Movies:

The following are ten movies I like in alphabetical order. You can probably find details in the Internet Movie Database.

• Babe -- best talking pig movie I've ever seen
• Fargo -- another "stupid is as stupid does" - got some awards!
• Forrest Gump -- any movie about Alabama has to be good
• High Plains Drifter -- no idea how many times I've seen this
• Nobody's Fool -- the book's good, too - Richard Russo's the author
• The Bridges of Madison County -- movie as rebuttal to the book
• The Princess Bride -- OK, so I'm a sentimental softie...
• The Seven Per Cent Solution -- another side of Sherlock Holmes
• The Stunt Man -- Peter O'Toole, Steve Railsback, Barbara Hershey
• Unforgiven -- I don't like _all_ of Eastwood's movies, but ...

• Men in Black - Good movie
• Lost World - Jurrasic Park, OK, but not great.
• Star Wars, didn't move me to see the other two.
• Beavis and Butt-head Do America, Funny. Enjoyed it.

Just saw the South Park movie.
And now a second movie in 1999, as I just saw The Blair Witch Project, and while I wasn't scared, I did think it was a well-made movie.
And now a third movie of the year: Mystery Men.
My first movie of 2000: Galaxy Quest. Good fun!

Music:

You can probably find most of these in The Ultimate Band List

• Big Head Todd and the Monsters, "Bittersweet" on Sister Sweetly CD
• David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust CD
• Joan Osborne, the whole CD
• Joe Jackson, "Steppin' Out"
• Los Lobos, "How Will the Wolf Survive?"
• Michael Murphy, Blue Sky Night Thunder CD
• Phish, A Live One CD
• Pink Floyd, "Mudmen" on Obscured by Clouds
• Suzanne Vega, the Solitude Standing CD
• The Pretenders, The Singles CD + that Ohio song

Books:
Eric Rawlins has a well-written annotated list . Maybe someday I'll annotate this one.

• Don Quixote, Cervantes (complete text)
• Nobody's Fool, Richard Russo (first two books were good, too)
• Superfolks, Robert Mayer (a superhero mid-life crisis)
• The Brothers K, David James Duncan (and "The River Why")
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (complete text)
• V for Vendetta, a graphic novel, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
• Lord of Light, Robert Zelazny
• JOB: A Comedy of Justice, Robert Heinlein
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen Donaldson
• The Fionavar Tapestry, Guy Gavriel Kay

• the Discworld books, Terry Pratchett
• With Charity Toward None, Florence King (a study of misanthropes)
• Parliament of Whores, P.J. O'Rourke (study of US government)
• the Calvin and Hobbes books, Watterson
• The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
• anything by Dave Barry
• Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (funniest apocalypse!)
• the Stuart Smalley meditation book, Al Franken
• the Fox Trot books, Bill Amend

• The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Persig
• A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean (like the movie, too)
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
• God: a Biography, Jack Miles (very interesting)
• Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson (one vol. history of US Civil War)
• How Real is Real?, Paul Watzlawick
• High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver (book of essays)
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
• We've had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, James Hillman and Michael Ventura

• Annie Dillard
• G. K. Chesterton
• Andre Gide
• Jacques Ellul
• Miguel Unamuno
• Terry Pratchett
• Florence King
• Steven Brust
• Edmund Crispin
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Flannery O'Connor
• Guy Gavriel Kay
• David James Duncan

• Astro City (Homage) - simply the best
• Bone (Cartoon Book) - mighty close to being the best
• Preacher (DC/Vertigo) - well-written but violent
• Cerebus (Aardvark) - in for the long haul
• Supergirl (DC) - I like Peter David's writing
• Leave It to Chance (Homage) - a series around a little girl? Yes!

Currently enjoying the Lucifer: The Morningstar Option miniseries from DC/Vertigo.

TV Shows:

I don't watch a lot of TV, but ...

• Talk Soup (E!)
• SportsCenter (ESPN)
• Night Stand (E!) - Small doses only, please.
• Friends (NBC) - just started watching, very well-written
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Cartoon)
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Sci-Fi)

Sports and Physical Fitness:
I'm a fan of:

• College Womens Basketball - fan of the Lady Vols of the University of Tennessee for seventeen years. Two National Championships in a row!
• National Football League - 49er fan

My fitness routine:

• first I stretch
• lots of walking
• some weight work
• was runnning six to nine miles a week, but got a heel spur, now just walking a lot...

Fitness plans: going to get and learn how to use rollerblades this year -- that's the 1997 and 1998 plan.
1998 update: got the rollerblades and have been on them some, but haven't mastered them yet.

Mental Health:
I've taken lots of tests and learned many things about myself. For example, I'm

• an introvert (live in my head), and thus quiet and shy
• intuitive (lots of imagination)
• feeling oriented, organize things by personal values
• perceiving, open-ended, always taking input, spontaneous, flexible
• a helper, I like to help people -- for brief periods of time
• a loner, so I like to help at a distance

You might wonder why an introvert would type all this stuff in. Well, it's a combination of things:

• Making lists can be an interesting self-discovery process
• I doubt many people will ever be reading this
• People do ask me what I like and don't like

Recovery:
My life got shaken up a bit a few years ago. I found it helpful to take a look at how I was coping with life and then see if my coping skills were actually making the problem worse. Since my "solutions" were actually my "problems" I used the tools known as Recovery to find a more effective means of dealing with life.

I found that other people had had the same problems I'd had -- that I don't have to be alone. (I realize this section makes no sense if life hasn't shaken you up yet -- just keep it in mind in case your world gets turned around some day.)

Computers: (back to the impersonal -- or important -- stuff)
I've owned:

• Kaypro II, Kaypro IV, Kaypro 10 (CP/M)
• Mac IIci
• Atari ST 1040
• Pentium 166, dual boot Windows 95 and FreeBSD (UNIX)
• Radio Shack Model 100

At work I mostly work with

• HP 9000/[K580|G30|827S] (HP-UX 10.01/10.20 and 11.0 now)
• Sun (SunOS and Solaris)
• IBM ThinkPad (FreeBSD)
• IBM Intellistation (Linux)