Interview meme

Stolen from Craig:

If you want to be interviewed:
1. Leave me a comment to that effect.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

And Craig's questions to me:

1). I'm getting to the stage in my life where crankiness may be a virtue...How does one act curmudgeonly while at the same time remaining tolerable?

I guess you'd have to ask people who see me regularly to determine how cranky and/or tolerable I am in real life. As much as I've cultivated a cranky persona at its worst in blog tournaments or online comments, I'm probably more social now than I've ever been. I'm pretty calm and easygoing about most things, and I think I've got an outstanding life, which I undoubtedly take for granted. However, that makes for a blog even less interesting than what you see here.

I dunno..."pick your spots" is my answer, I guess. The things I get het up about online -- whether Bender is a better sidekick than Jerome Benton, for instance -- are utterly ridiculous to begin with, so my railing against contrary views on such matters should not be taken seriously in the least. (answer: Jerome!)


2). Not looking so much for a guilty pleasure, but you've seen a number of films that most people haven't. What movie did you like that didn't receive a great deal of discussion, good or bad, that you wish more people knew about and why?

Two recent films by Yoji Yamada really moved me: Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade. They're period-era samurai films, but they deal more with class and the bureaucracy than with swordplay. The former was a best-foreign film nominee, but I don't think either made it past the film festival circuit. Both made it to DVD, at least.

There are films I'm more evangelistic about, but those have a better chance of finding an audience.


3). What is the greatest song ever by a Minnesota musical act? If they are different, what is your favorite song ever by a Minnesota musical act?
I should first apologize to Bob Dylan fans for ignoring him here. I'll never work in a hip record store now, but I'm shamefully clueless when it comes to his body of work, plus I view him as a "Minnesota musical artist" the same way Eric Lindros is a Nordiques great.

For greatest, I'm going to go with Prince's "When You Were Mine." It's free of Prince's more annoying quirks, was straight-ahead rockin' enough for Mitch Ryder to cover, turned out suitably kinky when Cyndi Lauper covered it and didn't change the gender pronouns; and despite the early-80s cheeze keyboards, it has a punky rawness that reflects the different things going on in the TC scene at the time.

For my favorite, I'm going with "Celebrated Summer" by Hüsker Dü. It used to be "Left of the Dial" by the 'Mats, but each time I've revisited the New Day Rising album I've found something more to appreciate amidst the wall of noise.


4). What's the secret to getting a good deal on a car?
We had great luck with the method espoused by fightingchance.com. In short: bone up on invoice price, dealer holdbacks, other incentives, and what the market for a given model actually is. Then fax a number of car dealers in the region and give them 3-5 days to bid for your business. Whether the intel in the website's $35 info pack is worthwhile may vary depending on how knowledgeable you are about the car market. We aren't, and thought it was completely worth it.


5). Of the three other Gerbils, which one is the most likely to be killed on the reunion tour in 2017?
"Reunion" assumes a breakup, and when it comes to quizbowl and retirement I operate on Too Much Joy's theory of breakups, which is: Too Much Joy will never break up. It may never make another record and it may never play another show, but that doesn't mean we've broken up....I'm not trying to be diplomatic or anything; the thing is, if you go out and say, "Oh, we broke up," and then you feel like playing a show later on, all of a sudden you're like The Who. Who wants to be The Who? I want to be The Who in 1965, not The Who in 1999.

But it'll be Rosenberg, of course. The three of us will have a hand in the execution, a la Murder on the Orient Express, and we'll do it solely for the dead pool points.