Taggin, taggin', taggin'....

Lynn tagged me with these questions, which are better questions than normal, so here goes. (Thank God she tagged me, actually, since I'm sitting here looking at a blank Blogger window thinking, "Geez, I got nothin' to say!")

1: Black and White or Color; how do you prefer your movies?

I have no real answer to this. Casablanca is as unthinkable to me in color as Star Wars is in black-and-white.

2: What is the one single subject that bores you to near-death?

I suppose I have to grant the possibility that many subjects I've found dull were simply being administered by boring teachers, but fact is, while I'm not proud of my lack of knowledge of economics, I'm not sufficiently shamed by my ignorance of it to rectify that by attempting any real study of the stuff.

3: MP3s, CDs, Tapes or Records: what is your favorite medium for prerecorded music?

I think that the CD is a friggin' miracle, and it pains me that the thing will probably be gone in a few years because we have this fetish for digitizing stuff. Give me a physical medium any day.

4: You are handed one first class trip plane ticket to anywhere in the world and ten million dollars cash. All of this is yours provided that you leave and not tell anyone where you are going ... Ever. This includes family, friends, everyone. Would you take the money and ticket and run?

Leave my family? Screw that. (And I already live in Buffalo, anyway.)

5: Seriously, what do you consider the world's most pressing issue now?

Global warming/climate change.

6: How would you rectify the world's most pressing issue?

I'd funnel money into developing non-fossil fuel energy technology. (And I would not rule out nuclear energy.)

7: You are given the chance to go back and change one thing in your life; what would that be?

I had the opportunity to interview at The Store over five years ago, but I turned it down because I had already accepted another job. I turned out to suck at that job. Oops.

8: You are given the chance to go back and change one event in world history, what would that be?

So many obvious answers (like Lynn's, which I was about to put here until I saw that she'd used it already), so I would either go snarky and make the Florida election in 2000 come out the way everybody knows it really came out, or I'd put a bug in the ear of whatever person rejected Adolf Hitler's art-school application that he might want to reconsider.

9: A night at the opera, or a night at the Grand Ole' Opry --Which do you choose?

Again, it depends: what's playing at each locale? It seems like a slam dunk for a classical music lover like myself to pick the opera, but if there's some early and boring Bellini opera versus, say, Willie Nelson, I'm going to the Opry.

10: What is the one great unsolved crime of all time you'd like to solve?

One? I can't decide between the two, so I'll cheat and name them both. I'd like to know who Jack the Ripper really was, and I'd like to know who, if anyone, was behind the fence on the grassy knoll.

11: One famous author can come to dinner with you. Who would that be, and what would you serve for the meal?

The problem here is that I would almost certainly feel like an idiot in the presence of just about any author. John Scalzi could come over if he wants, but if he mentions his Amazon ranking, he's doing the dishes. Or Stephen King. I'd serve some kind of baked pasta dish, because I can't get enough of baked pasta dishes.

12: You discover that John Lennon was right, that there is no hell below us, and above us there is only sky -- what's the first immoral thing you might do to celebrate this fact?

Sorry. I just don't like the idea of morality being a function of one getting us into Heaven whilst the other gets us into Hell. I've never been convinced about God as moral guarantor. So...I wouldn't do anything specifically immoral, on purpose, because of this. (BTW, I think that "Imagine" may be the most overrated song in the entire history of human musical expression.)

I'm not tagging anyone. Just grab-and-go, folks.