Some time ago Brad DeLong linked to this post over at Cosmic Variance… 

Academics: Still Totally Lame   

Here’s the thing: the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a handful of academics to divulge their guilty pleasures. Seems like a potentially amusing parlor game, no? Well, as a moment’s reflection would reveal, no. Because you see, what could they possibly say? Most academics, for better or for worse, basically conform to the stereotype. They like reading books and teaching classes, not shooting up heroin or walking around in public dressed up in gender-inappropriate undergarments. (See, I don’t even know what would count as a respectable guilty pleasure.) And if they did, they certainly wouldn’t admit it. And if they did admit it, it certainly wouldn’t be in the pages of the Chronicle.

I was one of the people they asked, and I immediately felt bad that I couldn’t come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others.

But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.

But the award goes to Prof. McCloskey, who in a candid examination of the dark hedonistic corners of her soul, managed to include this sentence:

Nothing pleases me more than opening a new textbook.

Arrrgh! Stuff like that sets back the cause of academic non-geekiness for centuries!

Thing of it is, if you really were the edgy hipster of your Walter Mitty dreams, then all that salacious stuff wouldn’t be your Guilty pleasures because you wouldn’t be feeling guilty about them.  They would just be your pleasures and you would revel in them.  Your guilty pleasures might just in fact, look a lot like the ones those academics thrilled to share with the world.  Oh…and by the way…I rilly enjoy a cup of hot chocolate by the fireplace…

Here’s what I think of as guilty pleasures: things you enjoy, but you’re a tad embarrassed to admit to.  Here are a few of mine… 

• Yaoi/Shounen Ai.  Beautiful, often longhaired guys, who are madly in love.  Sex, romance, angst, soap opera plots…what’s not to like?  I discovered these Japanese comics a few years ago and now I have a couple book shelves full of it.  There are usually several on my bed stand at any given moment, and another few on order from Amazon.  I feel sometimes like I’m having the teeny bopper experience I was denied back when I actually was that age.

• My Deep Fryer.  I shouldn’t eat out of that thing as much as I do, but I’ve found that if I don’t eat junk food between meals I can still eat from the deep fryer and maintain my weight.  I have a fish fry recipe that my neighbors and co-workers all love, and Cosco tempura shrimp cooks up deliciously in it.  Also hot dogs and Maryland crab cakes.  Deep fried food is high on my list of this life’s simple pleasures.  These days I put nothing but peanut oil in mine.

• Driving.  This isn’t very green of me, but just throwing my maps in the car and some luggage if I need it and driving from one horizon to the next is one of my all time favorite pastimes.  And now I have a car with a built-in GPS navagation system, so I don’t even need the maps.  I love to drive…not just to see someplace I’ve never seen before, although that too is one of this life’s pure joys, but also the simple physical act of driving a car down the road just gives me hours and hours of pleasure.  When I was a toddler I used to embarrass my mom no end pretending to be driving a car…complete with sound effects…as I walked alongside of her while she shopped. 

  I justify it on the grounds that I live within walking distance of work so I’m really not burning all that much gasoline on a yearly basis.  But I reckon I’ll keep doing it until the price of gasoline makes it prohibitive.  My fear is that I’ll live to see the price of gas spell the end of the American open road.  You have never seen this country, if you haven’t driven it from one end to the other.  Flying over it is like only reading the Cliff’s Notes or Readers Digest version.

• Cigars.  I know I shouldn’t.  But a relaxing walk through the neighborhood after dinner with a good cigar is one of this life’s simple, lovely pleasures.  As my body ages I’ve been cutting back…too much nicotine all at once and my body complains in various ways.  I like the Paul Garmirian Belicosos, the La Gloria Cubana Churchills and the Bahia Golds.  When I can get my hands on a real Cuban Montecristo I am in heaven.  They’re not as addictive as cigarettes, but dangerous enough in their own way, granted.  I can go weeks without bothering to open up my humidor.  But I doubt I’ll ever stop completely.

• Elevator Music.  There’s a ton of it on my iPod.  Henry Mancini, 101 Strings, Percy Faith.  I get in a mood and just wallow in the stuff.  I think it’s because it’s what mom used to listen to while I was a toddler.  (I got her taste for Swing music then too probably)  I’ll listen to it while doing chores around the house, or oddly enough while coding at work.  It’s pleasant, undemanding, and puts me in mind of simpler times.

  I’m sitting here right now listening to The Living Strings Play Songs of the Sea, something I searched for a digital copy of for years.

• Republic Serials.  I have a collection of them, mostly from the Rocket Man series.  Man…I still wish I had one of those jet packs I could take flight in.  Republic made the absolutely best serials of that golden age.  Columbia, which had the rights to the Superman and Batman characters, seemed to be aiming at a very young audience.  The republic serials were appealing more to an older boy, and I still love watching them.  Something about invaders from another planet employing fedora capped gangster henchmen to do their dirty work while they build fantastic machines of destruction in secret cave hideaways is still appealing somehow, to my inner teenager.

• Longhaired rocker boy music videos.  I stopped watching MTV when it stopped playing these.  I still keep my Bon Jovi and Nelson Brothers posters up.  Not that I really listen to much of their music, especially since the Nelsons went a little bit country, since I’m a little bit rock and roll…

• The Monkees.  Yes…I know.  This is about as uncool as it gets.  But I collected every friggin one of their albums back in the day, even as the group started breaking up, and I sill love to listen to it.  Tell me Pleasant Valley Sunday (the 45 version) doesn’t still hold up.  I don’t think people really appreciated how well Dolenz and Nesmith’s voices worked together in a song.

• Harry and Son.  The Paul Newman movie featuring Robbie Benson appearing in the nicest pair of cut-offs you will ever see on the silver screen.  Sometimes the cutoffs are all he’s wearing!  I’ve been searching for a DVD or VHS tape of this for ages.  I watch it religiously whenever I see it appear on the TV listings.  Maybe one of these times I’ll get around to following the plot too.  It’s just…the moment the cutoffs appear I keep forgetting to follow the story.

• 80s-90s Metal. Sometimes, as with elevator music, I just get in a mood and next thing I know I’m jammin’ to Lita Ford.