Erika Haub tagged me and now, due to the irrefutable, infallible, and merciless rules of netiquette, I best answer. Here are five things about me that you probably didn’t know (and I can’t promise that you wanted to know them).

1. When I was four years old, my family and I spent a day at Stony Creek in the Sequoia National Forest with another family. We kids played around in the creek and the surrounding rocks. As I climbed a rock, I slipped and fell face-first onto another rock, thus jamming three of my front teeth back up into my gums. I had to have emergency oral surgery. It was the first of four oral surgeries. The next surgery came when I was six as I had a “super tooth” coming in the front that was twice the size of any other tooth in my mouth and it had to be removed. Due to the accident and these two oral surgeries I had a missing front tooth for four or five years. I looked kind of like Alfred E. Neuman. (Ironically my brother and I had a subscription to Mad magazine when we were kids.)
2. There was a period for about six and a half years when I only wore shorts, except for formal occasions or when whatever job I held required that I wore long pants. As I entered high school, the school district had just changed the dress code policy to allow students to wear shorts year-round, prompting myself and two friends to have a contest to see who could go the longest in shorts. We spent winters in shorts, played snow football in the mountains in shorts, and I survived the 1997-1998 El Nino season at UC Davis in shorts. I finally put pants back on during my junior year of college.
3. In grade school, I took lessons for two separate activities: piano and karate. And there was some overlap. Piano was something more or less imposed upon my brother and I by our parents and karate was inspired by—what else?—the film The Karate Kid. Apparently I took to piano pretty well, but neither my brother or I liked it much. After a couple years my brother opted out and I wanted to as well, but my parents bribed me to take another year with—what else?—a Daniel LaRusso toy, which I think had karate-chop action. I’ve completely forgotten any of the training I received in karate or in piano.
4. I love the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail and generally all things Monty Python. That you probably knew or could of guessed. There is a part of that movie, however, that I despise with an unexplainable and nearly unquenchable passion. I hate, hate, hate the “Knights of the Round Table” song and dance scene—except for the clapping prisoner. (Check out this version of the scene.) The first dozen or so times I watched it I became extremely mad and wanted to punch the television. After a while I just left the room when it was on. I can now stay in the same room, but I still don’t like it and my blood pressure still rises, but only a couple points. And I’ve never understood why.
5. My first stab at learning ancient Greek was a horrible failure. In fact, it is extremely difficult for me to learn any new language. In college I took Greek, thinking it would be a good warm-up for seminary and would fulfill my requirement of three quarters of a foreign language needed to earn a BA. I knew that I plateau rather early in language learning, so I took it Pass/No Pass—we didn’t say fail at UC Davis. In the first quarter, I No Passed. I scrapped Greek and took French instead, which was the foreign language I studied for three years in high school.

As a bonus, Mark Hamill is 5’9” and so am I, more or less. That means I too am a little short for a Stormtrooper. Eddy, Tracy, Bill, James, and David, consider yourselves tagged.