Blog Status Update #764, and a Short Movie Review

My poor Blogger blog… How I neglect you so! Even though you continue to earn me (a meager amount of) money because of past stellar posts on the 1990s hit Freshman Fall and the short-lived Jerry Springer-hosted Baggage. Like seriously – I can’t believe how often people are looking for information on those two subjects! I also really like it when someone comments on a post five years after the fact.

It’s also odd for me to read some posts that are now 5+ years old. Yikes, they ain’t great, as Shakespeare once said to Roger Bacon. However, they serve as a good reminder of how I’ve progressed, so I’m begrudgingly leaving them up. Plus, I need to keep getting’ them (meager) checks based on search engine hits.

One other housekeeping item – I’m on a movie review podcast with some random strangers I know from the Internet. If you’d like to listen, you can go here. I mostly serve as comic relief, and as a result, I say incredibly horrible things sometimes! Good times! The latest movie review I participated in was The Santa Clause, so it’s very time-sensitive. Before that, I thought the Snowpiercer and Krull shows were also really solid.

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, so I won’t resolve to update you more. However, since I do have a bit of a light schedule the next few days, the least I can do is to provide some content in these hot news days of late December and early January. Such as…

Random movie review – I saw Boogie Nights today. Yeah, it IS weird that I haven’t seen it before! I felt like I’ve seen it before, given how many references Bill Simmons makes to it. But with its weird mixture of humor, drama and smut, I can see why it is so widely celebrated. If you’re in the mood for a dramatized (maybe!) flick about the porn industry and mommy issues, with a dash of humor, it’s definitely worth checking out. (And also, there is an awesome real-life crime article it borrows from, and that article is worth reading – “The Devil and John Holmes.”)

The Boogie Nights “Dirk Diggler” image is a common screen grab floating around the Internet. The top image comes from a public domain gallery.

An Ongoing Struggle of Dedication

The weird thing about my blog is that the readership numbers (allegedly) continue to grow even as I don't blog as much. A less vain writer would take this as an indictment of his writing ability, but after running my own news site for (almost) a year, I realize that there is a lot of value in an extensive back catalog. (In a true sign of the height of my own vanity, I often find myself clicking through past entries I've done, thanks to the “You Might Like...” prompting at the bottom of each of my entries.)

Anyway. My own effort on this has wavered, obviously. I've almost restarted about five times in the ensuing, unplanned five month vacation of mine from writing. In fact, it's bizarre to look back at my last entry to realize that the last time I wrote was the first week I got my cat, which has now been with me for three months. (As a status update on the cat, he really enjoys my new apartment much more, since the windows are much lower to the ground and he can perch there. He's still really, really old.)

At least for now, there should be posts queued up for these next two weeks – another one on Thursday, and Monday, Wednesday and Friday of next week. Beyond that, I'll have to see. If I continue writing, it will probably be on more evergreen topics, since the demands of work often don't leave me with time to do posts on the fly. I'm still a big fan of my workplace and what not, but it does take a full 40 to 50 hours a week, as compared to past journalism jobs, where I did get a bit more time to coast. (On the plus side, there are few things more joyous to me than being able to set my own hours.)

Addressing some of the comments that piled up in my absence: People are really quite into Kristen Wiig. I haven't seen Bridesmaids, but I kind of want to – it looks funny. However, to refine my earlier arguments on Wiig, it's not that I don't think she's funny. I just think she's way, way overused on Saturday Night Live. It's a habit Lorne Michaels can lapse into at times; some of the Jimmy Fallon years, he is in every single sketch too. But now that he has his own show and the humor isn't as forced, I've come to enjoy him much more. I imagine Wiig will be the same thing – I'll probably like her “Best Of” DVD, and whatever future endeavors she's into.

Hey, Who Wants To Be More Famous-er?

So, as part of work, we're going to start having blogs on my site, here, along with that cute picture of my sister's cat that I'm now taking care of.

If you're interested, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment. Basically, you'd just have to copy-paste your existing Blogger posts over to Patch, which is pretty simple. As long as you're writing about general topics - parenting, fashion, movies, video games, etc. - I can probably feature your writing on my site.

