If Lorcan Dempsey can be frivolous then I guess I can too.

4 novels for re-reading

  1. Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
  2. At Swim Two Birds - Flann O’Brien
  3. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  4. Puckoon - Spike Milligan

4 films for re-viewing

  1. Dersu Uzala - Akira Kurosawa
  2. Raising Arizona - the Coen brothers
  3. Road to Morocco (considered by connoisseurs the finest of the Road movies)
  4. Spirited Away - Hiyao Miyazaki

4 songs

  1. Yer Blues - The Beatles
  2. Who Would True Valour See - Maddie Prior
  3. Here We Are - Annette Hanshaw (still the most pleasing thing I think I’ve ever stumbled across on the web)
  4. The Gnu - Flanders and Swann

4 covers

  1. Wish I Could Shimmy Like my Sister Kate - Mose Scarlet
  2. Pauper’s Last Ride - Anne Lederman
  3. Lulu’s Back in Town - Leon Redbone
  4. The Seven Wonders - Silly Sisters

4 books that have changed the way I look at work

This is tough - I don’t seem to read any books about my current work. Now if it were blogs…

  1. Richard and Mary Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the ‘Manipulus florum’ of Thomas of Ireland, Toronto 1979 (Studies and Texts 47) - because the 13th century was the Golden Age of information science
  2. Merton College MS 266 - a 13th-century canon law miscellany, including some unique and innovative alphabetical indexes, and lots and lots of marginalia by an early owner showing how he used them
  3. Robert C. Binkley, Selected Papers - because the two-aught-aught-aughts are the new 1930s
  4. Getting Things Done - at least, I hope it will change the way I look at work, when I get around to finishing it

4 places I have lived

  1. Durham, North Carolina
  2. Hampstead, where I turned 18 (during a one-year stay in England)
  3. Toronto (1978-92)
  4. Groningen, The Netherlands (1992-1996)

4 places to eat

  1. Kensington Kitchen, Toronto
  2. Sugar Bowl, Edmonton
  3. Da Vinci, Groningen (ah, the tiramisù)
  4. The ice cream booth on Whyte near the tracks

4 jobs I have had

  1. Planting tobacco, Delhi, Ontario
  2. Washing dishes, Childrens Psychiatric Research Institute, London, Ont.
  3. Editing and normalizing placenames for the International Medieval Bibliography, Leeds, UK
  4. Encoding descriptions of Z39.50 servers in XML for a software vendor, Mississauga, Ont.

4 television programs

I’m the guy in the Charles Barsotti cartoon: leaning forward to switch on the tv with a self-satisfied little smile, saying to himself, “I don’t usually watch tv”.

4 websites visited daily

  1. Google
  2. BBC News
  3. Bloglines
  4. Toronto Blue Jays

Tags: the locals: Kenton Good (probably won’t do it), Blog Driver’s Waltz (might have done it while the meme was still fresh, probably won’t now), Pam Ryan (too busy to do it), Pod Bay Door (probably already did it)