Bryan sucks.

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.

So, I said that I liked marking things off of lists, and boy, do I ever. [It's a compulsion.] Stolen from Kari and CJ, I’m blaming Holland for this because, well, I blame all memes on him at this point. Susan Coleman pointed out that the BBC generated this base list:

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. ]

Well, since Jeff called me out like a punk, I better go through with it. It’s not like I’ve been writing about much lately anyway. [Besides, I get to break out Jeff's favorite tag!]

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.