43 posts tagged “qotd”
What video game is your personal Game of the Year?
Submitted by SimpleNate.
I'm pretty sure it's either Super Mario Galaxy or Portal, even though I've never played Galaxy and only played Portal for five minutes. Hard to believe Wii Sports was a year ago.
Do you own all the albums of any particular musical artist or group? Who?
Submitted by dutterman.
Yep, I think there's a few artists that I am a completist for. None of these will probably surprises for any of you.
- Prince
- Michael Jackson
- Janet Jackson
- George Michael
- P.M. Dawn
- Pigeonhed
The desire to be a completionist, for me, isn't about just collecting for its own sake. I only like to collect artists where having the rarities reveals more about the things I like in their music in the first place. Especially in recent years, for example, Prince's best work is buried in obscure recordings that you couldn't get by just walking into a mall record store, let alone by skimming through iTunes. So there's still stuff for me to collect. :)
What decision changed the course of your life?
Submitted by Ally.
Moving to New York ten years ago. It was the first time I ever just leapt into something with both feet and knew I had to make it work. Every time I've done that since then, it's worked out great.
What would you consider to be your 15 minutes of fame so far in life?
Hmm. Haven't had them yet.
Who is your Alert In Case Of Emergency person?
Naturally, it's my wife Alaina. But I may have to rethink this, because today I got some paperwork from the Social Security Administration that said something like "in the case of your death, your spouse may be eligible for up to $255 in a one-time payment" and she said "go get the gun!"
But she was kidding! Kidding. So she's still my #1 In Case of Emergency person. :)
How well does your name Google? Who are you up against? (Celebrities, etc.)
Submitted by Matt Blank.
Hmm. I hadn't looked in a while, but I'm the #1 result for "Anil" or "Anil Dash". There used to be a French government agency with the initials ANIL that used to be #1 for years, but I guess that's not there anymore. There are about a million results for the phrase "anil dash" or 785,000 for the phrase in quotes. Frustratingly, one of the first results that shows up is still my Wikipedia profile. I wouldn't care, except I consider the contents of that page to be kind of embarrassing.
When you go out to eat, how do you pick where to go?
Submitted by Kristine.
I ask Serious Eats! :)
What is your favorite day of the week?
I think it is -- CATURDAY!
Ever run for office? (School, club, organization, politics, etc.) Did you get elected?
I ran for a buncha different things when I was in school. I don't remember if I just ran or was actually elected to student council when I was in middle school, but that year our class elected a special ed kid to student council as a joke that (I felt, at least) was largely at his expense. I found that whole episode so disturbing and typical that I never ran for any of our class offices again.
But! I did participate pretty actively in the Model Legislature program run by the YMCA. It's different than the (better-known, I think) Model U.N. program that a lot of schools do, though I participated in that as well. In Model Legislature, we played the role of legislators for our state, so kids from all over Pennsylvania, where I grew up, all came to Harrisburg and we even got to sit in the actual seats of the state capitol. There were a lot of really good kids in the program, and it was one of my favorite experiences from high school, but I'll just share the anecdotes you would all appreciate.
- My sophomore year of high school, the Model Legislature program introduced lobbyists for the first time. I immediately signed up to be one, representing women's issues. (Seriously!) Yes, I was the first influence-peddling, silver-tongued perverter of the democratic process in the history of that state's august faux-legislative body. And I did it for the chicks.
- At the end of my junior year, I ran for Governor, a term I would have served as a senior if I had won. I think there were four or five serious candidates, including one guy whom I was friends with (I forget his name; it's been 15 years) who was actually the son of a real-life state legislator. He and I both lost (my performance in the final debate was unimpressive, since I'd almost completely lost my voice campaigning) but my friend Hans was the Editor-in-Chief of the Model Newspaper, which oversaw the elections, and I think he told me I placed third or fourth. NOT LAST! :)
- Since I wasn't Governor, I was eligible to run for a different office my senior year. That time, I killed. I ran for Speaker of the House against four or five other candidates. Instead of a debate, we each had a few minutes to present the case for our candidacies, and for the closing line of my speech, I stepped from behind the podium I was standing at and said, "and my final qualification is that I'm not just wearing purple pants, I'm purple on the inside." I won in a landslide.
- There were a lot of weird scheduling problems that year, so I ended up having to kill time in the actual chambers of the Pennsylvania Capitol in front of a few hundred high school kids all in formal dress, growing increasingly restless. I had a gavel, which was largely ineffective, but being way up high on the speaker's podium made it really easy to command everyone's attention. So, during the course of the long weekend, I carried out the duties of my office by singing my acapella rendition of the introduction to Whitney Houston's cover of Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman", having the congressional pages deliver notes to my girlfriend, and having everyone wave their hands in the air while chanting "Hip hop hooray, hoooo, heeeey, hoooo" because Naughty By Nature was very popular back then.
I'm pretty sure nobody's elected me to anything since then.