Anyway. I promise, I haven't forgotten about this thing! I just keep getting busy with vitally important things, like playing Rock Band 3 and Dragon Quest IX.

Stats, stats and stats - August 17, 2010

Although most of my readers are women, page views spike when I include pictures of women. I have no idea why this is the case, but please enjoy Marla Sokoloff, Anna Kendrick and Alison Brie.

Back when I started this blog, I would originally see how my hits changed from month-to-month, and then post about this and my AdSense stats. However, this didn't really make for that scintillating of a post. (If you're curious anyway, you can check out those posts by checking out this tag.)

However, it has been about 10 months since I last did one, so I figured it might be a bit more interesting now. Also, I've seen other bloggers talk about their most-searched keywords, like here. I thought to myself, "Hey, maybe people have found my site looking for interesting things as well!" Well, the results are a bit disappointing, but hey... It's my blog, so I guess you'll have to read them anyway. (mwhahaha! ... wait, wait, don't go!) Ranked in terms of popularity...

1) Annie's boobs. This is a reference to the NBC show Community, which I like quite a bit. In an episode parodying Goodfellas, one of the characters gets a monkey and decides to name it Annie's Boobs. Annie is another character on the show, played by the lovely Alison Brie. (By "lovely" I mean that she is really hot and was a complete slut in college, which is luridly interesting.) If you Google Image for "Annie's Boobs", my blog is the first one to come up, although I personally like the picture to the right that includes the monkey. (Click for the full-size version of it.) It's from this awesome picture capture site. Annie's Boobs (the monkey, not the actual anatomy, unfortunately) also has a Twitter account, which you can find here.

2) Dash Worthington. Similar to the above-entry, my picture is the first that pops up when you search for the term. Dash is The Daily Show's senior correspondent, and by that I mean he's about 65 years old. I wrote an entry about him here.

3) My friend Kate. The actual search term used is her first and last name, which I don't really want to use in this entry. I have no idea why people are Googling her, after all, and I only make one reference to her on my blog, a throwaway comment about how the song "Kate" by Ben Folds Five always makes me think of her.

4) Abigail Spencer twix. Much like Katie White from The Ting Tings, Abigail is someone I find so drop dead gorgeous that I hope we will be married at some point in the future. (I'm not sure if she will be before or after Katie, or if I'm just going to go old school Mormon.) But anyway, Abigail isn't a really well-known actress, so my blog entry on her was one of the few floating around on the web about her for a while. Also, because I'm mentioning her now, it gives me an excuse to re-run her photo:


5) site:stephenonstuff.blogspot.com giants over cowboys. I have no clue why this is a popular search term, actually. My friends Bob and Kristin pick football games with me during the football season, but if anyone is seriously using the picks for gambling advice out there, they're really in trouble. This also reminds me, sadly, that I never revealed who won last year... Or sent the winner their prize...

Uh, let's just move on! Anyway, those are the most popular search terms. I don't really have any weird search terms, unless you consider "Rihanna sucks" or "Molly Culver naked" to be odd statements. (Both are understandable to me.) And now to close out the entry, some conventional stats:

Lifetime Blog Stats
Range: March 6, 2009 to August 17, 2010
Total number of visits – 10,868
Total number of pageviews – 17,767
Average time on site – 1:37
Percentage of new visitors – 57.19%
Most popular day – July 27, 2010 (92 visits)
Least popular day – October 7, 2009 (4 visits)
Browsers used - Firefox (54.69%), IE (18.47%), Safari (14.72%), Chrome (9.86%) and Mozilla Compatible Agent (0.86%)
Top Ten popular states – Rhode Island (1,919), Massachusetts (1,342), California (839), New York (711), Virginia (640), Texas (266), Mississippi (214), Illinois (214), Minnesota (212) and Connecticut (192)
Top Ten unpopular states – Delaware, Montana and South Dakota (3), Wyoming (4), Alaska (7), Idaho (13), Nebraska (15), West Virginia and New Mexico (19), and Iowa (20)
Top Ten cities, excluding Rhode Island – Ft. Myer, VA (441); New York, NY (400); Medfield, MA (271); Cambridge, MA (263); Providence, RI (188); