Category: Friday Fives

1. If you could recommend just one music documentary or docudrama, what would it be?

“The Last Waltz” by Martin Scorsese, featuring The Band. If early-to-mid-1970s classic rock is your thing, take a look. Some classic performances from a cast of dozens of rock icons.

2. What’s your favorite song with a road, highway or interstate in the title?

“On The Road Again” by Willie Nelson. Not a highway song, but hey, he was a member of “The Highway Men” along with Kristopherson, Cash, and Waylon.

3. What is a FREE thing everyone should know/use?

Your local library. They have everything. Games, Movies, tech, books, audiobooks, eBooks, and physical books. Go forth and use them.
As a child, the library was my happy place. I would check out the five-book limit and pore through them in a few days. – how-to books, biographies, art books – then back to the library to find more.

4. What did every 90s house have that’s gone now?

A landline phone and a caller ID box. And there was also that cordless phone with the expanding antenna with spotty reception, especially if someone used the microwave while you were on the phone.

5. What’s a small thing that instantly makes your day better?

That first sip of coffee in the morning. I wasn’t a real coffee drinker until my time in the army. There was always a pot or an urn of coffee brewing in any office I was in while in Germany. Then you would go out into the economy and order a coffee at some guesthaus or bistro with your meal, and this exquisite cup of caramel, black richness would show up at your table and change the whole game of what coffee was about. I now have fresh-roasted coffee from our home roasting appliance and then prepared each day, ground and steeped in a French press – the only real way to make coffee. I have lain in bed in the morning just thinking about making that day’s first pot and then enjoying that first sip.

1. What song have you been playing a lot lately? been playing a lot lately?

Jerry Garcia’s live cover of “Stir It Up” from Volume 3 of Legion of Mary (Just a great album)

2. What’s your favorite song with a dog or cat in the lyrics?

It is probably the easiest answer, but “Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chapin. We lost him too soon.

3. What’s one album that everyone should own at least once?

Miles Davis’s “Kind Of Blue”

4. Who was the artist you listened to the most in high school?

Probably Journey. Or Foreigner.

5. What’s the greatest piano performance in a song?

Roy Bittan, from the E Street Band’s introduction on Meatloaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell”

1. Who, in fact, did let the dogs out?

Karen. Well, she actually doesn’t like dogs, especially yours, and that is the reason why the dogs are out, because of Karen.

2. And what exactly does love have to do with it?

Witha outta the love, you canno make a the ravioli. ina ordera too a have the soft pillow of a pasta, you needa a the love.

3. What is so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Because in the current MAGA-verse that we live in, those things are too DEA. Neighbors are to be hated as “those people” despised and feared.

4. Are you going to Scarborough fair?

Nah, been once, before they ruined the hot dogs. Not worth going back now. It is all too commercial.

5. Do you believe in the ways of magic?

The card game? I never really got into it.

1. Which famous person had the best death?

It was a terrible death. Cancer and all, but Warren Zevon and his very public life as he was dying – Letterman, recording an album and a documentary of his last days. If you have to g out, go out in style.

2. What is the most disturbing movie you have ever watched?

Pretty sure some form of this question has come up before, but – “The Blair Witch Project.” Saw it in the theater the weekend of its release while knowing nothing about it at all. I am not a horror film fan, but this one grabbed me and didn’t let go.

3. If you are given superpower to reveal one secret about someone/something, what would you dig out?

Donald Trump – “What the hell happened to you as a little boy? Because man, you are fucked up.”

4. You wake up tomorrow as a wild animal and have to survive in nature for the rest of your life. What animal are you choosing?

A Bonobo. Just because they are so adorable and smart.

5. Who do you miss the most right now?

My mom. Still have the urge to pick up the phone and call her to catch her up on things.

1. What’s your “death missed me by seconds” story?

OK. Don’t judge too much. I was just a fourth grader. But on winter mornings, my pal Clancy and I would walk over this bridge, and as the school bus whizzed past, we would reach out with our gloved hands, touch the bus along its bodywork, and try to run down its full length. Eventually, we got into real trouble with that, as it was very icy and prone to slipping under the bus’s wheels. We were called into the principal’s office and met by our fathers, who read us the riot act.
As good little boys, we started using the pedestrian bridge next to the roadway bridge.

2. What is an underrated skill in this modern world?

The ability to sharpen knives and keep them sharp.

3. What will turn out to be this generation’s ‘oh shit, smoking causes cancer’ moment?

Either the addictive short-form video algorithms are addicting both children and adults, or limiting the cognitive development of society.

Or, GLP-1s. (Says the guy who has been on them for over ten years. )

4. What is the largest, least evil company in the world

Costco. Damn, fine people. And my company, Camping World. There is actually a line in the employee handbook that is the golden rule of the company
“Don’t be an asshole.”

5. Have you been watching the World Cup? Who is going to win?

France. That way I can say my new favorite word more often. MBappe!

1. What are your memories of the bicentennial, for all you oldsters?

In our little town, I was 12 years old and remember the town going all out. a big festival, a parade. My dad and a number of his friends all grew big fuzzy beards. Folks sewed their own colonial clothes and wore them around town. It was also Colorado’s 100th birthday, and the overlap of the two anniversaries turned into a big to-do.

2. What would the Founding Fathers think about where this nation we created has ended up today?

Jefferson and Madison, for certain, would be livid. Hamilton was a very progressive thinker as well. As an immigrant from the West Indies and of mixed race, he would be proud of the end of slavery but angry about the banking and health care systems of the present day. Jefferson was a pretty progressive libertarian as well and would be so frustrated with the hyper-regulated state. Madison would just be smacking his forehead at all the misinterpretations of the Constitution he authored.

3. What might this nation look like in another 50 years?

With the overconsumption of resources, big tech, AI, and the widespread numbing of the population’s intelligence, I think the future could be pretty bleak. The young folk need to put down the video game controllers and get involved.

4. Sure, Trump and the leaders today are terrible, but where did this all go wrong?

Reagan and New Gingrich. They are patients Zero.

5. What’s a good quote to consider this weekend during our country’s 250th anniversary?

“He [the King of Great Britain] has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.

– Thomas Jefferson, from that long thing he wrote that one time.

1. What’s the most unrealistic ‘everyday life’ habit portrayed in Hollywood movies?

I’ll with TV and the computer is always on, always loads the webpage quickly, and the thing you’re looking for or solving for is the first hit on the search page.

2. Which once-famous actor does no one talk about anymore?

Kevin Spacey

3. What is one food you’ll never get tired of eating?

Lasagne. My mom’s lasagne. Oh, my mom’s cooking

4. What is one discontinued snack you would do almost anything to get your hands on today?

Heyday bars from Nabisco. Long gone. Chocolate, caramel, peanuts. All in a candy bar-sized cookie.

5. What’s something that you thought was boring or sounded boring when you were younger but now feels like a total luxury?

A nighttime shower, then off to bed early, followed by a weekend day sleep-in.

Please place your caption in the comments.

Please place your caption in the comments.

1. What’s a place in the U.S. that you want to go but haven’t gotten to yet?

San Diego, La Jolla especially for some nice mellow beach time.

2. What’s a piece of life advice you have been given that you not only have never forgotten, but you share with those younger than you?

At work, keep your head down, do the work, and don’t complain. That will do more to build your brand than any other “hack” you can imagine to get the boss’s attention.

3. What is your favorite word?

Lugubrious.


4. What is your least favorite word?

Commentated. There is no worldly need for that word.

5. What’s the most useless piece of information you’ve memorized?

My childhood home phone number. Some version or other of that number has been stuck in my head since I was 6 years old.