Tagged by *jconway

1. Palaeontologists I have met: Gregory Paul, Robert Bakker (I even have a signed marker sketch of a Leptoceratops that he once drew), John Horner, S. Christopher Bennett (not really met, he never talks to anybody when he is not giving a presentation, but I did see him give a presentation, which is as close as I could get to talking to him), Dave Peters (not a palaeontologist, but included here because he has a habit of annoying actual palaeontologists, which is generally only something palaeontologists do to each other), Phil Currie, Luis Chiappe, Michael Carr (see the note for Bennett, though Carr is not as reserved, he prefers to talk to other palaeontologists), and a few more who are generally unfamiliar to those more interested in Mesozoic archosaurs.

2. My list of palaeontologists I have met is probably ten times smaller than what several other people here could write.

3. I have an evil plan to move to a more civilised country, but I haven't decided what more civilised country I should move to. I primarily blame indecisiveness.

4. I haven't drawn anything by hand worth posting in two years. My more recent work has primarily been vector. I have tried to make vector work that is not a diagramme, but than I look at *nyctopterus's work and wonder why I bother. So I stick to skeletals.

5. I've been growing Thomas Huxley-style sideburns [link] in recent times, but whenever I get a haircut the people always trim them to look like normal long sideburns, as is the style today, even if I explain that I want them to be atypically bushy.

6. I have a masochistic tendency to throw myself into other people's debates at bad times or bring up "controversial" topics that people with more tact never dream of bringing up in conversation. It has brought me countless enemies. This is all said in a very positive tone.

7. Among a good number of other magic tricks I have perfected over the years, mostly out of boredom, I can make a toothpick disappear and reappear, which means I could qualify as a wizard in Florida. I also can bend spoons, which means I could qualify as a psychic. Both are rather simple but I'm more interested in the first option than the second, I think wizards are a bit more reputable.

8. I once worked at a museum cataloguing mini-blobsters from Mazon Creek. I had a strong desire to just write "blobster" on all the labels, excepting the ones that I could tell what they were. Eventually I figured out what all of them were and the impulse to label all of them as blobsters lessened. I still want to go over there and quickly finish my work on the yet uncatalogued specimens so that I may fool a palaeontologist working on Mazon Creek fossils into thinking that "Blobster hansonii" is a valid species.


I tag ~bensen-daniel, *dustdevil and ~little-al.