Four Play

Shot in 1923, this fading photograph shows my paternal great-grandparents, Lillian and Alexander Pierce (perched on the leftmost two camels), before Egypt’s Great Sphinx and Pyramid of Khafre during their round-the-world journey.

With an unusual bit of extra time on my hands, I’ve been playing around with this meme during the last week. I discovered it on the group blog Inkspot, and though I wasn’t actually invited to join in, I thought it might be fun. There were originally eight categories, which--because there’s no rule against this--I have expanded to an even 10, adding “4 things you want to do before you die” and “4 books you wish you could read again for the first time.” At the end, I have tagged a quartet of bloggers I’m pretty confident will enjoy tackling these questions themselves. But anybody can play at this game. If you have your own blog and post your responses there, please let me know, so I can tell Rap Sheet readers about it. If you would prefer to deposit your answers in the Comments section of this post, don’t hesitate to do so. And if you’re a regular contributor to The Rap Sheet, feel free to have your say on this page.

Anyway, here goes nothing ...

4 movies you would watch over and over again:

• Casablanca
• Chinatown
• The Aviator
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

4 places you have lived:

• Portland, Oregon (born there)
• Detroit, Michigan (unfortunately, I didn’t live there long
enough to really appreciate the place)
• Boulder, Colorado (where I occupied part of a carriage house across
from a mansion filled with party-loving sorority girls)
• Seattle, Washington (my home ever since the mid-1980s)

4 TV shows you love to watch:

• The Rockford Files
• The West Wing
• Deadwood
• In Plain Sight (just so there’s a current series here)

4 places you have been on vacation:

• New Orleans (ah, the beignets)
• Broome, Western Australia (the only place I’ve ridden camels)
• Quebec City, Canada (especially appealing in the winter)
• Barcelona, Spain (certainly one of the liveliest and most beautiful cities I have ever seen)

4 of your favorite foods:

• Tacos
• Chocolate-chip cookies
• Pizza
• Corn on the cob

4 Web sites you visit daily:

• Political Animal
• Salon
• Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine
• Do You Write Under Your Own Name?

4 places you would rather be right now:

• Browsing the bookstores around Charing Cross Road, London
• Sipping a rum punch while surreptitiously watching topless lovelies on the beach in Negril, Jamaica
• Having lunch in an outdoor café on Maiden Lane, San Francisco
• Buying cheese, bread, and wine on rue Cler in Paris

4 things you want to do before you die:

• Climb the Eiffel Tower
• Cruise down the Amazon River to Manaus, Brazil
• Finish writing, and see published, at least one novel of my own
• Visit Egypt’s Great Sphinx of Giza and re-create the photo topping this post

4 books you wish you could read again for the first time:

• The Underground Man, by Ross Macdonald
• Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
• Around the World in 80 Days,
by Jules Verne
• The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson

Tag 4 people you think will respond:

• Patti Abbott
• Donna Moore
• My fellow Spinetingler Award winner, Peter Rozovsky
• Nathan Cain