a memo and a meme

Despite the paucity of posts, Shoot the Projectionist H.Q. has been a flurry of activity over the last several days. The deadline for 31 Flicks that Give You the Willies nominating ballots is the end of the day tomorrow. Which means as the clock rolls over to midnight and it becomes Sunday, Oct. 14th, I'll check my e-mail for the final time, log the last the nominations and publish the list of nominees. I've received sixty ballots so far and well over a hundred films have been nominated--but there is still time and there are still a lot of neglected titles! So if you're out there and you haven't sent in your list yet, pack it full of obscure favorites and send it on in.

In other news, I've been tagged for a meme by Jonathan Lapper of CinemaStyles. (His post at that link has some interesting stuff about the meme phenomenon you may want to check out.)

When this thing started at Pharyngula it looked like this...

Here are the instructions: The Pharyngula mutating genre meme 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. Here are my starting propagators. Since I'm the one starting this whole shebang, my source site is nowhere but me, and I should be the only one to answer NONE…unless someone throws out my questions altogether and starts a competing meme, which would be rather interesting.

My parent is: NONE. 1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is… The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. 2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is… Cold Mountain. 3. The best sexy song in rock is… Gloria, by Patti Smith.



When Lapper sent it over to me it had gone through several mutations and become:



My parent is: Cinephile (you owe me a lot of back birthday presents Dad)
1. The best epic song (over six minutes in length) in rock is... How Soon is Now, The Smiths
2. The best mockumentary movie in comedy is... Best in Show ("He went after her like she was made out of ham")
3. The best End of the World movie in Science Fiction is... The Day the Earth Caught Fire


I left two questions alone and mutated one of them, creating this:

My parent is CinemayStyles.

1. The best epic song in rock is… COBRA by My Morning Jacket

2. The best horror parody film in comedy is… DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (1996)

3. The best End of the World movie in Science Fiction is… A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975)


And now, dear readers, I am sorry to say, but you have been tagged. If you feel compelled to do so, please mutate my meme and pass along the infection to someone else.



This is the cover to My Morning Jacket's Chocolate and Ice EP which contains "COBRA." At 24 minutes, 12 seconds, "COBRA" truly is the most epic song in rock.