In Which I Tag Myself

From Byzantium's Shores, I take the following:

1: Black and White or Color; how do you prefer your movies?
All things being equal, color. I mean, yes, there are classic movies that should never be colorized, but I'm much happier living in a color-film world than I'd be if they'd never invented it, you know?

2: What is the one single subject that bores you to near-death?
Ironically, given the field I work in, business. I throw out the business section of the paper without even looking at it.

3: MP3s, CDs, Tapes or Records: what is your favorite medium for prerecorded music?
Digital all the way. For a non-audiophile like me, the remarkable portability is hard to trump.

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?
Not for, literally, any amount of money, let alone the measly ten million. If I was just dealing with parents and siblings I might think about it some, but the wife and kids? No.

5: Seriously, what do you consider the world's most pressing issue now?
I don't know enough to say. Global warming comes to mind, but, while there is no doubt it is a real phenomena, and a bad one, just how bad is still not crystal clear. Terrorism seems more provincial, but if the kind of constant violence seen in the Middle East today ever gets nuclear, that could outstrip global warming on the priority scale, and in a heartbeat.

6: How would you rectify the world's most pressing issue?
Hah! If I had any idea, I'd be doing something more useful with my time.

7: You are given the chance to go back and change one thing in your life; what would that be?
I once interviewed for an editorial job at a pornography magazine. I left partway through the interview, thinking that a 40+-hour a week job of doing nothing but reading and looking at porn might be, I don't know, bad for me. But would that job, had I gotten it, had led to a more satisfying career in publishing?

8: You are given the chance to go back and change one event in world history, what would that be?
Sad to say, but I don't know enough history to really know what major fulcrum to push. So on a smaller scale, maybe I'd try and go back and get them to not launch that '86 space shuttle. How many years back was the space program pushed with that disaster?

9: A night at the opera, or a night at the Grand Ole' Opry --Which do you choose?
Opera, assuming I get to choose the opera. I read on Alex Ross' blog The Rest Is Noise that an opera of Tony Kushner's Angels in America has been written. That gets me all a-tingle.

10: What is the one great unsolved crime of all time you'd like to solve?
No idea.

11: One famous author can come to dinner with you. Who would that be, and what would you serve for the meal?
Stephen King has influenced my love for reading, and my fiction, more than probably anyone else, so invited he is. Lets grill us up some meaty 'ol ribs, shall we?

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?
Um, that's pretty much what I figure to be the reality now anyway, so none.

Until Whenever