Cecilia Bartoli, Beck, Bonobo, Grace Bumbry, Cafe Noir, Calexico, Decemberists, Ditty Bops, D'Oyly Carte, Cass Elliot, Gilbert & Sullivan, Friedrich Gulda, I Musici (Montreal), Iron & Wine, Islands, Carole King, Alfredo Kraus, Manu Chao, Joni Mitchell, New York Pro Musica, Edith Piaf, Psapp, Pete Seeger, Regina Spektor, Sufjan Stevens, Sunset Rubdown, They Might Be Giants, Mark Varelas (E Muzeki), Velvet Underground. (Most often, Verdi does it for me.)

Wuthering Heights, How Green Was My Valley, Little Foxes, Tales of Manhattan, Jane Eyre and such classics. In contemporary media, Making Love, Goonies, A Room With a View, Madame Sousatzka ...

Once upon a time, long before the advent of this venerable Internet, I read quite a lot. (Doesn't every little boy read dictionaries for fun?) Today it's research arcana, cerebral maintenance with BBC, NYT, Salon ... and, for diversion, far too much sensible online surfing and often, sadly, tedious chat.

Books and their bindings, serious academic investigation and writing, ancient cemeteries, my myriad collections of things that get dusty, counting carbs incorrectly, making a mess in the kitchen, Deep South cuisine ... caffeine by day and refreshing ice-cold adult beverages after dark.

A sixth-generation Texan, here's a contemplative and historiographer living five miles due north of Davy Crockett's place of death. Facial hair has always been an intriguing topic for me. I commenced my own exploration over 30 years ago yet for many of those vacillated, as men are often wont to do, between cleanshaven and bearded. During the last several years a sculpted growth was maintained but recently, throwing care to the wind, I elected to let the damned thing run wild ... but that folly has run its course.