I saw this over on Tom the Dog‘s blog, and it struck me as a fun idea to do myself — and then Messrs. Tosy and Cosh beat me to it. But anyway, here’s a list of stuff I like a lot, in alphabetical order!
1. The String Quartet number 2 in D, by Alexander Borodin. An achingly gorgeous work from one of the masters of Russian Romanticism.
2. The “Battle of Yavin” track from John Williams’s score to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. For my money, this is the best extended cue of action music ever composed.
3. Coinstar machines. I know, it takes a chunk of my money just for the convenience, but Lord, if there’s one mind-numbingly boring job that I can’t stand, it’s rolling loose change. I’m only too happy to sacrifice a few bucks to have a machine do it in minutes.
4. “Dancin’ in the Street”, as performed by David Bowie and Mick Jagger at LiveAid (and later filmed that same night for the MTV video). It’s got a good beat, and I can dance to it.
5. Glass-walled Elevators in tall buildings. I love riding glass elevators. Every building should have a glass elevator!
6. Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm Reynolds. The first really cool spaceship captain since Benjamin Sisko. He had so many good lines over the short run of Firefly, and Fillion always struck just the right note.
7. Yosemite Sam’s quintessential expression of awe or dismay, “Great hornytoads!”
8. Lieutenant Horatio Caine of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab. “Alex. Who do we have here?” (said while standing akimbo and facing directly away from Alex, who is kneeling over the body).
9. That decrepit castaway-guy, played by Michael Palin, who launches each episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with the single-word line, “It’s….”
10. “Raisuli Attacks”, from the score to The Wind and the Lion, by Jerry Goldsmith. The best short action cue I’ve ever heard (it’s about two minutes long).
11. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. The best book on writing I’ve ever encountered.
12. The tragic love triangle of Lisen, Amairgen, and Galadan in The Fionavar Tapestry — a haunting tale that’s all the more special since, by the time the events of the book take place, two of the three members of that triangle are dead.
13. Mirna from The Amazing Race. I loved her so.
14. The six symphonies of Carl Nielsen. Fascinating works, each of them — and I haven’t heard them in too long, I’ve just realized.
15. October. The best month of the year; I live for October. Baseball reaches its post-season; the NFL season’s narrative is starting to take shape; the weather (at least in these parts) is stunning.
16. Pie, the perfect food, whether savory or sweet. Expanding the concept to include pizza. On the plate, or in the pan, or arcing through the air toward an unwitting victim, pie is perfect!
17. Presque Isle, in Erie, PA. Hey Buffalonians, if you’re looking for a perfect day trip in summer, this is an amazing place to go.
18. The “Rangefinder” game on The Price is Right. A quick, fun game that got a lot more fun when they had some hard-of-hearing old lady playing it, and she couldn’t hear the timbre of the audience’s screaming shift from exhortation to stop the rangefinder’s motion to horror at her almost-certain failure to stop it on time.
19. Ted the lawyer on Scrubs, played by Sam Lloyd. This guy has one of the most inherently funny faces on television.
20. Les Troyens, the masterpiece opera by Hector Berlioz.
21. “Until the Last Moment”, by Yanni. There, I said it: I have some appreciation for Yanni. I love his Live at the Acropolis album. I’m sorry, so very, very sorry. (No, I’m not. Deal with it.)
22. Darth Vader. Because he’s well, Darth Vader.
23. Real, home-made Whipped cream. The stuff from an aerosol can? Blecchhh!
24. Chris Farley’s security guard in Wayne’s World, the one with more information than he should have had…and Wayne, later on, noting how useful that information turned out to be: “Aren’t we lucky we were there to get that information? It seemed extraneous at the time.”
25. The Simpsons: Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel.
26. Zantor, the evil emperor from the Star Wars fanfic of my youth.
This isn’t a “tagging” kind of thing, so grab and go if you’re so inclined.
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