Hey everyone. As another newcomer to the site, I guess this is obligatory. Name's Tom and I live in NW Florida...yes that part of Florida that got hammered by both IVAN and DENNIS. I used to be a professional drummer, but I had to quit because of damage I had done to my wrists after almost 20 yrs of hard playing. I now work from home as a voiceover talent, stay-at-home dad and a musician of another instrument-keyboards specifically. See my profile for my podcast site where you can pick up a few of my compositions. Don't expect to hear me sing... I'm a composer, not a lyricist so all the pieces are instrumental, but whattheheck. Comments are welcome either here or on the podsite... anyway I have a dear lady for a wife and 2 teenage kids who are also both musicians. My wife Barb is heavily involved in both Boy and Girl Scouts, as are the kids- Alex (15) and Brianna (14). Barb is also a Customer Service rep (read: phone slave) for a wholesale floor tile distributer. We live in the country... several miles from a fleaspeck town called Jay Florida about 35 mi north of Pensacola. It's really nice, but a curse in one very fundamental way in that we can't get any kind of broadband internet service out here, so we're stuck with a "56K" dialup connection which is in reality much closer to 14.4 and sometimes surprises us with a 44.1K connection speed. I'm a major fan of movies- mostly supernatural horror, thriller, sci-fi and believe it or not romantic comedies and the occasional action adventure...and classic B&W films. I'm not really impressed with the Hollywood crud being pumped out in the last 15 years or so. Barb and I actually spent full $$ to see the final Star Wars film in May last year, and I was sickened at the astonishing bad-ness of the film. 100 million dollars of blinding special effects don't make a movie good when the dialog sounds as if it were written by a couple of gifted 9 year olds. Terrible. Recent films which I have liked include SHREK, FINDING NEMO, MONSTERS, INC. and all the Harry Potter films-but I havn't seen the most recent one yet. I also want to see KING KONG but havn't seen that one either. I'm a major fan of Peter Jackson...and not because of what he did with LOTR... I was a fan of his work all the way back to MEET THE FEEBLES, BAD TASTE, BRAIN DEAD, THE FRIGHTENERS, and HEAVENLY CREATURES. My hobbies include cooking, astronomy, spoiling my wife and cats (3 of them- Glen, Tiger and Princess), reading, writing, gardening (I have several pots with various types of vegetable matter thriving and growing right now behind me under several hundred watts of gro-lights including onions, beans, jalepeno peppers, tomatos...and ummm... herb...my first time trying that particular species of plant), surfing the web, blogging and chatting. Here's a list of writers whose work I really enjoy reading: H.P. Lovecraft Arthur C. Clarke Alan Dean Foster Isaac Asimov Theodore Sturgeon Stephen King and a list of movie directors who, to me, make really great films: Stanley Kubrick Alfred Hitchcock Sydney Lamet Brian Yuzna John Carpenter David Cronenberg James Cameron AND a list of films which I can watch over and over again CONTACT YOU'VE GOT MAIL the entire BTTF series The 1st 3 HELLRAISER films the original STAR WARS trilogy DEMOLITION MAN GREASE STII:WRATH OF KHAN STIV:THE VOYAGE HOME (the save the whales one) STARMAN 2001 2010 THE ABYSS I have all those and about 100 more on DVD in my private collection...all legally purchased! I have no "college" education, but I'm an amateur physicist...as it were...I'm fascinated by cosmology, black holes, star formation, ancient history, the occult, ETI, relativity, quantum mechanics, philosophy, planetary exploration (I hang on every word of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers currently rolling about on Mars as well as the Cassini probe currently doing a great job in the Saturn system). I'm bored to death by Hollywood gossip. I couldn't care less who is marrying or boinking whom. I'm also extremely distrustful of everyone in politics these days... sorry, but I'm so cynical about what those feebs in DC are up to it actually scares me what will happen in the next 20 years or so. The only President I really liked was Clinton. Overactive winky or not, he did more for the environment than any other prez had done in decades... too bad our latest clown undid all Clinton's good work in the first 30 days of his first term. Ok... Music! I'm mostly but not completely stuck in the 70's as far as music goes... I was brought up on classical music, so I have an automatic love for anything symphonic. Bach is astonishing! I'm also into Stravinsky, Ravel, Beethovan, Bartok, Ligeti, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovski, Mussorgski and modern composers like Copeland. I discovered the prog-rock genre in 1973 so I got immediately hooked on Emerson Lake and Palmer and I still hold those guys in the highest esteem, but I also like Yes, King Crimson, The Nice, Atomic Rooster, Gentle Giant, Aphrodite's Child...and Led Zep, Black Sabbath, Hendrix, The Who, Deep Purple, Rush, Slayer, Grip, INC., Rob Zombie, Tool...you get the idea. Fairly eclectic in my musical taste-but NO country..well OK, classic country like Johnny Cash, Merl Haggard, Tom T. Hall and others. I'm also into the Big Band sound, and any jazz as well as the 70s fusion bands like Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea, Brand X, Return to Forever, Quincy Jones etc. I'm glad to be here and I look forward to cool exchanges with any and everyone here I think that's way more than enough! Tom PIC: 1) Taken 12/25/04...at about 2:30AM!
