My birthday is the most important day of the whole dang year. As an only child who was the only grandson/nephew of a large family for almost eight years running, I have an enormously inflated idea of my own natal day.

How big-headed was I? Well, I thought the big party and the fireworks on the Fourth of July were for me. And why not? I got a cake, and then they exploded things in the sky for my pleasure. So what if it was a day late?

So mark it down: July 3rd is when I will become Jack Benny’s age. Alas, I will be in Clarion, since I am leaving for San Diego on June 29th. So you might want to get that birthday party in a little early.

To help you, I have written up my biannual Greed List, the large list of things I desire in 2008. To see the history of the Greed List, read the intro to 2006’s Christmas list…. But the short version is that while I don’t expect everyone to get me everything (or anything), I find that the Greed Lists are an interesting commentary on what’s occupying my attention now, and why.

Otherwise, I’d just point you at my Wishlist and go, “Okay, that.” Which would be boring.

An iPod.
I’ve always wanted an iPod, which is a testament to Apple’s marketing, because I’ve never needed one before. I have a home with several TVs, I have a laptop that has all my MP3s, and I have a car with a CD player.

But iPods are cool, white plastic, redolent of sleek technology. Those tiny plastic buds mean you’re a hipster who writes novels at the back of the Starbucks when you’re not planning your Web 2.0 networking site. The reason I’ve coveted an iPod is not because I need the music, but I want the lifestyle.

I’ve avoided it until now. But with the advent of Clarion, I’ll be away from home for six weeks – and I still need to exercise. I can’t run without some sort of distraction to take my mind off the stabbing pains in my legs, and hauling my laptop around on my back with me, like Luke carrying Yoda, seems like a recipe for a cracked screen.

So I need an iPod. The smallest one will do. I’ll just need it for six weeks, and then I won’t need it again. But it has to be an iPod, because I do have iTunes.

Which I am opening up now, because I love cruising the Top 100 list to see what’s new. Hey, it may be stupid pop, but I love “I Kissed A Girl”…..

Dungeons and Dragons Core Rulebook Set: 4th Edition
I run a biweekly D&D Planescape campaign. But I don’t play D&D. That’s because the third-edition D&D rules were so awfully broken when you got to high levels that I gave up on the D&D mechanics.

So like a mechanic rewiring a car, I yanked out the D&D rules and installed Hero System rules instead. The players are still facing the classic D&D tropes of alignments and demons and angels… But when we roll dice to determine who’s getting smacked by a +5 vorpal sword, they’re Hero System dice doing Hero System damage.

So in a sense, I don’t need to read the new D&D. I’m never going to use it. Hero System does everything I need it to do and more, and the revamping of 4th Edition won’t change me back.

But 4th Edition strikes me as a landmark in roleplaying. Because it’s the first time that D&D really seems to have looked at player feedback, stripping the game down to what people actually do.

Roleplaying is for nerds, which like all nerdly things means that it’s studded with an unhealthy lust for continuity. Once something’s added to canon, it never gets yanked out. The players would protest! And even 3rd Edition D&D – a major change – kept a lot of the sillier bits of old roleplaying clichés, just because it wouldn’t have felt like D&D without it.

Which meant that a lot of D&D felt like it was for other people. There were whole areas of D&D designed for realism – oh, you can’t go there and fight anything, but here’s three pages devoted to it anyway. Why? Because it’s part of canon!

4th Edition, though? It’s a complete housecleaning. Rather than looking at what they thought D&D should be, the designers kept asking the vital question: “Does anyone actually use this?” And if it turns out that nobody understood, say, the planes or the alignment system, it went. They were like some bizarre reality TV show: PIMP MAH ROLEPLAYIN’.

As such, I don’t know whether I’ll like the new D&D, but I have to agree that what they’ve boiled it down to is a bold and interesting experiment. To us grognards, it feels like we’re standing in nothing – where’s the flavor? – but to novices and the fly-by roleplayers, I have a feeling that D&D 4th Edition will be exciting and new, something where everything they do matters.

It’ll be more flavorful to them because the entire game now revolves around the PCs. I don’t know whether that’s better or worse. But I need to read the manuals just to see what my impression of it is.

Sadly, these are the books I’ve most anticipated all year. How pathetic my life truly is.

Doctor Who – Beneath The Surface
I have an unhealthy love for all things Davison – as I’ve said before, Davison was the Doctor Who Got Things Wrong, the only one who was fallible. Every other Doctor is an unflagging moral compass who always does the right thing in the end, vanquishing foes….

