A few weird things...

Since I got tagged a week or two ago by Shawn I figured that I'd spit out a few things... perhaps more weird than obscure and in some cases merely unexpected by a few of you. Some of this may be known to some of you (but not others).

1. Some people say that they're terrible at remembering names, but somehow I think that I have most of them beat. I graduated from high school and got halfway through undergrad before memorizing the official spelling of my own middle name. That's both better and worse than it sounds. Worse: My middle name comes from one of my grandparents (but I always just called him grandpa). Better: It was a question of a single letter, and there are people out there with both spellings, albeit only one of which can be found on my birth certificate.
2. When I flew home for Christmas I found that my family had been debating whether or not I'd end up doing something while I was there. Weird thing #2: I avoid New Year's Celebrations - they're just too anti-climactic. I was thinking of changing that this year since I'm not home all that often, but I was sick that day and so the streak of 4 or 5 years continues.

   Of course, there are other important festivities through the year that shouldn't be forgotten about. One can't forget the excitement of pi day (Interestingly just today a search engine redirected someone to Rotundus based on a search query about that topic. pi day is less than a week away at this point, so it might be a good time to make your pi day party plans. There may still be time to order an "I love PI" t-shirt if you don't already have one.

3. National anthems annoy me. I'm not talking mere boredom here - they annoy me enough that if I'm somewhere in the vicinity of a TV that no one else is watching and a national anthem is being played I'll run around the room looking for a remote just so that I can mute the thing (even if I wasn't really watching the TV either). I don't really care what country's anthem it is either.

   Perhaps it's a Canadian thing. When Roger and I caught a Flames game back in February the Canadian national anthem was sung in Cree instead of English - not many people were singing along, but that didn't seem too much different from the norm at such events.

4. People know that I've a fair number of books kicking around, but it might surprise you what some of them are. At the moment the largest book in my collection in Calgary (weighing in at 2142 pages) is actually a French-English dictionary (specifically this one). It's not necessarily a particular weird book for a person to possess, but somehow I suspect that most of you would be surprised to find that I own such a volume.