well, at least up through Skies. After that, fuggeddaboutit.)
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson (Donaldson’s only enjoyable work is the Mordant’s Need set, and maybe the Gap series if you like really grim Sci-Fi.)
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams *
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice (Oddly enough, I read Queen of the Damned first. Take pity on my soul.)
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny (No, but I’ve read the Amber series. Ugh.)
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke *
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven (It’s on my list.)
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (I own an old, old copy… thanks Dad!)
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks (At least, I vaguely recall having started it once. Maybe I even finished it. Hmm.)
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Happy 2007, everybody. I know, I sort of left things hanging around here for the last few days of 2006 but when you get right down to it, there wasn’t much to say. I don’t want to look back on that particular run of twelve months. Not that it was all bad. Some of it was quite good. However, long stretches of it were absolutely dreadful. So, good riddance.

And now for something completely silly. At one of my favorite website stops I found an amusing new toy. I plugged in a specific (and perhaps unsurprising) sequence of letters and what follows are many of the results. Please note that I’ve taken a bit of liberty with the formatting, using the two separate words or my Internet nickname form depending on which amuses me more. (It’s all about my amusement, dammit.) Can you name the movies?

• I know this sounds crazy, but ever since yesterday on the road, I’ve been seeing this grey duck.

• Why don’t you come up sometime and see GreyDuck?
• We’ll always have GreyDuck.
• Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a grey duck.
• You had me at ‘grey duck’.
• I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old grey duck for dinner.
• I always say a kiss on the hand might feel very good, but a grey duck lasts forever.
• You can’t handle the grey duck!
• Love means never having to say you’re GreyDuck.
• We can’t stop here. This is grey duck country.
• Gort! Klaatu barada GreyDuck!
• It is too late, my grey duck is in your veins.
• That grey duck is the pure, physical manifestation of Sadako’s hatred.
• There is a grey duck coming. Are you sure you’re on the right side?
• I am the author. You are the grey duck. I outrank you!
• I feel the need – the need for GreyDuck!
• Soylent Green is GreyDuck!
• I love the smell of grey duck in the morning.
• Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to grey duck.
• I say we take off and nuke the entire grey duck from orbit.
• If you build it, GreyDuck will come.
• Hasta la vista, GreyDuck.
• I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little grey duck, too!

I love that last one! After all, I am “the little grey duck.” Ha!

Just in case I don’t come up with real content today, I present the following.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: The Right Reverend Karel the Indefatigable of Fishbourne Sneething Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

In the immortal words of… somebody or other: “Bow down now before me!”

Now’s as good a time as any for a silly meme, seeing as how I haven’t done one in a little while, and also seeing as how I seem to be all out of posting inspiration. Call it the post-BloPoMo slump. Call it Eloise for all I care, really. Anyway, here goes:

Post the first sentence from the first entry of each month this year.

JAN: “I set myself a modest goal, three hundred sixty five days or so ago, of posting entries on at least 95% of the days of the calendar year and getting the overall site posting rate up into the upper 60 percent range (at the time it was at about 63%).” (Remember when I accomplished my personal goals? Ah, those were the days.)

FEB: “I didn’t set out to spend a week avoiding my writing duties.” (Thus begins one of the most-commented-upon posts of my entire journal, in which I detail my experience with an IM spammer.)

MAR: “I went to several minutes’ work to create this little monstrosity for a comment on a LiveJournal entry, so by golly I’m going to inflict it on… I mean, share it with my adoring fans.” (I filked, sort of. This is back before I lost my job and, thus, any desire to create much of anything.)

APR: “Twice in the last twelve hours I’ve called the (polite, efficient, helpful) Dedicated Hosting support techs at Infinity Internet (our new hosts!) to reboot this webserver.” (It took moving to yet another server, several months later, to make the worst of our website problems go away.)

MAY: “To Whom It May Concern: Perhaps your company or similar organization requires someone of considerable skill with computer technology.” (The “please hire me!” posting. I was sliding rapidly toward complete despair at this point.)

JUN: “Because Lil’ did it, and because I haven’t posted in a while, and because… well, meh.” (It was a meme post. Go figure.)

JUL: “No more “unenjoyment” for this little grey duck!” (This may be the happiest post in my entire year.)