Davison’s Doctor always seemed in over his head. And he made vital mistakes. For me, the sum-up of everything Davison’s Doctor is comes at the end of Warriors of the Deep, where everyone lies dead thanks to senseless fighting and he shouts at his companions in despair: “There should have been another way!”

There should have been. Other Doctors would have found it. Davison? Not so lucky.

That lost-ness calls to me. When Davison triumphs, it means something. His victories are not written in the stars, but rather wrangled together by brains and smarts and luck. I root for him, rather than sitting back and waiting for the win.

This boxed set brings together the Silurians, which will do until we get the Sontaran boxed set (which I covet) and the inevitable deluxe release of War Games. Doctor Who has the best behind-the-scenes documentaries short of Red Dwarf, and I look forward to nerding out on this.

The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder, by Vincent Bugliosi
I’m not saying that I agree with the idea. But Vincent, who is a damned fine legal mind who’s impressed me on many occasions, thinks that there is a case to be made to prosecute George Bush for war crimes.

Part of this is trust. Any President in a war could theoretically be accused of war crimes, but because I know Vincent I’m trusting that he’s not using the generic arguments that could have been applied to Truman, or Nixon, or even Roosevelt. Bugliosi has some reason why he thinks that George Bush is vulnerable/culpable in a way that these guys aren’t, and I want to know what it is.

Even if I might, in the end, think he’s full of horse crap.

Good Books On Israeli Culture.
My next failed novel – tentatively entitled “The God Squad” – is set in Israel. I’d book a trip to Jerusalem myself, but Clarion has drained me of both time and funds to head out for overseas adventures.

So I need to know what it’s like on the ground in Israel for purposes of flavor and accuracy. I’ve already picked up Culture Shock: Israel, but if anyone has any recommendations on books that tell you what it’s like to live in modern-day Israel, I’d appreciate it. If you wanted to give them to me for my birthday? Even better. But it’s not required.

Caveman Chemistry, by Kevin M. Dunn
The gentleman who wrote this was a guest at ConFusion, and I’ve been trying to track down this book ever since. The pitch?

You’re thrown back in time. Using nothing but the materials at hand, how do you create plastic? What exactly do you do to make ceramics? This book teaches you what you’d need to know to impress the primitives, aside from waving your hands aimlessly and muttering, “Well, I know it’s possible to make steel….”

I think about being thrown back in time way too much. My pitch story for Clarion involved just that. And since I have the continual, mild nagging fear that I will walk through a door and wind up in ancient Rome, I need to memorize this stuff now so that I have it at hand.

Doctor Who – The Invasion
By the time Tom Baker took the helm of Doctor Who, it had become weirdly unambitious. The show had become purely sci-fi, and sci-fi in that narrow sense of going to other planets where aliens and English-speaking humans had technological problems.

Early Doctor Who, though? It went nuts.

Take Hartnell’s Dalek Invasion of Earth, a bravura twelve-episode performance complete with ruined London, multiple deaths, and horrific failures. Or this serial, where Cybermen invaded the London Underground, terrifying tiny children everywhere who were then convinced that men wrapped in tin foil would come charging out of the subway.

This was back when Doctor Who didn’t quite grasp that it was a kids show but had yet to be straightjacketed into science fiction, and so it took great whopping chances. This is a part of history, with my second- or third-favorite Doctor, and I’d like to have it.

Bender’s Big Score.
I love Futurama. I have not seen this yet. This is strange, since I could Netflix it, but I have a habit of rewatching old sitcoms when I’m down, and as such I know that I’d just wind up buying this anyway.

Doctor Who – Arc of Infinity/Timeflight
Have I mentioned my love of Peter Davison? Well, here it is again. Arc of Infinity is superior to Timeflight, if only for a) watching Davison in a horribly uncomfortable-looking Omega outfit and b) less Tegan, the most stridently vexing companion, but I’d like to have both for the extras.

Rushmore.
The amazing thing is that the Criterion Edition of Rushmore has been on my list since I began publishing it to LJ back in 2003. And nobody’s ever gotten it for me. Not that I blame them, but you’d think that I’d have bought the damn thing, since it’s one of my favorite comfort movies with one of the greatest soundtracks ever known to mankind.

But no. I keep stubbornly waiting. Someone will bear this to me. Some day.

(Tell me I'm full of it)