Thank you for coming! To celebrate ...

Well, thanks to my Hurricane Katrina ramblings and a timely metaquote, I finally hit my personal goal of 300 LiveJournal readers. Add that my journal has been messaged or linked to from other local LJ celebrities like theferret, arkhamrefugee, and wicked_wish, and the 300th friend-of confirms that I have finally crossed the boundary, in my own mind, to LiveJournal celebrity. D-list, but celebrity nonetheless. I'm very proud that 300+ people find what I'm writing to be interesting, including so many of you that I've never met in person.

So to celebrate, I'm going to do something that people do on LiveJournal all the time, that I've always resisted doing: Ask Me Anything. Ask me any one question, anything you're curious about, and you will get an answer. I do need to hang some conditions on this. Don't expect me to confess to any crimes within their statute of limitations. And don't expect me to give out anybody else's secrets that have been entrusted to me.

Also, be aware of the following warning. For the purposes of this one post and its answers, I am suspending the one limited form of tact that I adopted a long time ago. Normally, if you ask me a question and I think that you really, really don't want my honest answer, I will attempt to change the subject. If you ask me a second time, I will ask you not to ask me that question and/or tell you that it is my opinion that you are better off not asking me. If, in general, you ask me three times, then I will tell you. If after all of that, you tell me that you are sure that you want and need my opinion, I will tell it to you straight. If the news is negative, I will also include as much good news as I can dredge up so that you don't come away with a false impression that I think everything is bad news. But I will tell you, if you ask me three times. However, this one time, I am suspending that safeguard. Consider yourself already warned; if you ask me anything in this thread, I will assume that you have considered the possibility that I don't know what I'm talking about and that you're better off not asking, and decided to ask anyway.

Ask your questions as a direct reply to this message, if possible. I have turned anonymous posting on for this message's replies, and this message only. It's not truly anonymous; if you post anonymously, your IP address is logged where LJ admins and myself can see it. And I will delete flame-bait or spam, and if I get too much flame-bait or spam, I will turn anonymous posting back off. I'm only turning anonymous posting on so that people who want to ask who don't have LJ accounts, or who want a semblance or simulacrum of privacy, can ask anyway.

"I don't know" is an answer. "I don't care" and "I don't have an opinion of my own on that subject" are also answers. Odds are, though, that you won't see many of those. If I can't answer in a paragraph or two, I will promise you an answer as soon as I can get to one, especially if the response is overwhelming. If I can't answer in a paragraph or two and the question is especially interesting to me, it'll show up as an entire journal entry as soon as I can get to it.

So, all that being said: Ask me anything. What do you want to know?