Eight things about me meme

carbonel tagged me on this one, but I'm going to break the rules by not posting the rules and by not tagging anyone else.

1. I used to be a Friedrich-Hayek-type classical liberal on days when I wasn't a raving anarchocapitalist. Now I'm well and properly politically homeless in that Marxists no longer sound completely insane to me; they just sound a little overconfident of their understanding of the situation, which is exactly how Hayek sounds to me now as well. (And no, this does not make me even more eager to get involved in political discussions than I used to be.) The most important thing I have in common with old-school Marxists is internationalism, and I have always had that in common with them from the very beginning.

2. I just flunked out of a teacher training program. I was training to teach biology to inner-city teenagers. I learned a lot about myself and about public schools in the process, and my weaknesses in this sort of work turned out to be completely other than what I expected. I was also surprised to find out where my strengths for this sort of work lie.

3. I've been coming up with a set of 30-odd names for each of the nights of the synodic month; names for the phases of the moon, if you like, one for each night. It's not done yet, because this is an eel-slippery wiggly set of things to name. It's fun though. This is part of a general hobby of noodling around with invented calendrical systems.

4. When I was in second grade I pestered my teachers with questions about what started things spinning. I had to repeatedly explain to them that I already understood that it was inertia that kept them spinning and that I wanted to know what started them spinning in the first place. Eventually I was asked to write a letter with my question to the director of the local observatory-with-a-planetarium, which happened to belong to the local public schools (and that's a different story entirely). I'm not sure he understood my question either, but he did write back, and I did get invited to the afterschool astronomy program there, which I stayed in for two years. We ground mirrors and stuff as well as learning to identify constellations and stars.

5. My cat is named Toliman Ptolemy Tomkin Rigilkent Underfoot.

6. Last week I saw white-chinned swifts for the first time. Today I saw cobra clubtails (a species of dragonfly) for the first time. Also a pair of young stag white-tailed deer with fuzzy antler buds showing; I'm not sure I've ever seen even one of those just at that stage of development, much less two of them at once.

7. I've seen every movie the Coen Brothers have ever made up through 2003 (so their remake of The Ladykillers is the earliest one that I still have yet to see). Most of them I've seen more than once and would enjoy seeing again.

8. My beard is a different color than the hair on my head.