Jenny Marx's Email Forward

When was the first forwarded survey? When did the first smartass fill in "sex: yes please!" and "favorite album: an album of family pictures I have" to universal mirth of his friends (the earth being young, and humorous humor not having been invented yet)? I would have guessed sometime in the early 70's, soon after the invention of email.

The Redcloud parents, however, while conducting their Cthulu research in some of their musty old books, found something that looks startlingly like an email-forward survey dating from the 1860's, written, oddly, by Karl Marx's daughter Jenny. This is true: she really wrote this, and made all her famous commie friends and relations take it. Some of her questions ("Your maxim") have a slight old-timey feel, but several ("favorite color", "your idea of happiness") seem just as modern and banal as anything you'd see in your in-box.

In order to keep this 150-year-old forward going, we L&E writers are all going to take the survey and email it to everyone we know. You should too! As an added bonus, next week we'll publish Marx's and Engels's survey answers, which are tons cooler and funnier than ours. (Engels listed his motto as "Take it aisy." Engels is the fucking man.)

Laura's Answers to Jenny Marx's Questions

1. Your favorite virtue: Gooniness

2. Favorite virtue in man: A sense of honor so great as to blind its possessor from morality or logic. Or cute hair.

3. Favorite virtue in woman: Ability to banter.

4. Your chief characteristic: I'm shy! It's endearing!

5. Your idea of happiness: Somehow waking up with the ability to really enjoy mathematics, and then I find out they put Felicity back on at a convenient time.

6. Your idea of misery: Dial-up connection.

7. The vice you excuse most: Inhuman detachment, a la Data

8. The vice you detest most: A smug beard, a la Riker

9. Your chief aversion: Sincerity. No, wait! No! Candy corns! A box of boogers! A year without a Santa Claus! Bog monster! Tetanus! That's it. Tetanus. Lockjaw, man. That's some scary shit. I am averse to it.

10. Literary or historical characters you most like: Captain Jack Sparrow, Bertie Wooster, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Woz

11. Your favorite occupation: Listening to the Zappa brothers' rendition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time", and then going out and having it in my head, and everyone thinks I'm Brittany Spears. Oh no wait, I kind of hate that. All those autograph-seekers!

12. Your favorite hero: Andre-Louis Moreau

13. Your favorite heroine: Emma Wodehouse

14. Your favorite writer: Papa Redcloud

15. Your favorite flower: Jacques

16. Your favorite color: Glow-in-the-dark colored. It's not quite green, it's not quite white, but you can definitely be seen in the movie theatre. The best part is that you can't see the annoyed glances of the other patrons at your bobbing glowtastic hair-pins until it's too late. Unless their faces are glow-in-the-dark, in which case, what are they complaining about? Oh. I'm still talking. Sorry! At least I didn't giggle at Gollum's totally awesome soul-searching. Ass.

17. Your favorite dish: Ice cream so hard you need picks and shovels and all manner of old-fashioned polar-expedition gear

18. Your maxim: "I'm sleeping with the man in the mirror / I'm asking him to change his name / No maiden could have been any dearer / So if you wanna love a guy but not be gay / Fall in love with yourself, it just makes you vain / Sha na na, sha na na, sha na na"

19. Your motto: The truth is that I don't actually know the difference between a maxim and motto. Judging from Paul's survey, a motto is in Latin. So here goes: "Dune Guy delenda est"