Category: Friday Fives

1. What is an acronym specific to your workplace or profession? (students who don’t work: What is an acronym specific to your campus or major?)
I am in the corporate maze – they love acronyms for everything. I guess the most used is CSM, for the web based application Customer Service Management. Boooooring.

2. What is an acronym you use a lot in your personal life?
OK ? Ok, that is lame. Fubar? Snafu? All appropriate.

3. Internet acronyms are unavoidable, but what’s one you particularly despise, and what’s one you particularly like?
I am fond of ROTFLMAO. I hate LOL. The first is creative and has some style. The second is so stale that is used by everyone.

4. What acronym could you create right now for some regular annoyance in your life?
CBANE (Catbox Always Needs Emptied.)

5. What would be a memorable or appetizing acronym for your most recent meal? (if your most recent meal was a BLT or SOS or some similarly acronymed food, please choose the next-most recent meal, smart alecks!) SICC (Spicy Indian Chicken Curry) (homemade, labor intensive and an amazing dish, if I do say so myself.)

1. Did you write a list to Santa when you were little? Do you write a Christmas present wish list now?
I wrote Santa. I remember a few of the lists. Well, not the lists, per say but I remember going through the process. Dad worked for the Post Office and guaranteed that Santa would get them. Later in life I worked at a newspaper and got to publish many Santa letters. That was a great time of the year at the job as we got to mock and tease children.

2. What are the top 10 things on your list this year?
I dunno. Julie wants a Wii. She will be disappointed. I am getting less and less into the Christmas spirit each year. It is so commercial and superficial. I am full of Christmas Meh.

3. What are the three (or 1, 2, 4, 5) best presents you ever received as a child and why?

1. A Big Jim action figure rescue airplane. God, that was cool toy.
2. Atari
3. Erector set
4. Coleco football and some electric thing called Split Second.
5. Sledding stuff.

4. What are the top 5 movies you think everyone should see and why?

1. Casablanca
2. Raider’s of The Lost Ark
3. Bridge over the River Kwai
4. Towering Inferno (bad acting and William Holden, in the same film!)
5. The Thin Man

5. Which comes first, success or happiness? Or, to think of it a different way, does happiness follow success or are you only successful when you achieve happiness? Are they even necessarily related?
Wow, that is a mouthful of a question and a lot to consider. I have always been pretty happy. And generally, I am successful. It is a relative term, but I am doing better than a villager in a grass hut in Paket.

1. What’s your favorite song about growing up?
Duh! “Growing up” by Bruce Springsteen. Best version on the Live 75 – 85 compilation.

2. What’s your favorite song about cars or driving?
Wow, these folks aren’t even trying: “Stolen Car”, by Springsteen.

3. What’s your favorite song whose title is a name?
An Old 97s ditty: Doreen.

4. What’s your favorite get-up-and-dance song?
First impression when I read the question, the theme song to Soul Train entered my head – that is a fine get up and dance song.

5. What’s your favorite novelty song?
CW McCall’s “Old Home Fill’er Up Keep On Truckin’ Cafe”

1. What playground game do you remember most fondly?
Red Rover. We played in Sunday school, cub scouts, scout camp, Phys Ed in elementary and middle school and in college a few times. It is a great game. No real strategy, just run, as fast as you can towards people. That’s it. Good times.

2. What playground game did you just hate?
Dodge ball. I am so miserably clumsy and slow I always got hit. When it was my time to run the ball, I sucked at that to. Dodge ball is a game for jerks, racists, bigots, giants and freaks. If you like dodge ball, you hate America.

3. Which playground apparatus did you most enjoy?
Monkey bars. There was so much to do. Climb, slide, side, hide. Good times. In adult years, I was 31 or 32 and our gang would crawl in a late drunken stupor to Wash Park and hit the big wooden apparatus there and hang, drinking Boone’s Farm and Mad Dog and laugh, joke and banter until the cops would finally kick us out at around 2 am.

4. Which playground apparatus did you generally avoid or not care much for?
The rope climbing. In the Army, I did push ups for days. Lots of dumbells and weight machines, best shape of my life. Really. Roy was cut. Still could never do a rope climb or a chin up. I am shamed.

5. What playground game might be really fun if grownups played it with adult rules?
In college we had an organized league, or some such, and played kick ball. That kicks ass in adult land. So does tag and hide and seek. But I think I would like to organize a good old late night game of capture the flag. I had a ball playing that in my pre teen and early teen years in Scouts and think as an adult it could be great fun. Cell phones, GPS, digi cams. This could rule.

1. Are you a mentalist or an illusionist?
My whole act is a simple image. If you squint your eyes you can see the mirrors.
2. You’re on a roll. Do you feel the roll you’re on?
Oh, dude. Like right now, when it is dark like this – – I am so rolling.
3. How many performances a week?
I can perform a couple of times a day, if needed, however in my mid life, I am more pron to monthly encores and very special episodes.
4. Is there a little bit of Evel Knievel in you?
I was so smitten my Knievel as a kid. I had a doll/action figure with motor bike and my neighbor and I would jump him off all sorts of home made platform challenge jumps. Knievel rules!
5. How much of what you do is physical, by the way?
Sedentary. It is all sedentary, done in place, often I might even be strapped in to ensure nothing gets injured along the way. (Does anyone know what we are even talking about?)

