Playing guitar religiously, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, travelling the world over - my favorite places include

• Prague
• London
• Heidelberg, Germany
• the Cantabria province of Spain
• the Bahamas [specifically the Abacos]
• India (spent 2 weeks last July, it was amazing)
• Disney!!!
• Florence (and anywhere in Tuscany, really)
• Blue Ridge mountains of Tennessee
• New York City -- I was born there, it's in my blood

I love writing -- I've got over 250 movie/DVD reviews published .., as well as dozens of songs, poems, fiction, and non-fiction pieces just lying around waiting for greatness, music, reading, sailing, running, gaming, drinking, Disney, movies, theater, fun shit, whatever.

My big thing, I guess, is being your typical gadget geek -- your quintessential guy stuff. Home theater. Video games. iPods. Satellite radio. GADGETS. Best Buy is my freakin' mothership. I'll stop a movie if I can sense some cross-phase modulation in the surround-sound matrix. I'll through words around like "RF Modulator" and have people accuse me of making shit up.

So gaming... I'm huge into games. Gaming. Simulations. Whatever. I was a geeky D&D;'er as a kid, lived for video games (Atari, Colecovision, Sega Genesis), role-playing games, and used to be grossly addicted to my XBox. I'm also huge into board and card games, like Settlers of Catan, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Chez Geek, Munchkin, Lunch Money ("HUMILIATION! Jesus hates you and so do I!"), Spooks, Gloom, Cranium, Scene It, and of course the classics like Monopoly ("The Jew always wins this game, bitch!"), Life, Clue (Disney Haunted Mansion version), Battleship... all that fun stuff. I haven't been playing much XBox lately (and still haven't invested in an XBox 360, but give me time), but I was a sworn devotee to Whacked, Crimson Skies, Halo (but not Halo 2), Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic, and the Grand Theft Auto holy trinity. Hell I even enjoy a round of chess, although I massively suck at it. Nowadays you can find me .. playing City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Eve ... I love the .. gaming environment. I can give you the standard bullshit excuse that I appreciate it as a socio-cultural microcosm of 21st-Century adolescent wish-fulfillment, but nobody would be buying that.

What else? If you see me on my jogging route through South Miami and Coral Gables please try not sideswipe me with your Escalade (north on 59th court, east on 74th street, Red Road north to Sunset, east on Sunset to Cocoplum Circle and then back up in reverse). I like watching cool shit on TV and loathe shitcoms and reality bullshit. Please feel free to gut me from throat to groin with a hunting knife if I ever give a shit about what's going on in "American Idol". Gilbert Gottfried is a fucking genius, my first crush was on Connie Chung, and I'm wonderfully crushing on the woman of my dreams. Other than that, I love Thai food, smart funny creative women, and grilled cheese sandwiches with bacon and tomatoes.

And I'm not much into blondes but I'm bugfuck crazy over Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani... although I'd sooner do a big fat hairy stanky black guy than Paris Hilton.

I'm also a massive, unapologetic DISNEY geek -- the films, the animation, the parks, everything. I go to the parks 3-4X a year, or at least go up to the Orlando area to have fun over at Universal/Islands of Adventure, Sea World, even Medieval freakin' Times (went for the first time recently, it was a cheesy hoot!). Good old Uncle Walt himself is a personal hero of mine, for his perseverance and creative vision that helped shape the popular culture of not just America but the world as a whole. Anti-Semite? Ahh bullcrap. Anyway, as a fan and lover of animation, my adoration of Disney and Pixar creations is seemingly limitless. Anyone want to talk the Disney thing, let me know. In the meantime, anyone who has ANY interest in Disney should check out the amazing INSIDE THE MAGIC podcast. This is one of the slickest and most informative podcasts around, and it's got tons of trivia and info for Disney geeks everywhere. ..

Although I'm not a huge TV dude, I simply can't miss compellingly good shows that are well-written, acted, and directed. I'm huge into The Sopranos, The Shield, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. I love 24, but I'm also into Alias (Jennifer Garner I admire, for her vast intellect), Smallville (Kristin Kreuk... intellect), the new Battlestar Galactica completely rocks, Simpsons and Seinfeld reruns, Adult Swim, Family Guy is freakin' hysterical.

On the British side of the pond, my all time favorites include Monty Python's Flying Circus, Absolutely Fabulous, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, The Young Ones (GREATEST. BRITISH. SHOW. EVER), Coupling (the original British version please), Benny Hill, the original Whose Line Is It Anyway (Clive wipes the floor with Drew Carey's insanely unfunny ass), and French and Saunders.

For animation, other than the aforementioned Simpons and Family Guy, I'm bugfuck nuts for Cowboy Bebop, Justice League, Teen Titans, Inuyasha, and Samurai 7. Jesus I'm just a big fucking kid... sheesh.

I was a pretentious literature major, so too much to mention here. Favorite books/stories/novellas/etc. from favorite authors include: "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand, "Stalking the Nightmare" by Harlan Ellison, "The Illustrated Man" and "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, "Don Quixote" by Cervantes, "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Alex Haley (sorta), "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman, "Lone Wolf and Cub" by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, "King Lear", "Macbeth", "Titus Andronicus", and "Henry V" by Shakespeare, "American Gods", "Neverwhere", "Sandman", "1602", and "Death: The High Cost of Living" by Neil Gaiman, "The Decameron" by Bocaccio, "Dune" by Frank Herbert, "Lord of the Rings" by JRR Tolkien, "Musashi" by by Eiji Yoshikawa, "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester, ANYTHING by Edgar Allan Poe or Jelaluddin Rumi [the GREATEST poet this world has ever known], "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams (although the series does sort of peter out midway through the third book), "Strangers in Paradise" by Terry Moore (the single greatest comics series ever produced), "Dork Tower" by John Kovalic (if you know or love a True Geek in your life, you MUST READ this series), "Fables" by Bill Willingham, "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, "The Civil War: A Narrative" by Shelby Foote, "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" by JK Rowling (I *love* the series as a whole, but this one's my fave), "Assassination Vacation" by Sarah Vowell, "Foundation Trilogy" by Isaac Asimov, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce, "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain (THE seminal book of my youth), "The Chronicles of Narnia" (series) by CS Lewis, "Watchmen", "V for Vendetta", "For the Man who Has Everything" by Alan Moore, "Maus" by Art Spielgelman, " Le Mort D'Artur" by Thomas Mallory, "Usagi Yojimbo" by Stan Sakai, "The Dark Knight Returns" by Frank Miller, "A Song of Ice and Fire" (series) by George R. R. Martin [kicks ASS], the Matthew Scudder novels by Lawrence Brock, the Cadfael books by Ellis Peters, etc. etc.