Over the past few days, the two most popular posts on my blog have been 25 things about me...tagged and Building a Twitter Status Cloud, so I decided to mash the two of them up.

My first idea was to take the 25 things that my various friends have written, code them for categories, and do some sort of statistical analysis of what people write about. However, I’m pretty swamped right now, so I thought I would do something a little easier.

My next idea was to randomly select twenty five things that my friends have written and use that to create a new blog post. With a little bit of editing to make it look nice and flow together, here are 25 things about my friends:

1. When we lived in Red Lion, PA we owned a duplex. One half of the three story home is what we lived in, the other half made into 2 single apartments with an apartment in the back with our garage.
2. We raised horses and hunting dogs when I was growing up, so I was taught to never get attached to an animal. That’s why I’m so aggravated with Mary: we went to a shelter (“you’re taking me out to breakfast, buying me a new microwave, and we’re getting a dog”) , and she picked out a sweet Redbone Coonhound who had been horrifically abused. All Beau needs is constant love and attention, and I’ve become hopelessly attached to the big goofball.
3. I had to sit in the corner in kindergarten because I called the gym teacher a bitch. This was not because I knew what the word meant. His name was Mr. Rich, and I was simply coming up with rhymes for it. Nobody asked me why I was using that word before they sent me to the corner.
4. A very fond childhood memory is going to my grandmother's lake house for 4th of July and having her take all of my cousins and I in her car to Sonic for fresh a lime slush. To this day it's my favorite beverage.
5. My bench mark for the worst food would have to be beets and Sushi would be a very close second.
6. Have only been to Italy only once when I was 18. My ancestors are from Finland, my maiden name is the 2nd largest seaport in Finland, so I would love to go and see the country for myself.
7. My favorite pass-time is interacting with my friends on facebook.
8. My favorite webpage, besides my own, is the Ooze. A close second would be Emergent Village’s webpage. I have been visiting these two webpages since their inceptions.
9. Once on my lunch hour in Boston, I ran into Emo Phillips, literally.
10. I once sang backup to John Denver.
11. I've spoken with Sean Penn about mudslides and Madonna.
12. Am dyslexic and couldn't read well until about 15. As for writing, I needed another 5 more years to get it right. Yet because I am so competitive, people around me had no idea. I've been always a voracious reader and total nerd with a capacity to remember every piece of information that tickles my fancy --whether useful or not.
13. A friend of mine who has a masters in theater management tells me that I may actually be able to claim to have performed "on Broadway." I did a version of Animal Farm with a small troupe on a traffic island in the middle of the street. Apparently, depending on the number of people who passed and a few other measures like exact location, this may qualify for that vaunted distinction.
14. I own a lot of books. Every room in my apartment—except the bathroom—has books. I live in a library. I have read the majority of them at least once. I know every one I haven’t read.
15. Last three books I've read: Revolutionary Road, A Room with a View, and Nicholas and Alexandra.
16. Which leads me to this point: In graduate school I taught myself how to surf and only came close to drowning twice.
17. Since there wasn’t a doctoral program that suited me, I spent a year going to the North Carolina Central University School of Law at night. NCCU is a “traditionally all-black university”, was lead counsel for many of the great civil rights cases that went to the Supreme Court in the 1960s, and is the lowest-cost ABA-accredited law school in the country. I dropped out when I moved too far away to drive to class three evenings a week , and since I was paying for this myself, other schools were much too expensive since I never wanted to actually be a lawyer; I just wanted to study the law.
18. I can pack for a trip in one day or less. It takes me well over a week to unpack after I return from said trip.
19. I can tie a maraschino cherry stem in a knot in my mouth. I learned this from my dad before I turned 10. Now people ask me, "Your dad taught you bar tricks before you were 10?!"
20. I avoid using the dryer whenever possible.
21. I have held a wallaby in my arms. It wasn't a romantic thing, but it was awesome.
22. I'm kinda worried about 12/21/12 but figure we will all know about it one way or another soon enough.
23. The worst job I ever had was a Friday's waitress job in college. I went through the training with my closest friend and had a blast, and then on the first night out on the floor I quit after two tables.
24. I proposed to my wife while she was in the Peace Corps, at the Hotel Colbert in Casablanca in Morocco. But, Casablanca isn’t really as romantic as it sounds. Later we traveled to the many romantic spots and I kept thinking, “Crap, this would have been a great place to propose!” I have a bunch of photos of those places, but have never told my wife that is why I took them – until now.
25. Thinks Wiliams and Sonoma is heaven on earth.

As I thought more about this I thought it might be fun to take all of what my friends have done and create a word cloud of their things. As with my other projects, I used Wordle.net to generate the word cloud. Here is the word cloud I came up with:

25 things about my friends In a Word Cloud, originally uploaded by Aldon.