Best of 2007

I've forced my friends for the past few years to join me in my "best _____ of the year" list making. I enjoy reading lots of album reviews and most of my favorite sources collect their favorites this time of year. Of course, being the creative people they are, my friends have morphed the tradition well beyond just albums. So this year I'd like to open up the challenge to all. There really aren't any rules, only suggestions. Share your top 5 (or 6, or 10) favorite albums, movies, books, life experiences, jokes, web sites, philosophical concepts, things you learned, etc. Oh, and Mon's Rule is that they don't have to be new in 2007, just new to you in 2007.

So start thinking. I'll kick things off next week. Let's surpass the record number of participants in my Radiohead poll from early this year (1)!

The gods are not angry

At the risk of stealing Chris's thunder, we went with them to see Rob Bell's lecture "The gods aren't angry." I read Velvet Elvis on Chris's recommendation and I can see why he's such a big fan. Rob is sufficiently liberal, especially in his view of the bible, that I at least feel like we can have a common starting place. The main theme of his talk was that we're loved and accepted by God don't have to live lives as slaves to guilt and shame. I've heard lots of sermons with the same theme, and those were always my favorites. Unlike those sermons though, Rob's point of departure was a mini-history of human religion as a response to the anxiety of human finiteness and powerlessness (to borrow some terms from Tillich, as Rob also did). He then moved through the revolutionary view of God offered by the earliest stories in the bible, a view pushed even further by Jesus. He finished with a few very moving stories relating all of this to our (post-) modern lives. I really enjoyed the lecture. My quick summary: Stop living just to seek approval and beating yourself up when you don't get it. You've got it, now go live and love fully.

"You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!"

Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations

Ode to the Bus

Feels like it's time for another Aussie Haiku. This one goes out to the bus drivers of Adelaide's free city buses. Somebody thought it would be good to give them microphones.

Accents, most local,
One slavic. Thick to new ears.
Never stop talking.

Radiohead update

It's time to update the most popular quiz to date on the blog (1 respondent!). Mike had a very nice take and reported that he paid $6 for In Rainbows, Radiohead's new album. He also correctly guessed that I paid $10 for my copy. The Sound Opinions guys reported that in the first 1.5 weeks, Radiohead got 1.5 million downloads. Half of those people paid an average of $10, so Radiohead received about $7 million in the first couple of weeks. Not bad. Paste magazine is also doing a poll about how much reader's paid.

As far as the album goes, I like it. Not a huge departure from the last couple albums, but it is more accessible than Kid A or Amnesiac. It's a little slow; I wish there were a couple more rockers on the album. But in my first three listens it's very solid and growing on me. The last track, Videotape, is really beautiful (lyrics) and kind of disturbing (music) at the same time. What else would you expect from Radiohead?

Oink

We went down to Lexington, NC for Barbeque Fest last weekend. Lexington is a small NC town with the distinction of having more bbq restaurants per capita than anywhere in the world. The festival attracts over 100,000 people, so we figured it was worth checking out. I was expecting more of a bbq focus, with a competition and a chance to sample several recipes, but for those Bolivarites out there, it reminded more of a big Country Days. They had bbq sandwiches for sale that were OK, but not great. But there was a lot of good people watching. The subtitle for the festival could be "Demonstrations in How Not to Wear Your Hair"; we lost count of the mullets and bouffants. We also went down to the Hogway Speedway to watch the pigs race.



The feel of the day can be summed up with the following story. On the bus ride from the parking lot, the driver's instructions were interrupted by a request to turn up the radio because "they're playing Kenny", which apparently means Kenny Chesney who writes hokey songs about getting older.

Soooiieeee!