Friday five: Quotes

I spent the weekend camping, getting rained on, not sleeping, comforting a 12 year old on the chipping of her tooth, riding a steam train, being pissy at people with whom I was expected to socialise, drinking, and not looking at computers. Thus, the Friday Five is now a Sunday Evening Five.

Good batch of questions this week. All about quotes and sayings and stuff. I like and collect the wit, wisdom and pithy sayings of others, and that figures in nicely to most of these answers.

1. What does it say in the signature line of your emails? My personal one has my email address and website URL, along with my mobile number. It also has a quote, randomly selected from over 450 hand-picked options. I’ve been collecting them for more than 15 years now (I’m having one of those “woah I’m old” moments). First they were in a box, then in a really big text file, now they’re in a FileMaker database that gets imported into Apple Mail every so often to keep the signature database current with the quotes database. So very geeky.

My work signature has my name, email address, company name, phone number, website URL and city. 2. Did you have a senior quote in your high school yearbook? What was it? If you haven’t graduated yet, what would you like your quote to be?

Yeah, I had a quote. I think it was a Neil Young one I was fond of at the time: “Before I ever learned how to talk, I forgot what to say”. That’s from Crime of the Century if memory serves. 3. If you had vanity plates on your car, what would they read? If you already have them, what do they say?

Hah! I think vanity plates are one of the heights of wankerism, so if I would ever have them, I’d be all clever and stuff, and they would read “WANKER”. 4. Have you received any gifts with messages engraved upon them? What did the inscription say?

I have a pewter alcohol flask with “Kermit” engraved upon it. My girlfriend-at-the-time Hilary has a matching one with “Scarlet” on it. Those were our nicknames in a certain group of friends. She picked hers because she likes deep red colours. I ended up with “Kermit” because I have a habit of looking like Kermit the Frog when I’m excited about something. Picture Kermit introducing the big star of the night, waving his arms around and saying “yyyeeeaaaayyyyyyyy!!!”. But for the green, that’s me. 5. What would you like your epitaph to be?

I want to be burned, not buried or dumped, so this doesn’t really apply. Once burned, I don’t really want to be kept anywhere either, there are a few places I’d like to be spread – one of them is “The Cut”, a ski slope overlooking Vancouver. That’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, especially at night. So, based on that, my epitaph would most likely end up being a sign warning skiers to keep their tips up on the chairlift.

In the absence of a serious answer for this question, I’ll leave you with a quote, a proverb from India, gentle reader:

“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”

Once day I might tell you all about Mica and Lola. Not yet though.