AUG: “If you catch the killer, red-handed even, and it’s a hot day in late July, and you gun him down (you’ll figure out how to make it look like self defense later)… …does that make it a summer-y execution?” (As George Carlin once quipped, “These are the thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools.” Yes, I think of stuff like this all the time. You’d see more of it here if I could remember any of it long enough to get to a computer…)

SEP: “Via collision detection, I bring you the results of my recent fiddling about with the Official Seal Generator.” (It’s a fun toy, what can I say?)

OCT: “I flaked, oh yes indeed, on the real-life update thing.” (Understatement of the decade.)

NOV: “Wait, what? It’s November already?” (One exclamation, one sentence. So what?)

DEC: “So, after a solid 30 days’ posting, I decided to take a few days off.” (The first sentence in the previous post, no less. Heh.)

And because I adore you people, I’ll crank out another posting later on today. Who rocks the Casbah, baby? (Speaking of which: Do people actually have problems with that line from The Clash’s most famous song? Because, you know, I keep hearing an idiotic commercial on the radio, and, huh? If you think they’re singing about a catbox, you need professional help.)

Nayad posted her rendition of this (at a friend-locked LiveJournal post, unfortunately), and I was amused enough to go ahead and do the deed. It’s all her fault, right down to convincing me not to weasel out of it on account of not having actual/current names for some of the entries. So, here goes nothing.

1. YOUR SPY NAME: (middle name and current street name)
Peter San Rafael It could’ve been worse, I suppose. In the old house? Peter Long.

2. YOUR MOVIE STAR NAME: (grandfather/grandmother on your dad’s side, your favorite candy)
Frederick Tootsie Roll Note to self, never become a movie star. And I want the Internet to know that I thought about fudging this answer… ha ha… and picking either Whopper or York (for the Peppermint Patties). Frederick York wouldn’t be so bad, now would it?

3. YOUR RAP NAME (first initial of first name, first three or four letters of your last name)
K Kere Okay, whatever.

4. YOUR GAMER TAG: (a favorite color, a favorite animal)
Grey Duck Wow. I bet you’re all shocked by this one.

5. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you were born)
Peter Ketchikan

6. YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (first 3 letters of your last name, last 3 letters of mother’s maiden name, first 3 letters of your pet’s Name)
Ker Kel Pie Righto. For the record: The last time I owned a pet, it was a cat named Piemur. Go ahead and laugh if you must. And, yes, I was am an Anne McCaffrey fanboy.

7. JEDI NAME: (middle name spelled backwards, your mom’s maiden name spelled backwards)
Retep Yeslek It’s almost as good as my first and last names spelled backwards…

8. PORN STAR NAME: (first pet’s name, the street you grew up on)
Trouble Keller Let’s be clear about something: If you’ve paid attention to my journal recently, you know that I grew up on many streets. This one happens to be the location of the little white house in Brewster, WA in which Mom landed us after moving us out of her mother’s place up in Indian Dan Canyon. So… it’ll do, even though we weren’t there very long. Somehow I don’t think “Trouble Highway 173″ would roll off the tongue quite as well. Oh, yes, Trouble was the name of our cat in the second apartment in The Bronx when I was a wee lad. (See? I can remember some stuff!)

9. SUPERHERO NAME: (“The”, your favorite color, the automobile your dad drives)
The Grey Schwinn Because, you know, I’m pretty sure a Schwinn bicycle is the closest thing to a personal vehicle that my dad could be associated with, at least in my mind. That said, though, this is an atrocious superhero name. I should know.

10. YOUR ACTION HERO NAME: (first name of the main character in the last film you watched, last food you ate)
Lupin Donut It took me a minute to remember that the kids and I watched “Castle of Cagliostro” a week or so back. I suppose it could’ve been worse, since my heroine addiction means a good chance I’d have watched “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind” more recently… if I’d ever gotten around to it. Whew!

I’m way, way behind the curve on this one, since Mari and Lil’ did this one a while ago. But, what the heck.

“Go to Google and type in “$Name looks like” with the quotation marks (where your name = $Name), and put the top 10 things that come up.” Well, alrighty then! (My comments are in parentheses, italicized for your convenience or some-such.)
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