Now that you've all had a chance to think about this and answer, I shall fess up with my own answers.

> What's your favorite country based solely on its shape?

Italy, Chile, and South Africa, which other people have mentioned, are all good answers. My co-worker and I (we came up with all these questions in a typically silly afternoon) thought of all these. Other good answers are Canada (all those frozen islands to the north), Mexico or Thailand (bits falling off), and Senegal (The Gambia is like a dagger sticking into Senegal and consuming the most *useful* part of that land, namely the Gambia river). But I'm going to pick Norway, which has this huge curvy bit around the top and some of the most jagged coastline imaginable.

> What's your favorite shape to cut paper into?

Cirrus clouds on a moonlit night.

> What's your favorite color of sand?

In New Zealand, we went to a beach where the same was black on top, but as you walked and cut through the top layer of sand, you left dark blue footprints. That blue/black made great sand.

> What's your favorite number of square feet?

9, but not 3 ft. by 3 ft.; rather, 9 square feet as arranged in a "golden rectangle."

> What's your favorite thing to pretend is a gun?

This is a question in honor of my brother. As a kid, *anything* was a gun.

But I'm going to say my grandmother's walker. You lie down on the floor, grab that thing by the handles, and tip it up, and you've got a mounted four-barrel anti-aircraft station.

> What's your favorite prime number?

7, the number of perfection.

> What's your favorite smell of a food you don't like to eat?

Coffee.

> What's your favorite vowel sound?

Long A.

> What's your favorite Lord of the Rings character that you don't know the name of?

That guy that was all gray and big-eyed that was living in that cave all that time and kept making those choking sounds with his throat and was always after the Ring and stuff.

No?

Ok, in Return of the King, like two or three shots after Legolas took the elephant thing down, there was this one orc on the left in the back that does this cool kind of move thing with his head, you know, where he was kind of moving and his head also moved somehow. I liked that guy.

No?

Ok, Peter Jackson's daughter, as she's listening to Bilbo Baggins tell his stories, and she has that jaw-dropped expression on her face.

> What's your favorite country name no longer in official use?

Persia.

> What's your favorite musical note?

C

> What's your favorite letter that's also the name of a musical note?

A

> What's your favorite color for a refrigerator?

Off-white. Silver would be cooler, but dark appliances make kitchens gloomy.

> What's your favorite fort-building technique?

Pack down a humongous pile of snow and excavate. We did that once, and two things struck me: (1) rooms of snow really can get warm and even hot, (2) that thing was soundproof like you wouldn't believe.

> What's your favorite thing to laugh at other people about?

Culture shock.

> What's your favorite generic name for a technology company?

InterMaxBitTechNetTronCorpCo

> What's your favorite airline term?

Deadhead.

> What's your favorite key on a keyboard?

The reset button on the Apple IIe. Unlike the other clacky keys, this one just had a spring underneath it, and the button was shaped differently, and the overall effect was that it was way fun to press, and you could do so freely, because, for safety reasons, it didn't do anything unless you combined it with CTRL or OpenApple-CTRL.

> What's your favorite onomatopoeia?

Ptooie.