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7 Things
fleetfootmike tagged me for the "7 Things" meme. It involves listing 7 surprising or obscure facts about myself and then tagging seven other LJ users.



1. This is my first meme. I'm not a frequent poster at the best of times, and when confronted with coming up with a list of interesting facts about myself, I usually get blocked.
2. I may (or may not) have been an extra in the film Jaws. In he summer of 1974, some friends and I biked down the coast of Massachusetts to Wood's Hole, and took the ferry across to Martha's Vineyard. Another friend had gotten into some pretty serious trouble, and was staying with his grandparents for the summer. We spent about a week camping in their yard and hanging out on the island. I'm pretty sure the grand parents had no idea we were there. They were filming outdoor location shots for Jaws, and of course we spent some time watching. Mostly, they seemed to be struggling with a mechanical shark fin mounted to two air tanks that was towed behind a motorboat. The second unit director seemed to spend most of his time screaming at no one in particular. For one scene they needed a crowd of people to run along the beach while pointing at the shark. We got drafted. I think he scene may have ended up in the film as a bunch feet running by the camera.
3. I once drowned a car. My first car was a powder-blue 1964 Dodge Dart. I paid $165 for it. My folks' house at the time was out in the country. There was a small creek across the gravel road that led to the house. When my parents bought the property, a concrete culvert bridge was built. When they poured the bridge, the surface in the center sagged a bit, so the bridge had a pretty pronounced dip in the middle. In 1977, we had an extrodiarily wet winter, following 3 or 4 years of serious drought. During one particularly heavy downpour, I needed to get onto town to give some guitar lessons. When I got to the bridge, there was a large pool of water over the top, and extending out about 10 feet into the road on either side. A bunch of dead branches and brush from the drought had washed downstream and blocked the culvert. It looked pretty shallow, if a bit wide, so I tried to cross. As soon as I hit the dip in the center, the engine submerged, and the car stalled. Within seconds, there was water building up to the driver side windows. I scrambled out the passenger side, grabbed my guitar, and waded back toward the house. It was really scary, I'm a good swimmer, but I doubt I could have handled the current. Fortunately, the car blocked most of the flow as I made my escape. When I got to he house, I called my Mom to warn her the bridge was blocked. Just as I started to tell her about it, the car floated off downstream. It ended up several hundred yards away, with it's rear butter up against a pine tree and the nose in the creek bed. I used to have a snapshot, but I haven't seen it in years. I ended up selling it for $125 "as is" to a mechanic who (barely) got it running and drove it off. In a weird postscript, I later learned that a good friend and coworker at Emagic had once owned it. We were talking about cars we had owned one day, and he mentioned a slightly moldy smelling Dodge Dart he had once haed. We soon determined it was the same car. He told me it finally met it's end when a water tower collapsed on it.
4. I majored in Anhropology in college.
5. I had zero interest n computers until I started using one for music. I'm still far less interested in computers for their own sake than in what I can do with them.
6. For several years I hosted an early morning radio show "Wake Up and Smell the Radio" on KVMR, a community radio station in Nevada City, California.
7. I didn't take up the guitar to get girls, I just really wanted to play guitar. Good thing, as far as I could tell, girls were no more interested in me after I started playing than before :-).

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