Top of the crops

[kleenexwoman]

from woodburner: Top five ways for an armadillo to meet its doom

1. You're sleeping peacefully in the underbrush, when your pointed ears pick up the cry, "Hey Billy-Bob, I got me a fat one here!" Suddenly, you're grasped by your skinny little tail and dragged from your comfortable nap, only to tbe thrust into a tattered burlap sack and dropped into a blackened stewpot. At least you'll be served with gravy.

2. Smooshed by a truck. Flies buzz around you. Where's your armor now?

3. Mistaken for a roly-poly bug and put in a glass jar by a small child who doesn't know that animals have to breathe, and so has neglected to poke holes in the lid. You asphyxiate horribly. (Only applies to little miniature armadillos.)

4. Eaten by a coyote, the way nature intended.

5. Incinerated in a nuclear bomb blast, along with everything else around you.

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from handsomespeck: Top five songs and top five singers/bands (AND WHY)

1 & 2. Oingo Boingo and Steely Dan. It's hard to pick between the two, because I listen to their music in very different ways. I listen to Oingo Boingo for more...oh, let's say minutes per month, but I'll usually pick out a few Boingo songs that I absolutely HAVE to listen to on repeat, and then forget that the other ones exist (lately, it's been "Helpless," "Private Life," "On the Outside," and "Where Do All My Friends Go").
I don't listen to Steely Dan quite as much, but when I do, I can listen to almost any Steely Dan song and be satisfied. I'll put a song on repeat because I like it so much, but if I switch to another song, I'll be perfectly happy in a way I won't be if I suddenly switch Boingo songs.
I like Steely Dan because my dad used to play them a lot for me, and I've absorbed his musical taste, if nothing else. SD's music isn't particularly experimental or virtuoso-like...they're perfectionists and studio musicians, and their jazz/blues/poppy style is the mellowest music I'll actually agree to listen to. However, they're very good at it. Their lyrics are complex and clever, and they do the best job I've ever heard of matching musical backdrops to lyrics.
As for Boingo, ghostgecko got me to listen to them through songfics. I like Boingo because of Danny Elfman's amazing voice and orchestration, and the unusual instruments (theremin, xylophone, accordion, and that's just a single song). And hell, the lyrics...

My favorite Oingo Boingo song at the moment is "Helpless." I only have the live version, but I recently heard the original album version in Neal's car (Neal is the boyfriend of my roommate Becky).
My favorite Steely Dan song is...um...hm. Difficult. Well, at the moment it's "Haitian Divorce." I've been listening to it over and over because I have plans to write a story around it, and it's taking a long time to figure out how to change the plot and still keep it recognizable.

3. The Beatles. I was an enormous Beatles fangirl in high school, and I have every Beatles song ever recorded saved onto my laptop. I don't listen to their stuff quite as much anymore, but the Beatles-love never really goes away.

My favorite Beatles song is "Hey, Bulldog" off the "Yellow Submarine" CD. It doesn't really sound like any other Beatles song; it's a little more jagged and tense, which I find interesting in the middle of such a happy hippie collection.

4. Nick Drake. It's hard for me to listen to his songs normally, because I tend to listen to his songs a lot when I'm depressed or nostalgic, and the emotion comes back if I just decide I want to listen to "Things Behind the Sun." I once had to pull off the road and just blubber for a while because I put on a Nick Drake CD while driving.

My favorite Nick Drake song is "At the Chime of a City Clock." It evokes smooth grey stone, mist, pigeons, and dew beaded on very old cars.

5. Guns 'n' Roses. GnR was my first real favorite band, and I like to think that they sparked my meager adolescent rebellion. The best reason I can offer as to why I like this band is "THEY FUCKIN' ROCK, MAN!" which wouldn't really hold up in a debate.

I don't really have a favorite Guns 'n' Roses song. I can't pick a single one. Hmmm...

My favorite other song is "Out Come the Freaks," by Was Not Was, a band that is definitely on my top ten list of bands. It's just...oh, forget it, I wrote up a long review of this song ages ago, go find that. It's a fantastic song, that's all.

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from vicfitz82: Top Five Favorite Foods to Get at Any Given Chinese Restaurant

1. Beef and broccoli, because the addition of the beef makes the broccoli taste really, really delicious. Also, the chewy texture of the beef (it will always be chewy) and the crunchy texture of the broccoli are a nice contrast.

2. Orange chicken, because it's SO GOOD. They make chicken taste like oranges! Amazing! However, I've gotten this so often that I'm beginning to get sick of it.

3. Whatever the house equivalent of pad thai is. There's nothing better than a huge mass of various vegetables and the odd scrap of protein mixed with slippery noodles and soaked with mystery sauce.

4. Hot and sour soup. I've only recently discovered how tasty this is. Good for the sinuses, too.

5. Chicken lettuce wraps. I'm not certain if this is a traditional Chinese-American food or just a new hipster thing, but they're delicious. It's another contrast thing, the cool, crunchy blandness of the lettuce setting off the hot, sticky savoriness of the chicken. Writing this has made me very hungry for some.

