Hobbies and Interests include: Travel, geography, languages and language acquisition, Cuisine and the pursuit of fine comestibles, cinema, music, night life, museums, fine art, historical linguistics, archaeology, Egyptology, Hittitology, near-eastern studies, Greek history and historiography, Hellenistic history and historiography, Hellenistic topography of Turkey, Hellenistic sculpture and statuary, Etruscology, archaic Rome, Ptolemaic studies, Roman Military history, Roman conquest of the east, Roman epic poetry, Roman elegy, Mongol History, Central Asian History, Persian Studies, Seljuk Civilization, Mediaeval Iceland, Saga Literature and Viking Stuff in general, Old English literature, Incas and Aztecs, astronomy, space exploration, science fiction, classic horror fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allen Poe, FRPG's, comic book collecting, Vampyres, Silver Age Comics, Jack Kirby, Dr Strange, Jim Starlin, Tim Truman, bars
Jack Kirby, Thucydides, Solon, Socrates, Jack Shaftoe, Marcus Aurelius, Julian the Apostate, Diogenes the Cynic or Raquel Welch. But seriously,I love to meet people from all walks of life from all over the world-- one of the great blessings of being a linguist and a traveler is that it has opened a lot of doors for me and introduced me to the most amazing people in so many interesting places. I like to have penpals in many different places and also I do travel a lot so it is great to have friends whereever I go....
Like it all- one of the great passions of my life reflected in the fact that many of my friends from around the world are musicians. Jazz, Blues, Rock and Roll, Folk, Blugrass, ambient and hardcore-- bits of metal, hiphop and even a little country. I especially like live music-- WOMAD, High Sierra, One World, Sierra Nevada Festivals (love Red Rocks and the Gorge) I have seen over 1500 concerts in my life of every genre of music. World Beat is awesome- I particularly like the music of Senegal,Mali, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Latin rhythm can rip you asunder-- salsa, soukous, merenge, samba... middle eastern rhythms...Thracian Folk-- Love ENO, Classic Rock, Mozart, Grateful Dead, Gwar, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Dead Kennedys, Roots Reggae, Afrobeat, Doc Watson and Kiss.
Too many to mention- a very short list : The Petrified Forest; Rebecca; Last Man on Earth; You Cant Take it with You; Bride of Frankenstein; The Thing; Evil Dead II; Breakfast Club; Nightbreed; Trilogy of Terror; Lifeboat; The Great Dictator; Equus; Marathon Man; Three Days of the Condor; The Eiger Sanction (mostly for the redeyed villain); Bond; Peter Sellers; Brian De Palma; John Carpenter; James Cameron; Hitchcock; Frank Capra; Martin Scorcese; Hammer Films; Old Universal Horror; anything with Bela, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing etc...
Lost in Space; The Honeymooners; Addams Family (the old one of course); The Shield; the Wire; NYPD Blue; Night Court; Greg and Dharma; Soap; AquaTeenHunger Force, and loads more-- my mind is drooling in exhaustion when I consider the hours spent... these days I am pretty much limited to watching what little English broadcasting there is in Thailand
Too many to list; I'll put Thucydides and Heart of Darkness for good measure. Ovid's Metamorphoses... I spend a lot of time reading dictionaries and grammars of various languages-- currently engaged in working through a book called 'Thai for Advanced readers', plus reading passages from a Cambridge collection of Greek and Latin letters. Most recent favorites: Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle; Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander Series; Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; Procopius; Empires of the Word; Also love early Larry Niven; Isaac Asimov's Robot and Foundation series; Robert Louis Stevenson; Vernor Vinge; Comix and Graphic Novels; Herodotus; Diodorus Siculus; Plutarch; Plato; Rumi; Jalal al Din Juvaini; Cicero; Philip K Dick. HP Lovecraft. EA Poe.
Seha; Cap; the Silver Surfer; Miracle Man; Odysseus; MLK; John Lennon; Bob Marley; Genghis Khan; Belisarius; Cato the Elder; Themistocles; Pythagoras; Peacemakers, Lovers and Environmentalists.