Five Things You Don't Know About Me

I was originally planning on not playing the tagging game - though I was going to participate by pulling together the entire graph of tags. However, now that I've been tagged twice, I'm up for it (especially as this means that we do have a real graph and not just a tree :-). I was tagged by Max Kalehoff and Gary Angel.

1. When I was 15, I spent 3 weeks with a family in France who owned an oyster farm. I was terribly homesick, not particularly good at speaking French, and the end result is I have a pretty comprehensive loathing - even a distrust - of oysters. Here is where it all happened.
2. I play the French Horn - or rather, I played the French Horn. I just had it refurbished, so I'm back on track, once I get my embouchures back in shape. Like all horn players, I'm obliged to somehow mention Mozart, though I'm not sure how he'd fit in to this post. If you want to learn more about Mozart, you could do worse than listen to Salieri describe his music in the opening part of Amadeus by Peter Shaffer.
3. I care way too much about Star Wars. In a recent trip to Japan, I picked up the Japanese version of the laser disc edition of the original trilogy - and I don't even have a laser disc player. You see, I wanted to make sure I had a good record of something close to the original release - something that at least included Han shooting first. Not long after that, of course, Lucas maliciously releases the original theatrical version on DVD.
4. I care way too much about Nixon. I think this must be my father's fault. He sat me down to watch All The President's Men when I was very young (dad was always recommending films: Grapes of Wrath, Billy Liar, Star Wars). So why is the Nixon story so amazing to me? I find that there are two things about the American political ecology that are unique - the capacity of dirty deals and the capacity for transparency and reporting. The Nixon story highlights both of these pretty well. That and Pakula's direction is incredible.
5. I believe completely in the eventual existence of artificial intelligence.

Okay, now I get to tag some people, and I'm going to do it without checking to see if they have already been tagged, that way increasing the probability that the graph will be interesting: David Armano, Barney Pell, James Fee.