I. Once you have been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random facts about yourself.
II. At the end of the note, tag 16 people
III. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Ain’t taggin’ no one but Jeff, because well, Jeff Holland sucks for making me do this.

1. I shoot a Canon DSLR, but I have a Nikon Coolpix S210 for my point-and-shoot … on purpose.
2. Despite the fact that I wore a lot of flannel shirts in the 1990s, I didn’t own a Nirvana record until the current decade.
3. Contrary to how I was raised, my vote for Obama was not my first for a Democrat. That one went to Don Siegelman, and boy do I ever regret it. [Correlation != causation.]
4. I had never met anyone in Caedmon’s Call [after a show, or otherwise] before becoming a member of the [caedmonscall.net] Staff. I don’t think anyone in the band actually realizes this fact.
5. I purposefully chose not to date in my two years at MSMS because, “I’d never find my wife there. We’re gonna go to separate schools, and what’s the point in that?” Somewhere, Rick and Jessica are laughing.
6. I love that my dad’s middle name is his mother’s maiden name, and any girl I date ends up getting judged, rightly or wrongly, by what effect her last name would have on the middle name of our theoretical first-born. [This random note intended to prove to my mother that I do, in fact, want to get married and have kids, and think about it.]
7. I own a classic acoustic guitar, a 1960s Gibson Dove, but do not actually play the guitar. Andrew Osenga played it on the first of his Letters to the Editor EPs, which you can still download for free, and it resides at his house to this day.
8. I swore that I would go by my middle name, Franklin [probably shortening it to Frank], when we moved to the South. I forgot about it until Mom asked me about two weeks before we moved, and I decided I’d stick with my weird shortening of Geoffrey.
9. I had never seen a live-action hockey game until I first came to Huntsville. I have seen many, many, many since then.
10. I had a 34 on my ACT, a 1510 on my SAT, was a National Merit Finalist, and finished college with a sub-3.0 GPA, lower than my brother’s collegiate scores. I am living proof that a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re gonna kick ass in college. My GPA is decremented for a variety of reasons: MSMS burning me out on school, my untreated depression, all the time I spent screwing around with Student Government instead of school, and … well, being a lazy student.
11. My boss asked me how much money it would take to buy me out of the last year of my degree program, as he needed me full-time at the time. I considered his offer but knew it would affect our ABET accreditation.
12. I used to be afraid to fly, and am still afraid of falling from heights. I used to freak out when our family would drive over bridges, especially the Brent Spence Bridge. [What can I say? I was a weird kid.]
13. Two of my best friends pretty well thought they’d never like me after the first time they met me. That’s because our first meeting was right before the second Lord of the Rings movie came out, and my friends decided to prepare for it by watching the extended version of the first one. How would you torture me, y’all? Strap me to a chair and make me watch a three-hour movie and do nothing else. I’m such a spastic, continuous partial attention person that I just can’t do it. [The last movie I saw in the theater was The Incredibles, and only because Mark wanted to go see it.]
14. If I’d been born three hours earlier, I would’ve graduated with the aforementioned Dr. Perry. I was born at 0300 on 1 Oct 1978, and Ohio’s cutoff to start school was 30 Sep.
15. I once had a friend tell me, “If something ever happened to my husband, I would want to get remarried to you.” This revelation became even weirder when she got divorced.
16. My pinkies are crooked, which is a family trait. My left one is straighter because I’ve broken it seven times. Okay, broke it once, playing soccer, and I keep re-breaking the same spot because the break is at the end of the penultimate bone.

Any other questions?

1. What time do you usually leave for lunch?

I try to go as close to 1100 as I can. There are a couple places close by that are packed by 1115, so I learned to go early if I wanted a table without a wait. Every Tuesday, I meet with friends for Thai at 1115, but then on Thursdays, I have a telecon at 1100, so … it varies.

2. How long do you usually take for lunch?

It varies depending how busy I am at the office. If I’m covered up, I take a shorter break. The inverse of that is that, if I’m really stressed out, I’ll go a little longer. I’ve taken up to two hours, but that’s very rare. Usually an hour if I leave the office for lunch, a half-hour if I eat at my desk.

3. Ever eat lunch at home?

Yeah, I’ve done it. Not as often now that I live in Madison, though.

4. What are your favorite places to eat out for Work Lunch?

I personally am craving Thai Garden since we didn’t go on Tuesday. Like … I want Thai, and it’s before 0700 on a Saturday.

5. How often do you bring food in from home?

When I was a broke college kid, all the time. Now, not so much. Lazy. Plus, when I bring lunch, I tend to not leave the office, and I’ve found that leaving the office is good for my stress level.

6. Are you a lone ranger or a community eater?

I eat with co-workers or friends 2-3 times a week. Some weeks, it’s every day. Some weeks, it’s not at all.

