My Top 10 Visited Sites of 2011

Since we’re running a few Top 10 lists at FaithVillage this week, I’m following suit and posting a week of my own randomly chosen end-of-the-year Top 10 lists. Today, it’s the Top 10 sites I likely visited in 2011. There are no statistics to back up this list, just inclinations.

10. Grantland / ESPN

Ever since the Mavs won the championship (which I predicted), I’ve become an ardent NBA fan. Sadly, the lockout and the loss of many of the key Mavs from last year have left me with a bitter taste, thinking that the Mavs getting through the playoffs this year would be even more miraculous than last year’s epic run. If you’ve never visited Grantland and you appreciate good writing, Bill Simmons, pop culture, or Chuck Klosterman, you’re missing out on some of the best stuff on the Internet.

9. PostSecret

If you’re easily offended, this isn’t the site for you. If you’re awed by the incredible diversity of the human race—our hidden thoughts, unspoken hopes, and worst sins—this site is fascinating. People send their secrets via postcard to Frank Warren. The often simple words combine with just-as-simple art to produce compact yet compelling studies in humanity. It’s updated every Sunday, but not archived. In other words, the secrets are only up for a week at a time. However, these postcards have been collected into many different books.

8. GoodReads

I used Shelfari for ages. After using that site to catalog my library, then not finding an easy way to export that list, I jumped ship to GoodReads, a similar social network for book lovers. I’ve been happy ever since, especially with GoodReads’ iPhone app that allows me to scan book bar codes in order to add them to my digital shelf. It also helps me keep track of what I’ve read and how much work I still have left to do.

7. 101books.net

I don’t recall how I stumbled onto this humble blog with grand ambitions, but I’m glad I did. It’s fascinating reading for book lovers and English majors. Robert Bruce, unhappy with his lack of reading fiction as an adult, decided to read Time Magazine‘s Top 100 books since 1923 (the year Time was founded). He added Ulysses to the list, since it is widely considered a literary masterpiece, but was published in 1922. Bruce blogs about interesting trivia behind the books, then provides an easy-to-read and honest assessment of the time he spent in the book. I once spent a weekend poring over every post until I caught up to “real-time.”

6. Christian Nightmares / JesusNeedsNewPR / Huffington Post Religion

Both Christian Nightmares and Jesus Needs New PR are blogs that detail the rather weird side of Christianity. Sometimes funny, sometimes scary, but, to me, always interesting. Be warned: These sites are not for the faint of faith. HuffPo Religion is where I find news of note in the Christian world that is making waves beyond the church’s walls.

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A Remembrance of Christmas Past

 
Christmas. 1989.

My sister and I, along with our grandmother, aunt, and our three cousins, piled into a van and headed south to Mustang Island, Texas. I have few solid memories of my childhood, for good or ill, but there are moments from this trip I will never forget:

CC Image • amy in holland on Flickr

  • My youngest cousin, who’s the same age as me, singing Feliz Navidad for the entirety of the trip. To this day, whenever I hear that song, I hear his eight-year-old voice singing it and then I want to punch something.
  • Upon arrival at the hotel, we changed into our swim trunks and ran down to the beach, only to be confronted with a serious cold front. We ran back to the hotel as quickly as possible, wind and sand whipping our skin and defeating our spirits. It remained cold and wet for the duration of the trip.
  • My youngest cousin placing ice beneath the covers at the end of his sister’s bed for her to find at some future moment. I don’t remember if I was an accomplice to this prank or not, but I surely knew about it before it occurred. However, he may have coerced me to silence by threatening me with ten more verses of Feliz Navidad.
  • My sister and middle cousin shouting “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!” out of their hotel window, only to be met in response by a “SHUT UP!” from some other hotel window.
  • Playing Spy Hunter in the hotel’s arcade, and by arcade I mean the one arcade game they had in the corner.

I don’t remember any of the gifts I received that year. I don’t remember what the ride home was like, or if my youngest cousin had taken up another song for my enjoyment annoyance. But I wonder why I remember the moments I do . . .

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That Tone-Deaf Guy Behind You at Church

You’ve read the title and I know you already have someone in mind. Maybe it’s a regular at your church. Maybe it’s a friend or family member that goes with you every now and then. Or, as in my case, maybe it’s someone that was directly behind you at the last church service you attended.

  • They can’t find a pitch even in the middle of a baseball game. *
  • They think singing louder compensates for their lack of musical ability.
  • They have terrible parents, because good parents would tell their tone-deaf children that they can’t sing. We have American Idol to thank for a generation of hopeful yet hopelessly tone-deaf teens who think they’re the next big thing when their whale sounds shouldn’t even be dignified with the term “music.” (HT: Matt Chandler)

According to the venerable Wikipedia, tone-deafness, also known as “amusia,” is a “hearing impairment [that] appears to be genetically influenced, though it can also result from brain damage.” So, those that suffer (though the argument could be made that we all suffer) from tone-deafness are either hosed by genetics or hosed by circumstance. Then again, aren’t we all hosed by the same two things?

Listed among the notable tone-deaf on Wikipedia are such luminaries as:

I’ve never heard any of them sing, and it’s difficult to imagine any of these men doing so anyways.

