Sunday, March 09, 2008

Squandered my 4 'free' days...

Well, it's the end of my 4 day period where I had no appts, and I was going to get soooo much done...

Needless to say, reality didn't quite work out that way. Although I did have a few things that I'd forgotten to put on the calendar, so it wasn't a totally free 4 days. But either way, definitely nothing was accomplished in the studio today, this being full of the usual Sunday things.

So I'm free to respond to the tag from Amanda Watson-Will...7 facts about me! This tag has rules:

1. Once you are tagged, link back to the person who tagged you.
2 Post the rules on your blog.
3. Post 7 facts about yourself on your blog.
4. Tag 7 people and link to them.
5. Comment on their blog to let them know they have been tagged.

Drum roll please...

1. I have an extra toenail on each of my pinkie toes. When I was little, I was told that this was a Mongol trait, so I always figured Ghengis to be kin, since something like 90% of Mongolian males can trace their genes to the great Khan. A while ago, I googled it and turned up nothing. I googled it again recently and discovered a whole lot of conversations going on about it. Turns out, Cantonese claim it to be a Cantonese trait; Hakkas claim it to be a Hakka trait; and seems like every other Han Chinese claims it to be the indicator that you're a 'true Han.' And even some Norwegians have it. So my dreams of Ghengis kinship seems to have been very well dashed. Either that, or he's pretty much single 'handedly', ahem, populated much of Asia and some of Europe too.

2. I belong to the Haplogroup D. Now isn't that just fascinating?! This is the group that came out of Africa, went into the Middle East, through Central Asia, Siberia, and then into the Americas. The weird thing is, when you look at the map of human migration on the National Geographics Genographics site , this group is NOT, I repeat NOT shown as having gone into East Asia at all. And yet, the oral presentation says that many East Asians belong to this group. So I wonder why they don't draw the line as branching down into East Asia, and only as having gone into the Americas? Huh?

3. I'm bilingual...I speak both Emacs and Vi! And both Chinese and English too. Only I speak Chinese like a 15 year old in 1975.

4. I'm a belly dancer. I even performed once, way, way, way, way back in 1986, or maybe it was 1987. It was so stressful that I never did it again. Now I just dance for the fun of it. I even started violin lessons hoping to eventually play in a Middle Eastern band, but I've been too busy to play much in the last couple of years.

5. My first career aspiration, when I was 5, was to be an opera singer. European opera, not Peking opera.

6. This one is really about my cat: she knows her name, and comes when she's called (by her name, but not 'kitty kitty'). Sometimes when she's curled up next to my head, we play this game—I call out different names in sequence, and when I say her name, she whips my head with her tail! Occasionally, a name is close enough that she gets confused, but otherwise, she's pretty much dead on!

7. The last one. I've squandered 6 of them, so I better make this one a good one. Oh, The Pressure! Oh right, I was planning to include this one but forgot—I'm an Emmy winner, sort of. It was a technical Emmy, and they are really awarded to the product. So I was part of the engineering team that designed the product, which won a technical Emmy back in 1988. In 1992, another one of my projects was nominated, but didn't win.

So now I'm supposed to tag 7 people...this is like a pyramid scheme, isn't it? I'm not sure that I know 7 people with blogs, and they've probably all done this one already. And it's getting late, so I'll do that tomorrow.

4 comments:

Amanda said...

Thanks for playing along! How interesting to know about your origins right back to pre-historic times. How did you find this out? Is there some sort of special testing? Is it common for Americans to have this testing done? I don't know anyone in Australia who knows this sort of thing about themselves.

fingerstothebone said...

Ooops, let me try this again, just in case others want to know more about the genographics projects:

Hi Amanda,

I participated in the National Geographics Genographic Project. I don't know how common it is, but I thought it was cool, and the money you pay for the kit ($100) goes towards supporting the project, which is REALLY about learning about aboriginal people around the world.

If you go to their site, you can buy a kit (I think they ship all over the world). Then you just swab your cheeks twice, separated by something like 12 hours, and send in the swabs.

I don't know how common it is. I bought a kit for my mother-in-law, and outside of that, I only know of one other person who had it done, another artist, and she used the information she learned for an art installation.

gl. said...

okay, the info on the National Geographics Genographic Project is quite cool. so is the extra toenail.

what did you win an emmy for?

fingerstothebone said...

gl -- that's TWO extra toenails.

The Emmy was for the VM700 (stands for Video Measurement, to measure the quality of tv signals); this was back when I was at Tek. Then later, a software package that was an add-on to the VM700 (to measure video cameras) was nominated, but didn't win.