My Friday Five for April 14, 2002

  1. If you could eat dinner with and "get to know" one famous person (living or dead), who would you choose?
    I dunno about those quotes around "get to know"... They suggest to me that the phrase is meant in the "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more!" sense. If so, I have no idea. I can think of a number of hot celebrity babes who might be fun to "get to know", but I don't follow their lives at all, so I have no idea which of them might be interesting to actually get to know and which are grade-A bitches IRL.

    OTOH, superfluous quote marks abound these days and, if that's the case, I think I'll go with Egil Skallagrimsson, who the sagas tell us was an exceptional warrior, poet, and runemaster. While his skills may well have been exaggerated, I would love to be able to meet a man that well-rounded and that talented. If that's not famous enough for you, substitute Leonardo da Vinci, for essentially the same reasons.

  2. Has the death of a famous person ever had an effect on you? Who was it and how did you feel?
    Yeah. There have been a lot of sci-fi authors dying lately and it's sad to know that they'll never write another book for me to enjoy. Of them, the one who most affected me was almost certainly Douglas Adams.

  3. If you could BE a famous person for 24 hours, who would you choose?
    Flippant, first thing that comes to mind answer: Bill Gates, even though I'm not sure that 24 hours would be long enough to run Microsoft into the ground.

    Somewhat more serious answer: Pretty much any of the hot celebrity babes I mentioned above. I've always wondered what it would be like to be a woman and how it would feel different, both socially and kinesthetically. But that doesn't have anything to do with celebrity or the perks thereof.

    Totally serious non-answer: Beats the hell out of me. I don't follow the cult of fame. These people aren't anything special to me.

  4. Do people ever tell you that you look like someone famous? Who?
    Nope. I seem to have a few doppelgangers around, but none of 'em are famous.

  5. Have you ever met anyone famous?
    Not personally. I've seen famous people at conventions but never talked to any of them beyond thanking them for coming to see us.