CC Image • 2-Dog-Farm

But, God bless ‘em, the tone-deaf sing. At least the ones at my church do. Maybe they know they’re terrible. Maybe they don’t have a clue. But they sing. They sing their bleating hearts out. Why?

Because they don’t care. They don’t care about the sound of their voice as it physically assaults the eardrums of every bystander. They don’t care that they don’t sound like everyone else. They don’t care that they may or may not be committing the eighth deadly sin—screechery.

They sing because the One who’s listening hears hearts more than tones, beliefs more than words, and sincerity more than posturing.

May we all remember this when offering our worship to a gracious God, whatever form that worship takes.

But.

The next time that tone-deaf guy sits behind you at church, make pained faces in his direction to see if he reacts negatively or stops singing completely. You’ll have won a small and meaningless victory while saving the rest of us from yet another bad American Idol audition.

On second thought, don’t do that. My favorite episodes of Idol all happen in the first three weeks.

A Brand New and Totally Awesome Food Show

While I enjoy food just as much as the next person, I’m fairly inept when it comes to actually making anything. I can fling a pizza in the oven, and I can throw fritos on chili, and I can scramble eggs. That’s the extent of my culinary skills.

But there may be hope for me yet.

My cousin-in-law Bobby Cross and his co-host Kat Curlee have just released the first episode of a new web-only cooking show called the Totally Awesome Food Show. After toiling for years in restaurant management, he’s learned a thing or two about kitchens and food preparation (and customer appreciation impatience). However, in addition to his cooking chops, he’s one of the funniest guys I know. I’m waiting with bated breath for the moment he unleashes his Swedish Chef impression on the viewers of the Totally Awesome Food Show, but simply watch a few minutes of the first episode below and you’ll understand what I mean.

Tip: Look for links to appear in the top left corner of the player in order to fast forward to a recipe that may interest you.

What’s not to love about a free show that will make you laugh, teach you how to cook, and then allows you to enjoy the fruits (or drinks or desserts or meals) of your labor?

By the way, tech nerds may know Bobby’s co-host Kat Curlee as the wife of Dave Curlee, who’s responsible for, among other things, a very popular web-only tech show called GeekBeat.TV with Cali Lewis. In other words, Bob’s in great company!

The Stranglehold of the Long Novel

Over this past Thanksgiving weekend, I read through most of Robert Bruce’s blog, 101 Books: Reading my way through Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Novels. In addition to providing great fodder for future reading material, he’s also written interesting posts about writing, books, and the strange search terms that lead people to his site. A post from June, Can Long Novels Hold You Captive? captivated my attention.

CC Image • Emborg on Flickr

In high school, I was one of those kids.

Nerd. Dweeb. Dork. Maybe the most appropriate descriptive is “bookish.” I loved to read, and for some strange reason after I entered High School, I got onto a classics kick. I devoured Dickens. I dared Dumas and Dostoevsky to entertain me. The most egregious of my prideful reading sins was battling Tolstoy. I read War and Peace in High School.

I didn’t go on many dates that year. And by “many” I mean “none.”

If you ask me now what I know about War and Peace, I’ll tell you that war happens, and peace happens, but that’s likely not what the book is about. There is no reason for a 15-year-old to read War and Peace. The only reason I ever read it is because it was the longest book I knew existed and I wanted to be able to say that I read an incredibly long book, regardless of the fact that I likely only understood ten percent of it.

Which leads me back to Bruce’s post about the long novel. He links to an article by Mark O’Connell entitled The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels which proposes that readers, like captives, can became attached to their kidnapper if even the smallest amount of goodwill is shown to them at any time during their captivity. It’s a great read.

A paragraph that Bruce pulls from that piece resonated with me (emphasis mine):

“You finish the last page of a book like [Pynchon's] Gravity’s Rainbow and—even if you’ve spent much of it in a state of bewilderment or frustration or irritation—you think to yourself, ‘that was monumental.’ But it strikes me that this sense of monumentality, this gratified speechlessness that we tend to feel at such moments of closure and valediction, has at least as much to do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the author’s achievement in having written it. When you read the kind of novel that promises to increase the strength of your upper-body as much as the height of your brow—a Ulysses or a Brothers Karamazov or a Gravity’s Rainbow—there’s an awe about the scale of the work which, rightly, informs your response to it but which, more problematically, is often difficult to separate from an awe at the fact of your own surmounting of it.

That’s why I read War and Peace. In some strange way, it was an achievement that made a socially awkward and quiet kid feel confident in himself.

Allow me to humblebrag for a moment. (You’ll have an opportunity as well). Since then, I’ve read a number of long books that have held me captive:

  • The Count of Monte Cristo: One of my favorite books of all time
  • The Bible: Also one of my favorite books of all time
  • The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Series count for this list
  • The Harry Potter Series
  • The Faerie Queen: This is what happens when you become an English Major
  • Steve Jobs
  • Bonhoeffer: This is the book likely responsible for this post. It took me months to finish, but I recently finished it.
  • David Copperfield: Yep. Read it in H.S.
  • The Book of Basketball: One man’s fascinating look at the top NBA players of all time
  • Crime and Punishment
  • Moby Dick
  • East of Eden

Since reading Bruce’s blog and seeing that Infinite Jest was on the list, a book which I’ve started before but didn’t even get past 100 pages, I’m encouraged to give it another try.

Here’s your chance to humblebrag: What long novels have held you captive?