Music:
Sometimes I wish I had a soundtrack running behind the dramas big and small of my life and sometimes I discover that I actually do...the traffic noises, the planes overhead, the conversations in the background, CNN cycling thru the day, and actual music from Handel to Ray Charles wafting up from the radios, cds, and other mechanical sources around me. John Cage may have been a bit odd, but he was right that there is music everywhere. But if I get to chose the music I like Handel, Elvis, Peggy Lee, Puccini, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Ives, the Beatles, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Nora Jones, jazz without much snare drum nervousness, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Faure, 60's classic, Dixie Chics, lots more opera, Chopin, Cat Stevens, good old fashioned hymns including Amazing Grace, goofy musicals...and more more more.
Movies:
Room With a View; Manon of the Spring; Cinema Paradiso; African Queen; Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon; Amadeus; The Devil Wears Prada; To Kill a Mockingbird; Forrest Gump; ET; The Good Earth; A Fish Called Wanda; Legally Blonde; The Graduate; Somethings Got to Give; As Good as it Gets; Love Me Tender; Life is Beautiful; Philadelphia Story; Master and Commander; Some Like it Hot; The Days of Wine and Roses; Out of Africa; Kramer vs Kramer; Tootsie; Mr Smith Goes to Washington; Its a Wonderful Life; Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House; North by Northwest; Good Morning, Viet Nam; Good Will Hunting; Dead Poet Society; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Bonnie and Clyde; Finding Neverland and more.
Television:
a few..........Boston Legal, Brothers and Sisters, Medium, sometimes Larry King, usually Jay Leno, the Sopranos, House, Monk, news, Today, classic movies, some others......
Books:
Moby Dick; Ulysses; Anna Karenina; any thing by Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie; anything about European and American history;
Heroes:
Thomas Jefferson; Brunelleschi; Christopher Wren; Elizabeth I,