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.)

Slade's Answers to Jenny Marx's Questions

1. Your favorite virtue: Moral ambiguity.

2. Favorite virtue in man: Ablilty to think for themselves, assuming they aren't tied down by religion and the media.

3. Favorite virtue in woman: Oh. You meant the genders, not the species... That makes it easy. She has to play electric guitar.

4. Your chief characteristic: Being unsure as to whether I want to say "Fuck the world!" or "Save the world!" becase I don't know that it would work.

5. Your idea of happiness: Me, a beautiful woman, and a LAN for us to play CounterStrike on. Of course we'd have to be in love too.

6. Your idea of misery: Suddenly waking up in a world where the only sentient race on the planet is a hairless primate that lacks any morals or thought except what is told to it by its superiors, which are themselves chosen for their lack of thought.

7. The vice you excuse most: Pickle racing.

8. The vice you detest most: Avarice. Or maybe William Shatner.

9. Your chief aversion: Humanity.

10. Literary or historical characters you most like: Nietsche, Jung, that guy from that book I read, Michaelangelo (both the artist and the Ninja Turtle), Ghandi (All of 'em!), Death, Eris, Ambrose Bierce.

11. Your favorite occupation: Samuri Delecatessin owner.

12. Your favorite hero: Grendel.

13. Your favorite heroine: The Heroine Sheik

14. Your favorite writer: Eric Blair.

15. Your favorite flower: Black roses.

16. Your favorite color: What is this, some internet survey from a year ago? What are you going to ask next, my favorite food?

17. Your favorite dish: It would be boffo/wizard if I had a glass plate with a print of a Dalí painting on it.

18. Your maxim: Numquam pulsare leonis cum saxis.

19. Your motto: Carpe noctis.