CIA rat bastard

Janey feckin' mack. Langley's man in Dublin has tagged me with a 'meme' even stoopider, if marginally more mystical, than that Meme of Four thing: a Meme of Seven.

It appears I am the victim of random senseless meme-propagation -- Joe simply closed his eyes, stuck seven pins into his monitor and tagged the names he'd pinned. I won't be so cruel; I shall deliberately choose seven people from my blogroll who I believe are likely to ignore their tagging with the contempt it deserves, if indeed they learn of it at all. This meme has been making the rounds for a while now, and if any of the candidates were previously infected and are thus now immune, well, all the better for them. So: Seth, Richard, Des, Dragan, Abiola, Seb and Dinesh -- you're it.

My answers below the flip.

Seven things to do before I die:

1. Spend two years wandering in Australia
2. Ditto, in New Zealand
3. Learn Catalan
4. Describe a new species
5. Make a cassoulet
6. Buy a big old house north of the Finn
7. Really get my head round the Price equation once and for all

Seven things I cannot do:

1. Any dance beyond the Basic Waltz and the Caucasian Twitch
2. Play a musical instrument
3. Speak more than the cupla focal of the (hee hee) first national language
4. At the moment and in this country, drive
5. Say where I will be living in two years' time
6. Pronounce ferrocarril in a manner that would satisfy a Spaniard
7. Fit into my oldest jeans, alas

Seven things that attract me to a city:

1. Its food markets
2. The number and variety of its non-native communities
3. Highly 'urban' character combined with easy access to the back of beyond
4. Presence of one or more universities
5. Prevalence of surviving pre-WWII architecture
6. At least two 'arty' cinemas
7. A beergarden

Seven things I say:

1. Just five minutes more.... [rolls over, snores]
2. Well now that was delicious, though I say so myself
3. Ha leck mi doch!
4. That won't do at all, I'm afraid
5. Don't worry, she probably won't bite you
6. Oh, I don't think they suffer much
7. These were much less expensive before the euro!

Seven books I like:

1. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
2. The Chronic[what?!]cles of Narnia by CS Lewis
3. Till We Have Faces by the same
4. Murphy by Samuel Beckett
5. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
6. The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien
7. Der Hartmut in Baiern by Haggi

Seven movies that I’ve loved:

1. Gallipoli
2. Zoolander
3. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
4. Tender Mercies
5. Alien
6. Repo Man
7. Crimes and Misdemeanors

Hmm. By putting my six taggees above the fold in a normal sentence, I would appear to have reduced the number of categories to six. Perhaps that will break the evil power of this thing.