Blog-iversary, 2010

Well, it's that time of year again. It's my blog-iversary.

Since we last celebrated together I've become something of a professional blogger, by which I mean that I get paid money to write on the internet. It's something of a dream come true, because I had been doing this for free. I've been fortunate enough to publish something in the neighborhood of 160 posts for Ifbyphone and PMI since January 2010. And yet this year has managed to be the busiest yet for The Daily Snowman, with more than 100 posts published since my last blog-iversary. As always, I'm surprised and grateful that many thousands of you decided to come visit (or, I suppose, a few or you visited many thousands of times), to read what I have to say. I truly appreciate your support.

My advice to anyone hoping to be paid to write is this: just start writing. My paid gigs are a direct result of this humble blog, even though I never would have predicted the path from a blog about snowmen to multiple paying blogs about phones. Writing begets writing.  Just choose a topic and start writing. You never know who'll be reading.

Let's go now to this year's edition of the Snowies. (Any resemblance to any of these Urban Dictionary definitions of the word "snowy" is mostly accidental.)

Snowiest Embedded Videos



and



Snowiest Series

1. The Internet is Distracting
2. Zippers on Baseball Uniforms

Snowiest Update on a Multi-Year Series 

1. Yet More Evidence That Laugh-Tracks are Bad

Snowiest Recognition of TDS

1. Matt Bucher's Las Obras de Roberto Bolano
2. FreeDarko's Twitter

Snowiest 2666 Posts

1. Initial 2666 Thoughts
2. 2666's The Part About the Crimes and Literary Realism

Snowiest Weekly Paragraphs

From Pat Conroy's My Losing Season:

As a boy, I had constructed a shell for myself so impenetrable that I have been trying to write my way out of it for over thirty years, and even now I fear I have barely cracked its veneer. It is as rouged and polished and burnished as the specialized glass of telescopes, and it kept me hidden from the appraising eyes of the outside world long into manhood. But most of all it kept me hidden and safe from myself. No outsider I have ever met has struck me with the strangeness I encounter when I try to discover the deepest mysteries of the boy I once was. Several times in my life I have gone crazy, and I could not even begin to tell you why. The sadness collapses me from the inside out, and I have to follow the thing through until it finishes with me. It never happened to me when I was playing basketball because basketball was the only thing that granted me a complete and sublime congruence and oneness with the world. I found a joy, unrecapturable beyond the realm of speech or language, and I lost myself in the pure, dazzling majesty of my sweet, swift game.

And the great Will Leitch on LeBron's decision:

No, tonight, it felt like everyone involved — LeBron, ESPN, Bing, the University of Phoenix, Stuart Scott, the man who once chastised fans for having the audacity to boo, Jim freaking Gray — treated the millions of people watching like stupid, mindless consumers, empty lemmings ready to follow Sport into the abyss. Here, here are the Boys & Girls Club props. Here, here is your search engine. Here, here is your online college, Here, here is your Athletic Hero. Eat. Eat. Consume. You like it. You love it. You'll always come back for more.

They're surely right, of course. But never has it been laid more bare, and never did it feel so empty. It felt like a break, the moment when the tide crested, when we looked at the games, and their players, and ourselves, and wondered: Why in the world are we watching these awful people? It was a question impossible to answer.

Snowiest Posts About Ivy League Schools

1. Yale School Musical
2. Is Larry Summers the Key Character in The Social Network?
   

Snowiest Video Essays



and



Snowiest Movie Reviews

1. June 17, 1994: Subtle Choices Are Choices Nonetheless
2. Reviewing Avatar

Snowiest Books/Reading Posts

1. How We Remember Sports: FreeDarko's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History 
2. Helplessness of the Self: James Wood on David Foster Wallace

Snowiest Posts That Don't Fit in Another Category

1. Steve Earle in Concert
2. Reader's Despair Syndrome

Lastly, I'd like to wish a happy blog-iversary to my blog-brother, Ariel at Troubled Souls Unite, now in its second incarnation. He's essential reading if you love music or if you would like to understand the ways in which the love of music is expressed in America in 2010.

Blog-iversary

I'm about four weeks late with this, but happy Blog-iversary to me. Once again, we'll celebrate by reviewing some of the highlights of The Daily Snowman from year two to three in this, the 185th Post Spectacular.


Here we go:
 

Best Embedded Videos



and



Best investigative Series
Abandoned Car Watch, Parts One, Two and Three
Bakery Logo Plagiarism
 

Best Photos

 and

(Both from here.)

 

Best Sentences

• "As times passes and first-hand knowledge of these wars fades, these memorials play a huge role in determining how the wars themselves are remembered."
• "His barber made some type of mistake, and his head said, 'Except to Win.'”

Most Prominent Recognition of The Daily Snowman
Sorgi on Deadspin
Gunnin' for That #1 Spot on Ball Don't Lie


Best The Simpsons Posts
The Highly Literate Simpsons
The Simpsons' New Intro


Best Post
A Quick Lesson on Being Interesting
How The New York Times Does Business


Best Weekly Paragraphs

"Made in America"--America, made. In many ways, the story that comes together in the pieces of this book is that of people taking up the two elemental American fables--the fable of discovery and the fable of founding--and making their own versions: their own versions of the fables, which is to say their own version of America itself. Who knows if it is John F. Kennedy delivering his Inaugural Address or Jay Gatsby throwing one more party who is more truly invoking John Wintrhop's "A Model of Christian Charity" from three centuries before? Is it Frederick Douglass or Hank Williams who has the most to tell us, not to mention Jefferson's ghost, about the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence? Doesn't Emily Dickinson, within her own Amherst walls, invent as complete a nation--loose in the wilderness in flight from all forms of restraint, be they those of God or man--as Ahab on the quarterdeck or Lincoln at the East Face of the Capitol?

and

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise Understanding Comics, argues that the image you have of yourself when you're conversing is very different from your image of the person you're conversing with. You interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a very particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he's an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-nose-and-hair package. It's precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and--simplest of all, barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line--Charlie Brown.

Best Movie Reviews
Wolverine's Origins Are Surprisingly Boring
UP


Best Reading/Books Posts
The Changing Reader
Universal Authorship


Best Jewish Posts
Chabad Throws the Best Telethons
Old Jews Telling Jokes


Best Travel Posts    
Taking a Hike
Tour de Midwest

There've been about 6000 visitors to the site in the last year. Even though Ariel gets that every time he mentions Pearl Jam, I'm really quite overwhelmed by your support.

Thanks for reading.