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from josephwaldman: Top five nonfiction books

1. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. A collection of essays on the deeper meaning of pop cultural artifacts--and yes, there are deeper meanings, even if they're often simply reflective of the culture they fit into rather than conscious commentaries on it. A bit easier to follow than his more specific music books because of the inherent difficult in connecting with a reader when writing about music: You can describe a computer game or a movie that the reader has never seen or played and still be perfectly clear, but it's very difficult to imagine a song you've never heard for the purposes of an essay.

2. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay. Oddly enough, my copy was published by the head honcho of some investment company who wanted his investors to learn from the book and not be taken in by investment fads. I suppose it's as good an excuse as any to make other people read about psychics and alchemists and apocalypses.

3. A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. I like the way this book came about. Bryson realized he didn't know a thing about science, so he decided to learn all about it aand then write a book about what he learned for everyone else who didn't know anything about it. The result is a good overview of natural history written in an accessible and often humorous prose style.

4. Depraved and Insulting English, by Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea. A compiled dictionary of archaic or obscure words for unusual sex acts or disgusting conditions. The inspiration for the pp69 community, and one of the very best reference books I've ever owned.

5. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris. An anthro book explaining certain societal cycles and cultural taboos. Fascinating and enlightening.


Top five historical figures

1. René Descartes, one of the galvanizing figures of the Enlightenment (I dig the Enlightenment era, because applying logic and experimentation in order to understand the universe? FOR THE WIN!). Invented modern logic and the idea that you might be basically just a big brain in a jar and never know it. Dug cross-eyed chicks. Inspired Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz to invent calculus.

2. Isaac Newton. Did I mention that I basically have a huge intellectual hard-on for the Enlightenment era? Newton is the best-known figure of that period, because he was an asocial weirdo and a genius who invented physics. He went a little crazy in his old age and started getting into alchemy and mysticism, which actually led him to invent gravity as well (the apple had nothing to do with it, but little kids understand "guy in a wig got hit on the head with an apple" easier than they understand "Voodoo and demons made Newton think of gravity").

3. John Dee. I also like magicians and wizards and crap like that. Dee was an occultist and a Hermetic scholar and an astrologer, and was Queen Elizabeth's personal consultant. He invented the British Empire by telling Queen Elizabeth why it was totally OK to conquer the Western World, and then made it possible for the Brits to get there by inventing navigational...things (I don't know whether the angels he contacted through a mirror helped him with this, probably not).

4. Charles Darwin, because evolution. Hokay, I notice that pretty much everyone on this list is a scientist of some sort. Even Dee was kind of a scientist, because back then science and magic were pretty much the same thing.
Anyway, Darwin pretty much thought up evolution all by hisself, except for some other fella who wrote a much drier tome about it a few years before he did but never got the credit, and I can't even remember his name. He also gave the Victorians a whole new reason to hate the lower classes! Whee!

5. Pythagoras of Samos, Greek math hippie who believed that everything can be described in terms of mathematical equations. The very first Mathemagician!


Top five political figures

1. Harriet Jones, backbench Labour Party MP, elected Prime Minister after helping save the earth from an alien invasion. Um. Oh, you meant real people?

2. Thought Clinton did a damn good job. The man was president for most of my childhood, and things seemed to be going quite well then.

3. His Imperial Majesty Emperor Joshua Norton I, the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico from 1859 to 1880. Formally dissolved US Congress and abolished the Republican and Democrat parties. Ordered the building of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Dispered riots. By far the best leader the United States has ever had.

4. Lincoln, natch. We're learning about the Reconstruction in US History right now. Shame that racist fucker Johnson took over.

5. To be honest with you, Joe, I'm a little fuzzy right now and I can't remember the names of too many politicians. Uh...let's say Thomas Jefferson. A polymath, a Deist, and a true gentleman.

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from nyghtshayde: Top five ways in which a person can enjoy a jar of marshmallow fluff.

1. Unscrew top. Dip in spoon. Lick fluff off spoon. Repeat until the jar is empty or until you die of sugar poisoning, whichever comes first.

2. Marshmallow fluff's stickiness and sweetness makes it an ideal tool for attracting dessert spirits. Put an unopened jar on an altar and worship it a bit, then leave it be. In a week, take it off the altar, scrape off all the dessert spirits clinging to it, put them into plastic bags, and put them in the freezer for consumption at a later date. Mmm, noncorporeal goodness!

3. Put dollops of it onto the naughty bits of select people. Lick it off. This won't work as well as whipped cream does, because marshmallow fluff is stickier and thicker and doesn't melt off the same way, so it's going to get stuck and you're going to have to scrub it off (or do some careful trimming). But feel free to try!

4. Pose with it like so:

FLUFF_X_CORE, fools. Fluff can be BRUTAL. RAWR.

5. Put it on top of sliders for a thoroughly disgusting treat. You get grease and fat and salt and sugar this way. It's perfect!