I've been tagged

Edie at Annotated Life tagged me with this. Here is what comes immediately to mind.

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

It depends. Lawrence of Arabia cannot be a black and white movie; The Hustler cannot be a color movie.

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

New Age spirituality.

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

CDs because I have a CD player.

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?

I’d do the right thing by family and friends and take the money and run. I would compensate them generously for the terrible loss of my company. Ah damn, I probably would not go.

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

The explosive mix of unbridled capitalism, fundamentalist religious hatred and intolerance, and weapons of mass destruction in the world.

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

I doubt if it can be rectified. Human folly will play itself out until there are no more humans.

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

I would learn how to write at an early age. Then I would become an independent scholar.

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

I wish World War I had never happened. Changing history, however, sounds like a very risky proposition. Let’s try something less dramatic.

I wish Bernhard Riemann had not lost the journal he took with him to Paris, and also that his housekeeper had not burned some of his papers after his death. Who knows what great math might have been in them?

The loss of any text from antiquity down to modern times has always weighed heavily on my mind.

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

I would try to find a cool date and go where she wanted to go.

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

I would like to know who really murdered Fyodor Karamazov.

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

I would like to hang out with Fyodor Dostoevsky. I would fix caviar, shrimp, and cream cheese on cucumber slices for an appetizer, steaks, potatoes au gratin, and artichoke hearts with plenty of butter.

I would ask him if his mind was as on fire when he wrote the books as mine is when I read them. I would have plenty of vodka on hand and when he was tipsy enough, I would ask him who really murdered Fyodor Karamazov?

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?

I have been celebrating it most of my life. Another couple of Buds at the local bar could not hurt though.

I tag Deertown Times, Raindrops, Empty Rhetoric, and The title conscious blog if they care to do it.