Taste test (Updated by request)

Here are the results of my whirl through the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. My preferences are bolded and italicized; some were strong preferences, some were hard choices, and some were the lesser of two dislikes. For those of you who are saying "Uh, Chan, planning on posting anything gardening-related any time soon?", have no fear...I've come up with my very own taste test for gardeners (but only 25 questions, not 100), also after the jump.

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises?
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington?
4. Cats or dogs?
5. Matisse or Picasso?
6. Yeats or Eliot?
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin?
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike?
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca?
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning?
11. The Who or the Stones?
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath?
13. Trollope or Dickens?
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald?
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair?
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham?
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers?
19. Letterman or Leno?
20. Wilco or Cat Power?
21. Verdi or Wagner?
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe?
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash?
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis?
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando?
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp?
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt?
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin?
29. Red wine or white?
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde?
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity?
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev?
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev?
34. Constable or Turner?
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo?
36. Comedy or tragedy?
37. Fall or spring?
38. Manet or Monet?
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons?
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin?
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James?
42. Sunset or sunrise?
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter?
44. Mac or PC?
45. New York or Los Angeles?
46. Partisan Review or Horizon?
47. Stax or Motown?
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin?
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello?
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine?
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier?
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers?
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde?
54. Ghost World or Election?
55. Minimalism or conceptual art?
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny?
57. Modernism or postmodernism?
58. Batman or Spider-Man?
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams?
60. Johnson or Boswell?
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf?
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show?
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table?
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity?
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni?
66. Blue or green?
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It?
68. Ballet or opera?
69. Film or live theater?
70. Acoustic or electric?
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo?
72. Sargent or Whistler?
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera?
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma?
75. Sushi, yes or no?
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn?
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee?
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove?
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham?
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe?
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones?
82. Watercolor or pastel?
83. Bus or subway?
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg?
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter?
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser?
87. Schubert or Mozart?
88. The Fifties or the Twenties?
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick?
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce?
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins?
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman?
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill?
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann?
95. Italian or French cooking?
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord?
97. Anchovies, yes or no?
98. Short novels or long ones?
99. Swing or bebop?
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"?

Gardeners!
1. Lilies: oriental or asiatic?
2. No-till or till?
3. Bare hands or garden gloves?
4. Garden tchotchkes, no or yes?
5. Clay or sand?
6. Shrub roses or hybrid teas?
7. Hollyhocks: single or double?
8. Foliage: gray or glaucous?
9. Hemerocallis: flava or fulva?
10. Impatiens: double or single?
11. Calendula or tagetes?
12. Arborvitae or juniper?
13. Spaded edge or "edging"?
14. Asters or mums?
15. Reflecting pool or coursing waterfall?
16. Morning glory blue or forget-me-not blue?
17. Lettuce: leaf or cos?
18. Hyacinth bean or red runner bean?
19. Orange or pink?
20. Garden bed shapes: formal or informal?
21. Garden bed planting schemes: informal or formal?
22. Hydrangeas: lace-cap or mophead?
23. Spirea japonica: dried flowerheads standing over the winter or in bloom?
24. Japanese beetle drowning medium: kerosene or dishsoap solution?
25. Garden stroll time: dusk or dawn?

The choices I prefer are the first of each listed. And you?

UPDATE (July 6, 2004, 5:00 PM): Terry says "break out the calculator"! All right, all right, all right: 57% overall (skewed higher by the 83% [5 out of 6] convergence on matters gustatory).

Comments

[Robert the Llama Butcher]

Ah, Chan! You and Terry - Schubert over Mozart? Bach on the piano? What madness is this?

Thanks much for the Gardener's Index - I can't wait to get going on that!

[Chan S.]

Mozart is beyond brilliant, Beethoven (as you know) sends me, but only Schubert can make the Bookish G. cry. On piano v. harpsichord, I like 'em both, but if choose I must, I choose the option that gives me the most Glenn Gould.

[Don]

Chan, with Kathy's (Cold Climate Gardening)prodding, I took your taste test for gardeners.

BTW, I agree about Verdi over Wagner (but prefer Mozart). Hope all is well.

[basha]

I'm afraid I am not as well-versed in the intricacies of blogging as you all--don't understand the "track-back" stuff. But I DID take the taste test and posted it on my weblog.
Basha

[Rantor]

Fridays make clock-watchers out of us all and tempt us to do these evil things. I sure do hope nobody's logging these keystrokes.

[ramzesramz]

Somehow time I climbed on is not present and, asking questions, found interesting and not so interesting answers. One of which was - « FailureAccident on the Chernobyl atomic power station, 4 power unit ». I became interesting and thumbing through sites was simply horrified. One I the fellow worker, in the past the meter man, has told about the friend which was the liquidator of consequences of this failureaccident, the truth or not I do not know. But spoke that - « firemen which extinguished a fire there, by turns washed in a showersoul groups, and muzhiks because of an irradiation were shone in darkness, but to live ithim remains few hours ».

[EZWilliam]

Hello! Are you trying to be with my stubborn creature I have a nice joke. What do you call it when instead of raining cats and dogs, it rains chickens, ducks and turkeys? Fowl Weather!