My employer has generously given me the week off, so between now and New Year’s, I hope to clear the decks around here by blogging about a whole mess of topics and links that I’ve been gathering over the past few weeks.
First up is another of those list-style memes I occasionally run across, this one based around the number four. For your post-Christmas, Monday-morning amusement, I present the following bits of trivial information about yours truly:
Four jobs you’ve had in your life:
- Movie-theater projectionist
- Customer service representative (a.k.a. phone-drone, a.k.a., damned soul suffering in the blackest pits of hell)
- Technical writer
- Proofreader
Four movies you could watch over and over:
Bet you can’t guess the first title on my list…
- Star Wars (by which I mean the film most people now think of as “Episode IV: A New Hope”)
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Casablanca
- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Four places you’ve lived:
This is a tricky one, since I’ve technically lived in the same place my entire life — the same town, the same house. However, I have visited other places, some for several weeks at a time, and I have of course continued to live during those visits. So I’m going to fudge a bit here and list my hometown and three of the more memorable locations I’ve called home for very brief periods of time.
- Riverton, Utah
- Cambridge, England (I spent a month here in 1993 while attending the International Summer School at Cambridge U.)
- Reno, NV (I lost a week of 1991 here while my father brushed up on his firefighting skills)
- Los Angeles, CA (ten days of heavy-duty tourism back in ’99)
Four TV shows you love to watch:
Another tough one, at least when it comes to current TV. There are lots of classic shows that I own on DVD and love watching, but not many still-in-production series that I view on any consistent basis. Still, I’ll give it a go and list the current shows that I like to watch…
- Lost (yeah, I know, everybody loves this one — so sue me for hopping on the bandwagon)
- CSI (the original, Vegas-based edition; the spin-offs don’t do much for me)
- ER (the show has now lost all of its original cast and long ago started repeating its earliest, best stories, but it remains reliably entertaining)
- Rick Steves’ Europe (an odd choice, you may be thinking, and I suppose it is, a PBS travel series hosted by a guy who looks like a high-school math teacher, but I genuinely do love watching this one. Rick goes to all the places I’d like to visit myself, and even some of the places I’ve been…)
Four places you’ve been on vacation:
- San Francisco
- Phoenix, AZ
- New York City
- Munich, Germany
Four websites you visit daily:
- John Scalzi’s Whatever
- James Lileks’ Daily Bleat
- Wil Wheaton’s WWdN: In Exile (an offshoot of the [temporarily?] broken wilwheaton.net)
- Boing Boing
Four of your favorite foods:
- Pastrami burgers
- My mother’s stuffed bell peppers
- Spaghetti with mizithra cheese and browned butter (made famous by The Old Spaghetti Factory, but I’ve also got a pretty good recipe for doing it at home)
- Key-lime pie
Four places you’d rather be:
In the lap of luxury? I don’t know — I’m not even entirely sure what this one is asking. Does it mean places I’d rather live than where I currently do? Or is it more of a fantasy thing, i.e., wouldn’t you rather be on a beach than sitting at the office or whatever? If you’re going for the fantasy approach — and I think maybe that’s the object — couldn’t you include time-travel in the equation, too? If so, then here’s my list of places — and times — I’d rather be than sitting here at the old ‘puter in the final minutes of Christmas Day, 2005:
- Mann’s Chinese Theater, May 25, 1977 (if you don’t understand the significance of that date, you haven’t been reading this blog long enough…)
- Times Square in New York City on V-E Day (now that must’ve been a party!)
- Trekking through Europe with a notebook in one hand and a camera in the other
- That alternate universe where I got everything right and I’m living a life of incredible fabulousness
