I'd like to meet:
"By whose side would I like to sit over dinner someday?" - I'd venture to say: Keith Olbermann, Barack Obama, Maureen Dowd, Harry Belafonte, Arianna Huffington, Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie, Randall Robinson, George Balanchine, Taylor Branch, Damien Broderick, Stanley Crouch, Donna Leon, and Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz.I would love to have crossed paths with: Thomas Paine, George Sand, Mary Shelley, Robert G. Ingersoll, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Susan Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paul Robeson, Hubert Henry Harrison, Zorah Neale Hurston, Philip K. Dick, Vashti McCollum, and Octavia Butler. So many people, so little time and space for me to name them all.(and that up there should be WHOM I'd like to meet. Rrrrrrrrrr ...)
Movies:
Too many to mention, but some of my favorites: Metropolis (1927); The Miracle Woman (1931); Wuthering Heights (1939); Cat People (1942); Ivan the Terrible (1942); Double Indemnity (1944); Mildred Pierce (1945); Green Dolphin Street (1947); Song of Love (1947); Hamlet (1948); The Third Man (1949); Alice in Wonderland (1951); Hans Christian Andersen (1952); Wee Geordie (1955); Night of the Hunter (1955); Forbidden Planet (1956); Tea and Sympathy (1956); Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); Island in the Sun (1957); The Nights of Cabiria (1957); Vertigo (1958); South Pacific (1958); Black Orpheus (1959); The Nun's Story (1959); The Five Pennies (1959); The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959); The Manchurian Candidate (1962); Children of the Damned (1963); A Patch of Blue (1965); Seconds (1966); The Producers (1968); Women in Love (1969); Death in Venice (1971); McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971); Nicholas and Alexandra (1971); The Devils (1971); Last Tango in Paris (1972); Sunday Bloody Sunday (1972); The Godfather (Trilogy); The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976); (Bergman's) The Magic Flute (1976); The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); Don Giovanni (1978); (Frank Langella as) Dracula (1979) The Hunger (1983); Choose Me (1984); The Brother From Another Planet (1984); Trouble in Mind (1985); Blue Velvet (1986); The Dead (1987); At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991); (Coppola's) Dracula (1992); Blade Runner (1992); Groundhog Day (1993); The Shawshank Redemption (1994); Strange Days (1995); Before Sunrise (1995); Lone Star (1996); Gattaca (1997); Matrix (1999); Fight Club (1999); The Ring (Trilogy); Vanilla Sky (2001); Before Sunset (2004); Borat (2006)
Television:
History Channel; Discovery Channel; Star Trek; Eyes on the Prize (14-part PBS series); Prime Suspect (1991-2006); MythBusters; Penn and Teller's Bullshit!; HGTV; Nip/Tuck (my guilty pleasure); otherwise, TV is used mostly as a DVD decoder.
Books:
Richard Fortey (A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth); Mary Shelley (Frankenstein); Carl Sagan (The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark; and other works); Forrest G. Wood (The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century); Annie Laurie Gaylor, ed. (Women Without Superstition); Vashti McCollum (One Woman's Fight); James Forman (The Making of Black Revolutionaries); Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene; other works); Michael Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time); Ed Regis (Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition); Damien Broderick (The Spike; other works); Philip K. Dick (everything)
Heroes:
"Our heroes are our sons and daughters, who taught us what it really means to be human and to care for each other." - Katie Dolan (1924-2006), Seattle activist