Seven Things (Filler Post)

I'm still on the road today and not able to provide the type of rich content you've come to expect. You'll have to make do with a bit of meagre gruel you can blame on the number one beer blogger in America, who tagged me in a kind of beer blogger chain letter. He writes:

The idea is “I’m supposed to write seven things that people might not know about me” and then bestow the same “honor” on 15 more unsuspecting bloggers.

He did, and he tagged me. I will do the seven things dealy, but I will bravely break the cycle and wave my skinny arse in fate's direction. Here goes:

1. At birth, my last name was Gorostiza. It changed to Alworth when I was adopted a little later on. The name is Basque, and a few years back, a Basque woman told me that surnames tend to reflect local landmarks. Gorostiza apparently means "holly tree."
2. I hate holly trees.
3. In December, Chronicle Books will release a little boxed set thingy called The Beer Tasting Toolkit (or something similar). I wrote it. It follows their quite successful Wine Tasting Party Kit.
   
4. I have owned three Volkswagen vans.
   
5. One of my favorite television shows--which I discovered long after it went off the air--is Veronica Mars. It contains all the things I love: class commentary, highbrow/lowbrow references, witty dialogue, and a hardboiled gloss. Don't believe me? Joss Whedon said this about it: ""Best. Show. Ever. Seriously, I've never gotten more wrapped up in a show I wasn't making, and maybe even more than those [...] These guys know what they're doing on a level that intimidates me." And Whedon, of course, made Firefly, another of my very favoritist shows.
6. I am so bad at math that I barely graduated from college. You had to pass this basic proficiency test to graduate, and if you couldn't, you had to pass a sub-100 level class (075). I managed to fail THAT, but eventually passed the test.
   
7. Ironically, this would lead naturally toward my job as a university researcher responsible mainly for (low-level) stats. Moral: statistics have very little to do with math.

Regular blogging will resume this afternoon or tomorrow.