7. How often does your company pay for your lunch?

Once a quarter or so, if a meeting runs into lunch.

8. What is your favorite lunch meal of all time?

Mmm … three-star chicken Pad Thai.

Here’s how it works:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Mark in red the books you LOVE. [Ed.: I'll cheat and boldly italicize the ones I love.
4. Reprint this list in your blog.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -- and before you ask, Jeff, no ... I don't like Wuthering Heights either.
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - I haven’t read all of it, I admit.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Meh.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams --- oh, I do believe I just lost all my geek cred.
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -- I've started but not finished it.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis --- I just lost all my hipster Christian cred.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -- or at least I'm fairly sure that I have. If I did, I read it at MSMS, and I'm surprised I remember my own name after that.
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville --- started it once.
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett --- but so, so long ago that I might as well not have.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - I'll skip on advice of my psychiatrist.
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt --- I failed to read this when Kari did a virtual book club about it. I am ashamed.
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens --- dammit, I've read more Dickens than I thought. Must be a Mississippi thing?
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White --- quite some time ago. Age in the single digits.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom --- Seriously? I love the big-eared dude, but ... really?
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl --- again, forever and a day ago.
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Do you have suggestions for what I should read on this list that I haven't indicated that I would? [Yes, Kari, I hear you yelling for Pride and Prejudice. All the way over here. And my window's closed. ]

• Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism.
  
• Paper Route’s Are We All Forgotten, on the suggestion of Jeff.
  
• Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere. Yes, I am slow to the GB party, but Stephen got me there.
  
• 16 Aug 2001 [Jersey City, NJ, USA] concert bootleg of Radiohead. 2001-08-16: Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, USA (disc 1) and 2001-08-16: Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, USA (disc 2).
  
• 17 Nov 2006 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. 2006-11-17: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 1) and 2006-11-17: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 2).
  
• 13 Oct 2007 [Kansas City, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. 2007-10-13: The Crossroads at KC, Kansas City, MO, USA (disc 1) and 2007-10-13: The Crossroads at KC, Kansas City, MO, USA (disc 2).
  
• 12 Apr 2008 [Norfolk, VA, USA] concert bootleg of Spoon. 2008-04-12: The Norva, Norfolk, VA, USA (disc 1) and 2008-04-12: The Norva, Norfolk, VA, USA (disc 2).
  

Last week was pretty disappointing.:

• Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. Okay, so the Led Zeppelin that I love is the rockin’, bluesy stuff. And to quote Wikipedia on Houses of the Holy, “This album was a stylistic turning point in the lifespan of Led Zeppelin.” And, well, on “The Song Remains the Same”, I was confused for a minute, thinking that maybe Geddy Lee had replaced Robert Plant or something. [I'm sure that several people broke things after reading that sentence.] Admittedly, it gets back to sounding a little more like Led Zeppelin as the album progresses, and I am the person that did say, just two weeks ago, “I’m a firm believer that bands have to experiment lest they [and/or their fans] become totally bored with the thing.” But that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. So, yes, I should rate this now, right? Three stars, mainly on the strength of “Dancing Days” and “D’yer Mak’er”.
  
• The Cardigans’ Super Extra Gravity. The phrase that I was going to use for this album was “solid, but boring” until I got to “I Need Some Fine Wine and You, You Need to Be Nicer”. I have a lot of friends who are excellent singer/songwriters, so I say this with a bit of trepidation, but … man, The Cardigans rock way too damn much to try to do the singer/songwriter+backing band thing. Sadly, that and a fusion of quasi-country stuff [although it felt like Nina Persson was channeling Sixpence's Leigh Nash for the first few tracks] made for a boring start. But it picks up in the second half of the record, which is good. Three-and-a-half stars.
  
• Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. Egad. Jacob said this about Coldplay on a forum I run: “The best way I can put it is that I like simpler Coldplay. It just feels like they’re trying to be something that they’re not right now. The indie-rock/prog-rock (good call Adriene) feel just doesn’t fit what Coldplay was. Sure that sounds like the old fan wishing their band hadn’t grown up and changed their sound…I’ll cop to that. But some of their earlier songs made me want to cry. Now their new stuff does that but for different reasons.” I can’t say it any frickin’ better. One-and-a-half stars, and if any of my friends wants it, I’ll give it to them. I don’t want it back. One-and-a-half stars. I haven’t bought an album that I’ve actively hated in quite some time, but … this is it. Gah.
  
• 25 Oct 1997 [Utica, NY, USA] concert bootleg of Blues Traveler. I’m surprised that a SBD sounds this poorly-mixed, but then I probably shouldn’t be. Sound board operators don’t have time to give tapers jacking into their boards the time to give perfectly-mixed feeds. The mix is very definitely pushed towards the treble and towards John’s voice standing out above all others. For people that crap on me wanting to do SBD/AUD matrices, well, suck on this. Two stars. [Sad, because Bob Sheehan was really on this night. And before Chris Smith says crap to me ... suck on it, LC.]
  
