Weird and random facts

Pkchukiss has hit me with a meme, and it's just as well because I have caught a cold and was having trouble coming up with something to write about today that wasn't a great big moan about how unfair life is.

Here is the meme:

Rules of the game: Post 5 Weird and Random Facts about yourself, then at the end list the names of 5 people who are next in line to do this.

Weird and random is hard, but I've taken it to mean the first five things I think of. That's random, right? Irrelevant, anyway.

Here goes:

1. I am the Missing Link.

When I was ten a woman who was knitting a sweater for me took my measurements, and while she was doing this she chatted with my mother. After she'd finished she looked at the numbers she'd written and did a double-take.

"I shouldn't talk when I'm doing this," she laughed. "I've made a mistake. Your arms can't possibly be that long. Twenty-one inches? A little thing like you?" She scoffed at herself. "Sixteen, more like!"

She measured again. My arms were, indeed, twenty-one inches long, and the theory of evolution gained instant follower.

2. I have no ambition. I do not want to be anyone, or do anything in particular. Just being is enough for me, and doing whatever I'm doing well.

3. My father had that balding pattern where his hair receded at the sides and he was left with a vertical strip of hair down his forehead. When I was about seven I asked him why it was like that, and he told me it was a special hairstyle for clever people, and I BELIEVED HIM. For years.

4. When I was six I was a fast reader, and one day my cousin commented on how quickly my eyes moved back and forth as I was reading. For about an hour after he said this I read the same paragraph over and over, because I kept noticing my eyes and losing the plot, and for weeks afterwards his words would come back to me at odd moments and I would lose track of what I was reading. It was INSANELY IRRITATING, and I thought he'd done it deliberately because I would rather read than play with him. (This is still true, incidentally.)

5. When I was four my brother told me that if I was wearing gumboots (rubber boots) the electric fence would not give me a shock, and I believed him and touched the electric fence. I got a shock. I'm fairly sure he was right and the gumboots were at fault, but I am still mad at him for laughing. It wasn't very nice.

I don't know who to tag. How about the first five commenters?