Her name is Rio and she dances in the sand

If you can have a pre-mid-life crisis, then so can I. Someone recently called me a "serial dater", so I'll get over mine by having a life-transforming experience Hugh Grant style.

Many people have soft spots in their hearts for what they loved as a kid, a teen, hell, as a twentysomething corporate business mogul too (yay me!). I've noticed that all the Lord of the Rings fans today had read and loved the books as kids. I...don't fall into that particular category. Did you know that I rarely listened to music until I was 16 or 17? I bet you didn't. If I had stuck with the music I listened to at 16, there would be a lot of Beach Boys, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Spin Doctors, Weird Al, old swing music, and maybe some Little Feat as well. One day at work, during my high school years, my friend and I put a tape in that played "Parents Just Don't Understand" back-to-back-to-back for 4 hours straight. If only parents understood. At least I found later that Kafka understood. By 17, I had found The Grateful Dead, The Skatalites, and much more. As for live music, there weren't many concerts in my Wisconsin hometown. Going to concerts meant piling in a car with my friends and driving to Skappleton or the Concert Cafe in Green Bay. At you know what that meant: singing "Bitches 2" and all the rest of Ice-T's O.G. Original Gangster (1991) in the car on the way.

I'll admit that I've never heard the John Lennon album to which you refer. I do know people hate it! But people do love Catcher In the Rye. All the Salinger I've read is Franny & Zooey (1961). I approve of that one (so you're okay Holly, you can now safely admit you like it too).

You may be on to something with The Killers though. Big glitzy remakes can work. Sometimes they work better than the originals. When Elaine Pagels wrote about the roots of christianity in the 70s, she failed to realize how much theology and politics are fundamentally the same as secret agent spy stuff. Fortunately, Hollywood came to the rescue on that score. That is certainly not all. R. Buckminster Fuller said, "Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them." Well, he didn't realize that babies have a secret language and battle evil scientists bent on exploiting them. Duran Duran a second time through could easily surpass the original, as long as no animals are harmed and no animal products are used.