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Seven Blunders of the Modern Me

Brian King tagged me as part of the latest Mozilla geek meme, the rules of which are as follows:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I particularly appreciate this opportunity because it gives me a much-needed nudge to post something on this blog, which has been dormant for far too long. So without further ado, seven gripping facts about me, me, me:

• Although I sound and act American, I’m actually British by birth and nationality. My family moved to Connecticut when I was six years old, where I dropped my English accent and burgeoning cricket skills like a live grenade. I still drink my tea with plenty of milk.
• I’ve lived in Europe since 1992, first in Paris, then in Hamburg and now in Prague, which I appear to be unable to leave. This means I’ve spent most of my life outside of the States (22 versus 16 years).
• One of the main reasons I prefer to live in Europe is my love of learning and speaking foreign languages. I started to learn French at the age of 13 and spent a few summers in France as a teenager. I dreamed of moving to Paris after university, so I did. I used to be able to fool the natives into thinking I was French, but my skills have rusted a bit since then. I also speak German and Czech fluently but I couldn’t fool anyone into thinking much of anything other than how funny my accent sounds. I’ve dabbled in many other languages, in most of which I can only utter a garbled sentence or two: Russian (three years at university and a semester abroad in Moscow), Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Dutch, Japanese, Swedish, Farsi, Hebrew and Esperanto.
• I love playing golf despite my utter lack of natural ability. My official handicap is 23.6 but I swear, I’m really much better than that.
• I have an obsessive personality and when I take up an activity, I practice and talk about it incessantly. For example, I studied backgammon intensively for a couple of years, achieving a near world class level. This didn’t prevent me from losing more money than I would care to admit gambling on matches. My latest passion is piano.
• In college I used to joke with my friends about starting a band called “Plastic Million”, for no particularly good reason. As a result, my moniker on various online fora is “plasticmillion”, which I can’t bring myself to change despite its unquestionable goofiness.
• Everyone in my family cooks well. When I’m too lazy to go shopping (a frequent occurrence), I enjoy making tasty dishes from whatever happens to be lying around in my kitchen. Ask me about my corned beef chili and Indian ratatouille (or, as I call it, “ragatouille”).

I’m supposed to invite seven other people but I’m late to the party, and I can’t think of even one Mozillian with a blog who hasn’t already taken the plunge. I dare say this meme is rapidly running out of meme juice anyway.