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Contrasting with my usual custom of posting long-winded and overwrought answers to questions no one asks, here are six actual questions asked by an actual person, the lovely . I can sense the shock and amazement on the faces of you, all four of you, my loyal readers.

I will now proceed to answer them:

1. What fiction book has had the greatest influence on your life?

Probably George Orwell’s 1984. It created an awareness of my own thought patterns and self-talk (a double-edged sword, really) that had many applications from politics to ethics, relationships and the way I think about Christianity.

Runners up are Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater, C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Dickens’s Great Expectations.

2. Do you like hats? Do you think they should come back in style? For men as well as women?

I do like hats. While watching older films, I’ve many times lamented the fact that hats for men aren’t in fashion anymore. Watching an old Hitchcock, any film noir or Indiana Jones movie makes me want to go out and buy a fedora. The only article of designer clothing I own is a dark gray American Eagle beanie (toboggan, whatever) that I wear often in the winter.

I can’t comment on women’s hats except to say I wish they’d come back too. I know less than nothing about women’s fashion, but if men’s are going to come back, by golly women’s should come as well. First, even.

3. Have you ever had a supernatural experience?

I’m reminded of Caedmon’s Call lyrics (from “Shifting Sand”), “But you know I’ve seen so much I explained it away…” I’m sure I’ve experienced far more supernatural events than I know. Every answered prayer is a supernatural experience, I suppose, and I’ve had plenty of those. I remember one event that occurred during a youth group ski retreat in the winter of ’01. We had been skiing all day and had a worship service and mini-sermon that evening. We sang again near the end and the group segued into spontaneous worshiping and prophecy. I had never prophesied before, but I felt a strong prompting to prophesy over my friend David, so I walked over to him, closed my eyes and put my hand on his shoulder and just spoke whatever God put on my heart to tell him. As they heard me, others starting coming over and testifying to what God was speaking through me was true. I didn’t even notice; I was just praying over David. Afterward he and many others confirmed that almost everything that had come out of my mouth had been dead-on (things he had been struggling with, needed encouragement, etc… I don’t remember what-all it was). I don’t mention my experience when people ask me whether I believe in “gifts of the Spirit” like tongues and prophecy, that’s up to the believer and their own convictions vis-a-vis the less explicit passages in Scripture, but I do know that God had been speaking through me in a more direct way than He ever had before. That’s supernatural, I suppose.

4. What is your favourite cuisine? Do you know what type of wine should be drunk with it?

Hmm… By “cuisine” I’m assuming you mean food of a regional or ethnic persuasion as opposed to an individual dish? I don’t know that I can go there completely, since when given the leeway I’m somewhat picky about food, which means that there’s no one cuisine I can say I like everything. But Mediterranean cuisine tends to have the highest percentage of dishes I enjoy. One in particular is thiny-sliced, lightly-breaded and grilled veal with Herbes de Provence, wild rice and asparagus. An excellent wine with this is Pouilly-Fuissé, a great white wine from the Burgundy region in France. That’s a sublime dish.

5. Who is the funniest person of all time?

I’d say it’s a toss-up between Conan O’Brien, John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson (in his “Black Adder” and “Mr. Bean” roles) and Greg Adams, a guy I went to high school with.

Bonus Question: Where in france did your family live and why?

My family and I lived in France from ’87 to mid-’89, and then again from ’92 to mid-’94, for a total of about 5 years. My father is an electrical engineer with IBM, and they had a plant in southern France, near Nice (close to the Italian border), so he worked there. During the first stint and the first year of the second we lived in a town called Vence about 15 minutes inland from the coast, in the rapidly rising piedmont of the Alps. We moved in ’93 into another house in Tourettes-sur-Loup, a smaller town parallel to Vence relative to the coast, but a little farther west. I spent many of my formative years there, and as you know the compulsion to return goes deeper than mere wanderlust… It’s a foundational longing for someplace else coupled with the silent inner refrain that I do not belong here. Some days are better than others.

They’re great questions and I hope I’ve done them justice considering my state of limited alertness on the cusp of sleep. Now to bed with me.

Addendum: If you’d like me to ask you five (or six or three or twentyleventeen) questions, comment and I’ll see what I can come up with. Or as Winston Churchill would say, I will see what up with which I can come.