Listening to and creating music, writing, movies that make me think, books about the scary and the bizarre, politics, scientific innovation, the human brain, taking in life from behind the wheel of a MINI.
[L]ong ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you.
Keith Olbermann
Live from Ground Zero, September 11, 2006
Joseph Arthur, the Beatles, Nirvana, Radiohead, Modest Mouse, the Replacements, They Might Be Giants, Guster, Paul Westerberg, Chris Kasper, Elton John, the Beastie Boys, Matt Costa, Nine Inch Nails, Death Cab for Cutie, Dar Williams, The Beastles, M. Ward, Frank Black, King Missile, Bob Dylan, Nellie McKay, Bright Eyes, The Pixies, Jack Johnson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jason Mraz, The Postal Service, Andrew Bird, Wilco, the Eels, Franz Ferdinand, Ani Difranco, Marcy Playground, R.E.M.
Reality TV shows. Can't get enough of them. I think of them as poorly controlled social experiments. I tend not to like the ones that go too far in staging or editing to create "characters" with readily definable personalities -- all do this to a degree but some are worse offenders. If I want fiction I will watch fiction and real fiction is much more entertaining than fake Reality TV fiction. My favorite past time is listening to music so naturally my favorite is American Idol. Can't wait for the new season! My favorite non-reality show of the moment is The Office. All-time fave series is the X-Files. All-time fave guilty pleasure was Days of Our Lives. All-time fave cartoon is Woody Woodpecker.
How about authors? Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Edgar Allan Poe are my all-time faves. I'd like to be one someday.
Those who went first. Those who survived. Those who create.