I hate chain letters. Never liked 'em, never sent 'em. But this is a little different.
First of all, it's a challenge, and I don't back down from them lightly. Secondly, it came from two trusted sources in less than 24 hours--from old buddy and Meister-blogger Mitch Joel and from new buddy Michael Wagner. And finally, it segues so snugly into this tome's passionate theme that the team at Surprise Central has given it the unanimous thumbs up.
I speak of "The Five Things Meme," a social media tagging experience best explained by Mitch himself right here. In a nutshell, it asks recipients to reveal "Five Things You Wouldn't Know About Me" to their blog's audience--an exercise in Surprise if there ever was one--and then send the dare over to five other folks.
I'll delve deeper into the ramifications of this over the weekend, but the challenge to come up with five unknown personal factoids in the age of insta-Google (not to mention every tale I already spun in my tell-all book I Almost Killed George Burns) was indeed, uh, well...challenging.
But I think I pulled it off, so without any further adue...
1) My first career goal was to be a garbageman. I was about three-and-a-half years old and saw these guys outside my window at night, making all sorts of loud noise, throwing large cans around at random, and jumping on-and-off of a moving truck. "What a gig!" I remember thinking. "Where do I sign up?"
2) I have been accused of having what could be called a "bad temper," the worst of which once erupted volcanic-like when I was at Just For Laughs and I trashed my entire office--desk, bookshelves, windows, coffee cups-- with a baseball bat. My assistant Diane, with me for over a decade now but then in her first month on the job, hid under her desk to escape the flying shrapnel. Diane now sits safely three offices away from me...but the baseball bat is still within arm's length behind my desk. Just in case...just in case.
3) I love Cool Whip (particularly Cool Whip Light, which has only 35 calories in three heaping tablespoons!), Kraft's non-dairy, neo-synthetic, cloud-like whipped topping. I put it on just about everything, even resort to eating it out of the tub, and as an added bonus, let my dog Shaydee lick the spoon when I'm done.
4) I collect rare books, and some of my most prized possessions are first editions of Ayn Rand's We The Living and Atlas Shrugged as well as a signed first edition (complete with scribble of a Campbell's Soup can) of Andy Warhol's autobiography The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
5) While known to be somewhat outgoing , I am incredibly uncomfortable and shy at parties. I am much more at ease on stage in front of 5,000 than at a dinner party of five.
So there. And now, it's over to you Tim Sanders, Rick Spence, Austin Hill, Roger Von Oech and Shardy (Martine, you would've been included but you don't blog, and if you did, it would evaporate the blogosphere).