Snow White and the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Dwarves

I generally don't respond to blog-memes, partly because of an anti-authoritarian streak where I hate to be told what to think and write about and partly because I like for this to be a blog about ideas, not about me. But I got tagged with this one by two people whom I both like and respect, so I'll play along if you folks will. It's the old "random facts about you" thing. So I'll list eight as requested, but you guys feel free to leave one. What is it that your playground pals would never know about you?

Here's the meme:

- Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
- People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
- At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
- Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

1) Between second grade and my junior year of high school, I never missed a day of school -- including Jewish holidays, and I went to school s where even the African-American kids took off Yom Kippur.

2) I play the harmonica. Not well, but I enjoy playing about as much as anything else I can think of. In fact, I used to sit in grad school with a band called Eldon Green and later a was a part of a band called Warthog in a sleezy little dive in Fells Point in Baltimore.

3) Gwydion was the first person in history to pronounce out loud my full name spelled backwards.

4) Despite the fact that I do not drink coffee, I collected coffee mugs from all 50 states with the name of the state, or of a location or major attraction in the state.

5) I have been searching for years for a copy of an out of print book entitled Scrambled Chickens which includes the following recipe for a home-made atomic bomb:

(1) Get a jar full of atoms
(2) Insert fuse
(3) Light fuse
(4) Run like hell

6) I own colored chalk holders to coordinate with whatever I wear when teaching.

7) My Erdos number is 6. Having never been in a feature film, I can only fudge a Bacon number of 5 -- I've been in home movies with my Uncle who appeared briefly in Avalon with Aidan Quinn who was in Practical Magic with Sandra Bullock who was in Loverboy with Kevin Bacon. This gives me a fudged Erdos-Bacon number of 11.

8) I am pathologically uptight about asking favors of other people if there is even the slightest possibility of it being a burden. As such, I will list a few blogs, but will not leave comments nagging them to take this up. If they come across this and think it would be fun, so be it, but I'm not going to bother them.

Here are eight sites:

Gwydion
Filosofia y Flores
Foreign Student
Rural Mama
Philosophical Lawyer
Oxymoronic Philosopher
The Good Word of Sprout
Snapshots From an Ordinary Life

So there. Now what is it no one in the blogosphere would know about you?