incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Out to Massachusetts this weekend for a family holiday barbeque. We had to take the dog, because all the local boarders were full, but it went better than we feared—she does not like other dogs, but when outdoors and a reasonable distance away from the other two dogs (my parents' and my cousins') and kept company by at least one person, she was pretty calm. She didn't sleep in our room this time, and yelped for about ten minutes intermittently when she was put to bed, but after that she was okay. The barbeque itself was very nice. We met my new first cousin once removed, who is four months old and looks extremely concerned all the time; apparently he's the spitting image of his dad at that age, so he won't necessarily grow up to be a horrible pessimist just because he looks that way now.

We saw Spiderman 2 yesterday. ( 'I want arms like that, only not evil.' Indiscriminate spoilers. )

I suppose, while we're talking about superhero movies, I should drop in this ( personality quiz result )

Today we went furniture shopping, and found a TV stand that should let us save some space and remove the stereo equipment from its current rickety shelving. Finding the right piece was surprisingly easy; figuring out the best place to put it is surprisingly hard, but will probably be apparent once we get the thing and try out the various options. Oh, and we bought books, of course. And early this week Chad's new computer will be delivered, and I'll attempt to connect it to his old one and transfer his files over. Wish me luck . . .

(I have already had more computer luck than I expected this week. I had to upgrade Eudora because 3.0.6 doesn't support SMTP authentication—go figure—which I hadn't wanted to do because a 4.x or 5.x that I'd tried had saved my mailboxes in HTML (  all over the place, like that) for no apparent reason. Eudora 6.1, I am pleased to say, does no such thing. I don't known whether this means I'm on a roll with computers or I'm out of luck.)

Set the first:

1. I sat on the Lord Chancellor's woolsack.
   

   Almost everyone spotted this as the lie; I was hoping that my
   semester working in Parliament (admittedly for an MP) would give it
   an aura of plausibility, but alas, no.

   
   



2. I spoke (more than once) from the floor of the U.S. House of
   Representatives.
   

   I worked for a Congressman for a year and gave tours to
   constituents; when the House wasn't in session, I would bring
   people down onto the floor.

   
   



3. A former Presidential candidate wrote me a recommendation
   letter for law school.
   

   Michael Dukakis teaches at Northeastern University; I took a
   class from him.

   
   
   

   Really nice, smart person, and very dedicated to teaching.

   
   

Set the second:

1. I ate lunch with Alec Baldwin.
   

   About a quarter thought this was the lie. For my class with
   Dukakis, I wrote a paper on campaign finance reform, so he brought
   me to a luncheon that an advocacy group gave, featuring
   Baldwin.

   
   
   

   He looks very like he does on screen, and seemed knowledgable
   and enthused.

   
   



2. I was an extra on the set of Good Will Hunting.
   

   About half correctly spotted this as the lie. I was in college
   in Boston at the right time, so it had a much better aura of
   plausibility than the first one, anyway.

   
   



3. I inspired a novel.
   

   I asked papersky a question which eventually led to
   The Prize in the Game. It was probably not a good one
   to use as a lot of people here know that. =>

   
   

I see that the "two truths and a lie" meme is going around LJ. Actually, people seem to be doing n > 2 truths, which I don't think works as well—so here are two, very vaguely thematic, sets of two truths and one lie. (Those of you who participated in last year's discussion on sf.fandom will have a head start on these; the rest of you, no cheating by googling the old post. => ) Answers will be forthcoming in a separate post.

Set the first:

1. I sat on the Lord Chancellor's woolsack.
2. I spoke (more than once) from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
3. A former Presidential candidate wrote me a recommendation letter for law school.

Set the second:

1. I ate lunch with Alec Baldwin.
2. I was an extra on the set of Good Will Hunting.
3. I inspired a novel.

[ETA: comments may contain speculation, if you want to guess unencumbered by other people's ideas, go straight to "add a comment" or your local equivalent.]

Found poem meme, via truepenny.

Silly meme gacked from maybethemoon. Leave a comment to my answers to her five questions, and I'll ask you five questions for you to answer on your journal. I'm not sure why this is so appealing, but what the heck.

Oh dear. I take no responsibility for what follows.