• 1 Sep 2007 [Denver, CO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. Gah. Another week of getting burnt by a stealth rig. Venues that don’t allow tapers suck. This sounds pretty good despite being stealthily done. Two-and-a-half stars.
  
• 26 Apr 2008 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. It’s a rare case when I’m disappointed by a matrix [well, other than my own, heh], but I am by this one. Karin’s vocals are too hot in the mix, but I fear that’s probably a fault of the sound board op [which shocks me, because this typically isn't the case with CST shows] than the taper. [After all, if she's too hot in the SBD feed, she's probably too hot in the mains, and you can't compensate with the AUD part of the feed to get more of the band.] I mean, it’s still a decent recording, but I only give it three stars. I expected four-plus.
  
• 27 May 2008 [Milan, Italy] concert bootleg of Feist. Feist bootlegs are hard to come by, so I was willing to chance it on a recording made by a Zoom H2’s internal mics. [Hey, I own and use a Tascam DR-1, so I'm understanding. It's just that internal mics aren't going to get a big band's sound, especially not in a room like that.] So it’s not terribly surprising that the recording is muddy and distant, but hey, it’s free, right? Two-and-a-half stars.
  

The rules of the “game” are simple:

1. list your top ten favorite films (in no particular order).
2. if you’re tagged, you’ve got to post and tag 3-5 other people.
3. give a tag back (some link love) to the one who tagged you in your post
4. give a hat tip (HT) to Dan

I’ll follow those, except somehow along the way, Dan lost the linklove. Sorry, dude. Since these are in no particular order, I won’t use an ordered list. That saves me brain cycles on ordering them…

• Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back: Yes, they are defining movies of my generation, even if the first one came out before I was born. I don’t include RotJ because I hate Ewoks, and the first three … well, the problem is the same: letting Lucas write dialogue is like letting me plan an exercise regimen.
• The Big Lebowski. I adore introducing this farcical romp of mistaken identity to people. Goes better with a good Caucasian, and I mix a hell of a Caucasian, Jackie. And yes, because I am a large, bearded man, I often get pushed into role-playing Walter. Eight year olds, Dude.
• Primer. I’ll go off the board here with a movie I’ve seen only once, but have probably replayed in my head a number of times. It absolutely blew my fuckin’ mind when I saw it.
• Clerks. So recently, a friend called this “a whiny bitch movie”. And, well, yes. It’s crude and hilarious, but it’s also pretty ingenious. Well, for a buddy movie shot in black and white that involves playing roller hockey on the roof of convenience store. This movie, of course, made Kevin Smith’s career. Thankfully, it was the first of his films that I saw.
• Arma … okay, no, I couldn’t finish typing it. Seriously, this is a fun movie to watch with me ONLY IF YOU LIKE TO LISTEN TO ME YELL AT THE TV AND THROW STUFF AROUND THE ROOM. Ahem. [I'm a killjoy.]
• Swingers. Right up there with Lebowski, a movie I can pop in at any time and always feel better afterward. When I thought yesterday that I’d be driving to Houston last night, I said, “I can be to Houston by midnight. Hell, I’ll be up five hundy by midnight!” Too bad no one in the room got it.
• Miracle, for two reasons: the agonizing “AGAIN! [whistle]” scene, which is totally legit, and … well, beating the fucking Soviets. Okay, a third reason: Kurt Russell’s son plays hockey for my alma mater, and not yours. Chumps.
• Apollo XIII. Um, hi. I work in manned spaceflight, and this movie makes heroes out of engineers. Not all of my days are as exciting as the “We’ve got to make this fit into this using this” scene, but some days, it feels like that. Without, you know, the deadline and the risk of people dying if we keep on fucking around.
• High Fidelity. Let’s just say that I watched it last week and lived it starting Sunday. Well, not really. But I did consider autobiographically organizing my CD collection. [I'm okay, though. Really.] Admission: if I were independently wealthy, I would buy a big, old downtown building and put a coffeehouse/bar, record store, and music venue in it. I would also hire John Cusack to manage it and smoke a lot of cigarettes.
• Shawshank Redemption. If you have to ask why, you clearly have not watched the movie, and … well, you should. Mind you, this comes from someone who really doesn’t watch movies that often.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ending with Kubrick is always a great choice. Stunningly beautiful, hauntingly weird, terribly quotable, and spot-on. Well, other than the fact that we’re seven years past that and still fucking around in low Earth orbit.

Okay, since I have to have a list of victims …

• Kari
• Amy
• Stephen and Misty, since we watch movies together.
• Alex, because he’ll be pissed at me for calling him out.