Big Big Question

Bill and Ted have loaned you their phonebooth. You can bring one person from the past to the present to show them around. (Assuming no time-space continuum stuff is messed up,) Who to you grab?

What song(s) are you embarrassed that you listen to (and love)? Could be junk, top 40, misogynistic - it’s the idea that you’re repulsed by the fact that you love it.

Is there a movie you’ve seen recently that left you wanting? A movie that had you wishing you could put in disc 2 and continue to follow the characters?

If you were in Oregon in the eighties, you’ve got a better than average chance of having seen Goonies and Stand By Me—both shot in our fine state, and extra-famous because of that.

Where are you from, and what movies do locals pretty much Have To See on account of the locale?

There are folks who malign, and folks who defend, video games as a one of the main forms of entertainment for the current generation of kids; and it seems to me that one of the touchstone arguments in either direction is a comparison to what kids were doing thirty or fifty years ago instead.

But what are video games replacing?  Is it books that are getting aside?  Is it cowboys and indians in the backyard?  Burning ants with magnifying glasses?

What’s being offset, and is it a good thing or a bad thing or just a neutral thing?

Help me do some plot spinning, BBQ’ers!

I’ve got a serial story/novella in the works (9,600 words so far), and I’m stumped as to who will be the Bad Guy/Bad Girl.

Plot: A hairdresser in California is subject to psychic visions while she sleeps, which come true. Her husband is a programmer/science type who doubts her. He secretly works for a government contractor in San Fran that gathers information on suspected terrorist activity in the U.S. (domestic only). She does not know this, she thinks he works as in middle management at a software company.

The husband’s workplace spits out information on people based on data collected from supercomputers. One place is Amherst, Massachusetts, where there is a group of anti-war activists.

Meanwhile, in Amherst, we have a dude who is an FBI agent who has infiltrated himself into this anti-war group. He has fallen in love with the leader, an older woman who is a college professor. She has a connection with a homeless guy who is a veteran of the Gulf War and he and her FBI boyfriend hate each other (she has no idea her boyfriend is with the FBI and her boyfriend doesn’t get why she puts up with being friends with this homeless tramp).

In California, there is a spy within the govt contractor’s office who misdirects information so that the FBI will go hunt people who aren’t really a terrorist threat.

We find the hairdresser correctly predicting a big Cali earthquake, while our FBI agent was sent to Austin, Texas on a wild goose chase on bad information sent to him by the California office. He returns home to Amherst to find his girlfriend and her friends planning a trip to Washington, D.C. to protest the current war.

Our psychic hairdresser has a premonition about something bad happening in D.C. but she is wrapped up in earthquake stuff (their friends have been hurt, etc.). All she sees is something vague. I’m thinking she is going to eventually go to D.C. to stop whatever it is she sees and everyone involved will wind up there for a big climax.

Who is the bad guy/girl? The FBI agent? The disgruntled vet? The spy in the California office? One of the members of the anti-war group? Or someone mysterious who was totally missed by everyone?

What would float your boat as a reader in this situation?

Lousy novel?  Awful non-fiction?  Horrific columnist?  What’s the worst piece of writing you’ve spent time on in the last year or two?

On September 11, 2001 and the days immediately after, what songs did you find yourself playing?

Comic books!  The historical dismissal was that they were for kids — badly drawn, badly written pulp.  Over time, there’s been a lot of attention paid (by readers at least) to the growth of non-superhero comics, to graphic novels and the counter-description of “sequential art”, but we’ve still got Spiderman and Superman as big ticket items, men in tights still the vanguard of the medium.

So what’s your take?  Do you read comics?  Did you read them growing up?  Do you see comic books as a literary medium with some unavoidable legacy kids stuff, or light fare with some spikes of maturity?

Why is being a pop music artist so rife with occupational hazards?