The Mutated Gene Meme

Kathleen tags me with the most complicated meme in history:

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.


My origins:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-great-grandparent is Shakespeare's Sister.
My great-great-grandparent is Excuse This Mess....
My great-grandparent is Jennifer.
My grandparent is Snag.
My parent is Kathleen of the Oakland Dilletante Kathleens.

1. The best comedy in alternative universes is: Fox News. Sean Hannity, a scary DeVinci Code albino who says people are at war with Christmas, fembot and mandroid newscasters, Ann Coulter without irony, and Bill O'Reilly, all packaged by a greedy Australian.

2. The best sexy song in rock is: "Hot Girls in Love" by Loverboy. Headbands! Mullets! An album cover featuring a man's ass in red leather pants! And 100% Canadian! Yet they were hunted by many hot girls in love. That takes a special kind of sexy.

3. The best cult novel in absurdist fiction is: The Apprentice by Lewis "Scooter" Libby. A grown man named Scooter writes scenes of animal sex before working for a vice president who eats puppies.

4. The best Jim Varney movie in American film is: Slam Dunk Ernest/Ernest Scared Stoopid (tie). In the first film, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar plays an angel who teaches Ernest how to dunk. It's nice when the facts write the jokes for me.

5. The best use of ground meat in American cooking is: The Culver's Butterburger. In my heaven, these grow on trees, and in real life, every bite gets you that much closer to going to heaven.

6. The time-travel story in nonfiction is: The Republican Party national platform. Gays, back in the closet. Women, back in the kitchen. Hispanics, back in Hispanola. Blacks, back of the bus. Michael J. Fox and DeLorean sold separately.

In keeping with my actual biological status, I will be unable to pass the meme onto others. But with answers like these, it's probably for the good of the species.