A Pleasant Waste of Time - Sometimes

In late June I wrote a blog about my signing up for Facebook. Against my better judgment, I signed up to please my daughters. They had signed on a week before at the urgings of one of the former “loves of my life”.

I have 22 Facebook friends (my younger daughter has more that 100); 6 of them are family members, 2 are former “loves of my life”, 3 are former roommates (they were really friends, because anyone who had the forbearance to live with me, had to be a friend) and 2 are former co-workers. The rest are childhood friends of my two daughters, who probably remember me only as “that crabby old man” who would go searching for his daughters when they were out past curfew.

Last week, a friend and former roommate tagged me. A tag is like a meme. I don’t participate in memes and I usually ignore tags (not that I get that many). But the topic of this tag fascinated me.

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what movies my friends choose.

He then listed his 15 movies.

I’ve been known to occasionally bend the rules; almost to the point of cheating (if I knew I could get away with it). So I grab a piece of loose leaf paper and put it on a clip board. Within ten minutes I had a list of more than 30 movies.

It’s funny how the mind works. The first movie that I wrote down reminded me of other movies featuring one of the actors (actress) in that movie. Then your mind leads you to a director. My hand was writing faster than a speeding bullet. I write a lot faster than I can type; and I don’t have to constantly use a backspace key.

I sat back and looked at my list and decided that some of the movies on the lower end of the list should have been closer to the top of the list. It was a hopeless cause (where is St. Jude when you need him?). So I decided to give up on this tag game and not participate.

After speaking to a friend (Richard Feder) yesterday, I decided to bend the rules and edit my selections. But I would not put the results on Facebook; instead I would write this Blog. The first movie listed is still the first movie that popped into my mind. It was the first non-animated movie that I had seen in color. The second was also second on my original list.

The List:

1. The African Queen
2. Casablanca
3. On the Waterfront
4. Star Wars
5. Forrest Gump
6. M*A*S*H
7. Animal House
8. Blazing Saddles
9. Goodfellows
10. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
11. 2001: A Space Odyssey
12. The Godfather
13. North by Northwest
14. Alien
15. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Five movies that just missed the final cut were:

1. Caddyshack
2. The Maltese Falcon
3. Donovan’s Reef
4. The Terminator
5. Charade

The problem with these tag games is that the list requirements are either too long or too short.

The Beach Bum

For Your Viewing Pleasure

Thursday night is one of the few nights that I watch regular (non-cable) network television. I began doing this when my son was living with me. He liked the Thursday night CBS lineup, especially the Survivor series and CSI. He told me that I should get out of my rut of “watching the same old reruns” over and over again. He would say “How many times have you seen this episode or that episode”. He was right; I needed to expand my sphere of television viewing.

The first thing that I noticed while watching, what I call, regular television is that there is a greater variety of commercials. The cable channels tend to show the same old commercials over and over again. After Prime Time you might see the same Ad 6 times during an one hour program. I like good commercials and don’t mind watching them, but there are very few good commercials on Cable television.

I had rarely watched CSI, although the reruns are available on several of the Cable Channels that I view on a regular basis. It takes place in Las Vegas and I have a have an aversion to anything that has to do with Las Vegas. Putting my sentiments aside I now watch CSI. It is fairly well written; the plots are good although they are unrealistic. But you can say this of most police and crime programming on television.


I had watched the first season of Survivor, missing only one episode. When it got down to the final 4, I recall that one of the women went on a tirade saying that two of the other finalists were a Snake and a Rat. At this point, I realized that this program was all about the fine art of back stabbing. I stopped watching after the first season.

This reminded me of the time that I had spent in Asmara, Eritrea, Ethiopia (Eritrea won it’s independence from Ethiopia in 1993). A friend that I called Fat Mike (although he preferred to be called Gross Mike) and I, plus other friends, would play a board game called Risk. The object of this game was World Domination. An interesting concept for a bunch of Viet Nam era GI's.

As in the Survivor series, it was essential to make an alliance with one or more of the other 5 players in the game. Forming an alliance with Fat Mike was usually beneficial in the early rounds of the game, as he was a very aggressive player. He would negotiate two to four alliances at the beginning of the first round to eliminate the weaker players first. One of the players would usually be out of the game before the fourth round. The next player would go down in the next round, leaving only 4 players in the game.

Fat Mike was the best Back Stabber in the game of Risk and therefore he usually won the game. Although we all knew this, we would still make an alliance with him, knowing that he would eventually turn on us, his ally; that was the nature of the game. We all thought that we could build enough armies to fend off his back stabbing tactics. Fat Mike was the Snake. Others of us took turns at being the Rat. The Snake usually ate the Rat.

Every Survivor episode that I watch reminds me of Fat Mike. Good memories from many years ago. And that is why I continue to watch this asinine program.

The Beach Bum