1. What is your favorite experience in your life so far?
Traveling across Europe in a Jeep with Army friends. Several weekends of long weekend trips across the continent. It can’t be repeated and it was a great time.

2. What motivates you to keep going every day?
Boy, that is rough. I am so bored at work right now and life outside work has gotten a bit routine. (Wow, that sounds depressed. I am not depressed, just not all that engaged.) I guess finding something new around the corner – music, authors, friends and even rekindling existing relationships.

3. Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to accomplish?
Jeesh, the questions this week are a bit daunting – whatever happened to “What is your favorite condiment?” I can answer that – hot sauce. Where do I want to go in life? Alas, those choices don’t come to the table in an old six pack carrier. I want a richer, more rewarding job and the ability to positively effect people’s lives. I haven’t pinpointed the details.

4. Is there anything that you regret? Do you try to change it?
I regret not getting my master’s degree. I dabbled once with applying for law school – I think I would enjoy studying law. I don’t think I would be a great lawyer – at least not a trial lawyer – but I think I would like to study the law – I regret not following through with that.

5. What is your most cherished gift you have received? Why do you cherish it so much?Ed gave me a Waterman pen one year for my birthday – it was eventually stolen off my desk at work – but I love that pen and the idea behind – a thoughtful gift that nudged me back to reading and writing more and to get off my ass and get something published.

1. Where is the nearest playground slide?
At the school playground on the other side of the fence in my complex parking lot.
2. What’s something you recently let slide?
I am late again on the second half payment of my taxes.

3. Who recently let slide something you did?
I miss deadlines and work on little projects and usually get a slide. Does that mean what I do is not important.

4. Where is the nearest water slide?
I defer to Aqua Queen on this one, but I think at the Montclair rec center over at Lowry.

5. When did you last slide down a pole, a rope, or an embankment?
I slid down the banister at work on the stairway about two weeks ago. I got style.

1. Is it easy to be you?
Absolutely. I have mastered the ability to go through life without a care. It is troubling for most of those around me, but not a problem for me.

2. What was the last thing you baked?
I bake bread quite often. I have a wicked easy recipe from Bittman of the New York Times. It makes a delicious crusty rustic loaf with virtually no work. I also make beer bread quite often as well. Also requires virtually no work.

3. What do you have to force yourself to do?
Laundry and home chores. I really need live in help and a personal assistant. After all I go through life footloose and fancy free.

4. What’s your personal hell?
Big, overly organized family gatherings. I love family and just hanging out with said family. But fancy, organized events where I have to perforrm to an expected behavior – that is a personal hell.

5. Where do you like to spend your time outdoors?
On a patio at a tavern on a Saturday afternoon watching the world go by, accompanied by a few friends and great conversation.

1. Have you ever considered running away from home?
As a kid, I never had a need, but we did have some neighbor friends that all had some sketchy family arrangements and I remember one kid, Butch, when we were 10 or 11 or so threatening to run away. He didn’t, however, and went on to have successful career in the Air Force.
2. Have you ever actually run away from home? (If so, for how long?)
Nope. Again, as a kid, I had a blissful tenure. But we did take long, hours long, hikes in the hills and sometimes it felt like we had run away. But I was always home in time for dinner and some beet cake.
3. What would make you want to run away from home?
If the feds ever find all that I have done in my own way to foster the war on drugs, I am goner. I will have to run south to Bogata.
4. What would you do if a friend ran away to your house?
Give them a couch to sleep on with no questions asked.
5. If you were going to run away from home, where would you go?
Well, now, if I tell you, then I wouldn’t be away, now would I? That being said, I would go to the rural hills some where in Western Colorado – an entire land of no questions asked.

1. Which do you think reveals more about a person, the contents of their refrigerator or the contents of their purse?
Their purse, bag, attache is usually an outward indicator of who a person is: the tools used through the day. The refrigerator is a the keeper of the secrets – the orderliness or disorderliness of a person’s life. The refrigerator tells more, I think.

2. When you visit someone’s home, what are you most interested in looking at?
Well, the default answer is the medicine cabinet – or a cupboard in the bathroom – but based on the above question, maybe we should be looking in the refrigerator.

3. If you could make it so that one person on earth was physically incapable of telling lies or keeping secrets, celebrities & politicians included, who would you choose?
If the world depended on one absolutely honest person, I want that person to be the Attorney General. With all the recent stuff in the past years, we need a crime fighting hero on come through and clean stuff up.

4. Have you ever spilled the beans on someone else’s secret? If so, what was it?
Yes. In the Army, under the charm of wine, I let slip to an Army friend’s Fiance that her beau was sleeping around with other women in the barracks. I was in a ton of trouble and to some extent shunned.

5. Have you ever kept a diary? If so, was it top secret? What did you write about?I have kept several versions of a diary, not necessarily top secret.