American football.
YMF city that ought to host an Olympiad, and is capable of it, but hasn’t yet.
Tehran
Fav cooking oil
Extra-virgin olive oil (but not for everything)
YMF volcano?
Popocatepetl
Fav Lake
Lake Waiau, on the Big Island of Hawaii. It’s near the summit of Mauna Kea, and is one of the few lakes on the Hawaiian Islands. When I was there just after sunset, the lake was twinkling with starlight.
YMF peninsula?
Florida
YMF isthmus?
Isthmus of Avalon, Newfoundland, where I once drove in falling snow in July
Fav ferry crossing
The Staten Island Ferry. Great views!
YMF Gilbert & Sullivan role?
“A cook and a captain bold” from “Yarn of the Nancy Belle”
Fav nursery rhymr
“Taffy was a Welshman”
Apologies to anyone Welsh. I had no idea at the time what it meant; it was essentially a nonsense word to me when I was a 3-yr-old Jewish kid in Morningside Heights. I did get that the speaker of the rhyme was using it as an insult-- but he was just as bad as Taffy.
YMF thing you ever saw on a stage.
Les Miserables in London in late 1985, with Colm Wilkinson and the original cast. It’s not often I give anything a standing ovation, but at the end I was out of my seat like I’d been shot from a cannon. Great show.
YMF overseas memory.
Photographing the 2004 Transit of Venus in Vienna (see my avatar). The entire transit took 6.5 hours, and I was in the beautiful Wiener Stadtpark, near the gold Johann Strauss Jr. statue. Lots of people talked with me and looked through my camera at the transit. I had spent a lot of time beforehand, calculating when to take each shot, to the second. Lots of fun.
YMF domestic travel memory?
In college, a me, myself and I lazy roadtrip up to Duluth, MN, for my first ever solo vacation. Instead of straight shooting up 35W, I wandered backroads in Wisconsin, stopped in towns that had family ties, had the windows down and radio loud. It was the first time there weren’t any expectations on my time and no one imparting their choices.
Of course, I checked into the hotel, popped open a beer… and did homework. I was probably asleep by 10pm. A real wild one, I was.
YMF hotel stay
The place my family stayed in Leningrad. I don’t know how we lucked into such a place. The bathroom was a religious experience. It had a refrigerator. The beds were opulence that was practically tsarist.
YMF motel stay.
That would have to be in Mexico, where “Motel” means rates are by the hour. Wife and I, seniors, pretended we didn’y know that, the girls treated us like family, we stayed all night in mirror-ceilinged comfort, were only charged for an hour, grand-opening specie…
Fav “mistake” you made
Went to a fish cannery to buy a case of dented cans of mackerel to feed my cat… Unlabeled, they turned out to be squid, which introduced me to exotic seafood. Cat loved them, too.
Fav team playing in a bowl game this year
The Wisconsin Badgers. My alma mater, they beat Wake Forest in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl – during the postgame celebration, Badgers quarterback Graham Mertz dropped the trophy on the locker room floor, shattering it. Ooops!
YMF spread or topping for a sandwich?
Mayo and I buy Dukes but I doubt if you can get it in Wisconsin.
Fav brand name you can’t get in tour area.
I’m assuming that’s “your” area.
Any kosher wine that is not Manischewitz. Seriously, Manischewitz tastes like cough syrup, and it’s only a couple dollars cheaper per bottle than about twenty kinds of seriously good wines made in Israel, Italy, and California, and hekshered. (Why Italy, I have no idea, there’s just a kosher winery there.)
YMF ritual or habit you engage in, even though you know it doesn’t actually do anything.
Counting my cash at ATMs. (I always thought Mogen David was as common as Cold Duck.)
Fav organ meat preparation/recipe