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.)

Paul's Answers to Jenny Marx's Questions

1. Your favorite virtue: regularly updating your website

2. Favorite virtue in man: A flinty gaze.

3. Favorite virtue in woman: The ability to speak really fast, like those wisecracking newspaper reporter dames from 40's movies who call everyone "bub"

4. Your chief characteristic: insouciance; elan; vast holdings of land

5. Your idea of happiness: Recieving a fax from the President of the World stating that for the safety of the earth, I am required to sit in my room drinking root beer and writing light comic articles to confuse and delight our alien invaders to death

6. Your idea of misery: The same, but my room doesn't have air conditioning

7. The vice you excuse most: being Mr. T

8. The vice you detest most: not being Mr. T

9. Your chief aversion: genuine human emotion

10. Literary or historical characters you most like: Sigmund Freud. Not the real Sigmund Freud but the jet-packed crime-fighting Sigmund Freud I just made up. He has a dog sidekick named "General Dog," who is modelled in form and feature on Patton

11. Your favorite occupation: Anything in which you can make a joke about non-standards-compliant browsers and everyone thinks it's hilarious.

12. Your favorite hero: Steve Wozniak

13. Your favorite heroine: Tina Fey

14. Your favorite writer: If Aeschylus had thought of it, he totally would have had a scene where a guy kneels by his dead buddy and shrieks to the heavens, "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!" He's just that kind of guy. So, not Aeschylus.

15. Your favorite flower: Favorite flower? Maybe in the 1800's or whenever Jenny Marx was writing this people had favorite flowers, but it's the future now, baby. People have favorite colas; favorite operating systems; even favorite salvaged munition to put on your post-apocolyptic car. Flowers are not in it.

16. Your favorite color: #C700C7, the color of money (if money were gay)

17. Your favorite dish: Personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut, provided it was earned by participation in the Book-It Program

18. Your maxim: "You are what you eat. And you are somebody. But you don't eat somebody. That's cannibalism. And it's wrong."

19. Your motto: "De dune guy nil nisi bonum" (don't speak ill of Dune Guy)