Sherry Chandler

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

PZ Myers at Pharyngula started this meme as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace. It’s sort of interesting to follow the string and watch the questions mutate. And this of course is only one string. (Hector’s pup, it’s a hoot just to see what people call their blogs.)

I stole the photo from The Primate Diaries.

As much as I hate to be accused of poopishness (especially of the old variety), I think I will not make a direct attempt to propagate myself. My genetic information is not that robust and so I will be content to be one of those occasional dead-ends that arise on the evolutionary tree.

However, if any of my readers is interested in a case of spontaneous generation, you may considered yourself tapped.

The rules:

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.

The lineage:

• My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
• My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
• My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
• My great-great-great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
• My great-great-grandparent is Kate.
• My great-grandparent is Finally Maturing.
• My grantparent is Parts-n-Pieces
• My parent is I See Invisible People.

The Questions and Answers:

• The best adult novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (you may think this is a children’s book but you’d be mistaken)
• The best scary movie in American classic cinema is: Night of the Hunter
• The best singer/songwriter song in classic rock music is: The Weight by Robbie Robertson as performed by The Band
• The best cult novel in post-Beat fiction is: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña
• The best high-carb food in Southern cooking is: home-fried potatoes

Related posts:

The book meme

flickr meme

Quotation Meme

The Unspectacular Meme

Four Things Meme

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