1. I've seen more horror movies than you have.
2. I can write over 2000 kanji; it took me about a year to learn them all.
3. I've been on the Internet since it was the ARPAnet. One of my first quasi-professional programming jobs was writing message-handling code for an IMP running on a PDP-8 at New York University.
4. I'm on a very short list of people who have argued with Steve Jobs, not lost, precisely, and managed to keep their badges anyway.
5. I have a growing collection of pre-paid subway cards of the world, including a "Charlie Card" (Boston), a "Metro Card" (New York), a "SUICA Card" (Tokyo), a "T-MONEY Card" (Seoul), and an "Oyster Card" (London).
6. My car spent more time in the San Francisco International Airport parking structure last year than it did in my driveway.
7. I met Billy Joel at 4:00 am in the Astor Street subway station while he was shooting the cover for the album "Turnstiles".
8. I have the largest hands of anyone I've ever met.
9. Tokyo natives have told me that I know my way around Tokyo better than they do.
10. I'm a mutant: I only have three wisdom teeth.
11. I have absolutely no ability to tell whether colors "go together". I've had salespeople in clothing stores assume that I was colorblind.
12. I haven't combed my hair in a decade or more: when a new barber asked how I combed it, I replied, "When I need to comb it, I get it cut."
13. I own six pairs of yellow sneakers, all different.
14. I was an extra in Brian de Palma's "Phantom of the Paradise".
15. I do theatrical lighting as an occasional hobby. I've run a follow-spot from sixty feet up a redwood tree.
16. I ran sound board for Talking Heads at CBGB in 1976, when they were playing warm-up for a group called The Shirts.
17. I bowl left-handed, but play baseball right-handed. I'm ambidextrous at pingpong.
18. I can make omelets, steak au poivre and Bearnaise sauce without consulting a cookbook.
19. I know what "hoist by one's own petard" actually means.
20. I can distinguish, in detail, between a single ballista, a double ballista, an arbalest and a trebuchet.
21. Some of the first Japanese words I learned were vocabulary from samurai movies, including "tsujigiri" (testing out a new sword on a random passerby) and "nisekubi" (counterfeit severed head).
22. My first personal hard disk was a SuperMac 20 megabyte SCSI drive. It cost $2,500 and was the size of a cinderblock.
23. The first assembly language I ever learned was COMPASS, used by the CDC 6600 "supercomputer".
24. Clifton Fadiman is a cousin of mine. He's an asshole.
25. I am an NRA-qualified sharpshooter.
26. I can sound out Russian (i.e. Cyrillic) and Korean (i.e. Hangeul), but don't understand either.
27. I aspire to learn to write in "mirror script", from right to left, like Leonardo da Vinci.
28. I read that Voltaire drank 50 cups of coffee a day, and I thought I'd never get up to that point, until i realized that he was drinking those tiny thimble-sized cups.
29. I know enough about Christian heresies to be able to discuss them intelligently with seminarians.
30. I made an evangelical Christian who was intent on converting me cry by explaining about mistranslations in the book of Isaiah. I'm not especially proud of this.
31. I'm a sucker for edged weapons and cigarette lighters.
32. I kept myself in spending money my freshman year at college playing poker against my dorm-mates.
33. I have free-climbed the 200-foot Kensico Dam in Westchester County, New York. Trying that these days might get you shot.
34. I have a very polite note from the Dean of Students at Bard College asking whether I might not refrain from free-climbing the fronts of the dormitories. Some sort of insurance thing.
35. I've dislocated my right shoulder five times.
36. In 26 years of living in New York City, I only experienced one serious attempt at a mugging. The would-be perpetrator agreed with me that it wasn't a very good idea after I'd knocked him flat several times.
37. My last kung-fu instructor was a Czech from Prague.
38. I used to be able to read and speak a little Tibetan.
39. If you count being able to say "Hello" and "Thank you", I speak about nineteen languages.
40. I probably own close to a hundred t-shirts, a third of them from Apple.
41. My great-uncle was an animator on "Fantasia". He got personally fired by Walt Disney for attempting to start an animators' union, and went on to a career as a successful art forger and world traveler.
42. I took the GREs, cold, on a whim a couple of years ago, and scored 800 quantitative, 780 qualitative, and 660 analytical. I'd have done better on the analytical if I'd practiced a few problems of that type beforehand.
43. Some friends and I made mercury fulminate in high school. We didn't blow ourselves up, happily.
44. In twenty years of living in California, I've had four car accidents (I was riding a motorcycle for one); according to the police reports, and everyone's insurance companies, I wasn't at fault in a single one.
45. I didn't get a driver's license until I was 25.
46. I deeply desire to own a reproduction of the "Oscillation Overthruster" from the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". I almost snagged one on eBay about four years ago, but lost it at literally the last moment.
47. Among others, I have seen the following groups perform live: Talking Heads, the Rolling Stones, Yes, Genesis, Gentle Giant, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
48. I have, on one occasion, found myself explaining sumo wrestling to Japanese people.
49. I'd like to make mead some time.
50. I have an unused day pass for the tram in Amsterdam in my wallet. Fortunately, they never expire.
