30 October 2007

PZ's mutating meme

About a week and a half ago, I was infected with an evolving blog meme, and I think the only way to get better is to pass it on. Brian over at Laelaps tagged me; maybe he's annoyed about my suggestion to his profs that they assign him more homework, or maybe he's indignant at my mention of the RU Screw. I know he wants to be a transitional fossil, but I doubt he wants to be an evolutionary dead-end, so I'll help him out just this once.

The meme started over at Pharyngula, where you can read about its origins. Here are the rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is
going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

First, my phylogeny:
My great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My grandparent is The Anterior Commissure
My parent is Laelaps

And my contributions to the meme pool:

The best scary movie in sociopolitical dystopias is:
Children of Men

The best sexy song in pop rock is:
"With or Without You" by U2.

The best scary story in romantic short stories is:
"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

The best B-movie in 1980's horror films is:
Alligator
I'm leaving this one in, but I've never seen this fine piece of cinematic art, or any other B-movie in the horror genre, and I've already used up my two mutations. I think this is a blow to my viability, but we'll let God PZ decide.

Now I get to infect some other bloggers. I'd like to infect ERV, but she's already been kissed, and she's a busy grad student, so I'm going to target Christians for infection. I tag:
Siris
John Farrell
Steve Martin at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution
The Fire and the Rose

Now we'll see whether this expansion into a new niche will result in an adaptive radiation or a mass extinction.

2 comments:

John Farrell said...

I'll try not to disappoint. For the scariest movie of the 80's does it count if I suggest the 6th game of the 1986 world series?

Okay, probably not....

Stephen Matheson said...

All you have to do is change the genre. You want scary? In 1986, my wife and I lived in New Jersey. (I could stop there.) And, well, I was cheering for the Mets. I still haven't thought of a penance, although I've been a Sox fan since '96 (that's 1996) and they didn't even make the ALCS till we were on our way out of Boston (2001). Good luck with the meme!