There's an art to bragging without really bragging
Who says they’re the 50 best? Only me. And while they’re skewed toward those in my Google+ circles (techies, media types) and those in theirs (civilians, a couple of celebs), I have compiled this list over the past few months by looking at many hundreds of Google+ profiles, which in addition to containing standard biographical info invite users to claim “bragging rights.”
(Take it from 1000 Zombies: Google+ is no ghost town)
Most people pass – it’s not required – and too many take the invitation far too seriously. But among those who exercise more imagination, restraint and self-deprecation – in other words, those who get it – you will find interesting and amusing tidbits. Here are 50 self-identified “bragging rights:”
“Born on the same day that the Beatles recorded their first album (now that dates me). By all accounts, around about the time that they recorded “Twist and Shout,” I popped out. Seems appropriate somehow.”
“I have never watched ‘Titanic’ in its entirety, played World of Warcraft, played Angry Birds, read a Harlequin romance novel, watched Jersey Shore, killed a human being, or broken a bone.”
“Found a dead body when I was 12, saved the Enterprise a few times, Ran the Axis of Anarchy, broke up Penny and Leonard. Currently running the non-lethal weapons lab at Global Dynamics.”
“I caught Jizmak’s drumstick at the end of a Gwar concert in Montclair NJ. At 17 I accurately predicted the downfall of Boston Market while working there.”
“I have a photographic memory for words and ideas, but not numbers. I can quote movie dialog or passages from a book from memory, but can’t remember my own phone number.”
“When I was 14 I wrote a single pass 6502 assembler in Atari BASIC (yes, really). In college, while my peers had modern 286 PCs for their assignments, I had a hand-me-down Heathkit 8086; I rewrote the BIOS so it would be PC compatible enough to run MS-DOS 3.0, Wordstar, Lotus 123, and Borland’s Turbo C IDE. Everything since then is a corporate trade secret.”
“I was one of the first to use video on the web to promote horses for sale. I have one of the oldest, largest Quarter Horses email communities, est. 1999.”
In addition to my editing duties, I have written Buzzblog since January, 2006 and wrote the 'Net Buzz column in Network World's dearly departed print edition for 13 years. Feel free to e-mail me at pmcnamara@nww.com.
