Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...

Babble on.

I've been tagged by both the Clown Prince of Mutts and the Joker Solicitor with today's trendy tool to immolate one's own self-respect and decorum. Hah. As if I had any in the first place.

Without further ado, but with a just enough wine in me to proceed, here are five weird things about me.

Oh wait. I should first let you know this is a group effort - a list cobbled together from the responses of my entire family tonight at the dinner table. Yes, I indeed painted a bullseye on my extensive forehead (it stretches from my eyebrows all the way past the crown of my polished dome) and asked everyone around me what was weirdest about yours truly. The responses were varied and most cruel. Luckily I have the skin of a rhino. And the belly of a hippo with the breath of a dyspeptic camel, but I digress...

1. I eat many things in a very particular way. Apparently, the most interesting of those methods involves coloured candies - Smarties, Skittles and the like. If I have a flat surface such as a table or desk at hand, I'll divide the candies up into their respective colours. Sometimes I'll group the colours in straight lines, and sometimes in geometric shapes. I'll then eat them in order. Sometimes the order is to eat all of one colour before proceeding to the next (always either most to least or the reverse), sometimes it's to even the groups off before eroding them equally in turns until they're gone. Whichever method I choose, the one constant is that it's bizarre.


2. When I'm angry, my ears go back like a dog or cat. That is to say, they physically change position in relation to the rest of my face. With the lack of cranial hair, I'm told it's fairly noticeable.


3. I love reading books, but I hate reading hardcovers. Apart from reasons of price, I prefer the way paperbacks feel in my hands - they're much less unwieldy than hardcovers. I can do things while reading a paperback - walk, eat, cuddle a child, take a swig of my beer - that I can't while struggling with a larger and heavier hard-bound book. I regret to say that I've even returned hardcovers I received as gifts and waited to use the bookstore credit until the paperback of the same novel was released. My Litlbit now ensures that I specify PAPERBACK ONLY on my Christmas list.


4. I can make a sound like a galloping horse with my tongue. I know of only one other person in the whole world with the same ability, and she's a blood relation.


5. I have an unnatural ability to tune out people around me. I can read a book at a party and not be disturbed. Litlbit and Joge often have to call me a few times for dinner if I'm intent on a LEGO engineering project with my son Boo. It's not that I'm consciously ignorning them, it's that my conscious mind simply doesn't hear them. This actually extends to conversations too. Joge says I'm the only person she knows who can drop off into a daydream halfway through a sentence, be brought back to reality with a sharp word or a tap on the arm, restart the exact same sentence, and be lost to distraction at precisely the same point again. As frequent readers - and there are enough of you to recruit a gospel choir these days - will already know, my mind is a world unto itself.

Having typed all of this fuelled by a good bottle of wine, I make no promises as to its longevity. If I awake tomorrow to find my rapier wit was nothing more than a figment of my intoxication, the post may well slip beneath electonic waves, never to been seen again beyond the dusky realm of Google Cache.

Under the heading of Misery Loves Company, I tag the following soon-to-be-miserable souls:

• All things Canadian...


• The Tiger In Exile


• Tart Cider


• Occam's Carbuncle


• Argghhh!!! (Sir John the Merciless, Imperial Armorer)

Babble off.