I like Groundhog Day because it’s a beautiful reminder that any old pudgy rodent is as good as the smartest human / computer combination at making forecasts about the future. More than Thanksgiving, it’s the holiday that forces some humility upon us.
Tropic Thunder. Laughed myself to tears.
If this was one of those “living or dead” scenarios, I’d have to go with Mark Twain. But as it may not be, and I wouldn’t want to have dinner with a box of bones, I’d say Chuck Palahniuk, or — in nonfiction — David Brooks.
You own few things and nothing owns you.
My wife and I once had tea in Nagaland with men who’d been cannibals in their youth, but they weren’t anymore (and — in point of fact — probably didn’t have the teeth for solid food anymore,) so I don’t think that counts.
For the most part, I don’t think of customs as being more or less interesting, just — sometimes — unexpected. I’ve noticed that most people see cultural customs as the strange behaviors other peoples do, while their own culture’s customs are largely invisible to them (i.e. “That’s just how things are done; it really couldn’t be done any other way.”) So, I guess it’s been most interesting, having returned from living abroad for more than a dozen years, noticing just how many strange and baffling things Americans do.
I’m fond of the hiking trails.
I once hitched a ride and was not murdered. [I hope it goes without saying that neither did I murder the person who gave me a ride. If it does not, I did not.]
“And that’s how you do that!”
(I’m told that in medias res is the ideal narrative approach for memoirs.)
Trying to get squirrels out of the attic. They did me like Macaulay Culkin / Kevin McCallister in Home Alone. Ultimately, had to call experts (pest control, not hitmen,) and they made short work of it.
If such a situation were to avail itself, I would make a law so that no one person — even a high elected official — could change the law unilaterally. (Administrative policies for the bureaucracy not being laws, said high elected official could go to town on them.) Why? Because one person being able to change law is an affront to democracy and to the very concept of rule of law, and if we make it the object of fantasy to be able to do so we are cooked.
We had such a law in the US. It was called the Constitution, and it was glorious. It said that only the legislature (a body consisting of many representatives) could make law, and only the judiciary could interpret and evaluate the legality of a law. And it was okay that the executive was the least democratic of branches because it was to stay in the lane of enforcing the laws as they were written (and shaped by judicial interpretation,) and if the executive started getting too big for his britches, the legislature would turn off the flow of money.
So, my great fantasy is not to be able to unilaterally change law, but to have three functioning branches of government who stay in their own lanes, applying checks as (and only as) described in the Constitution.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 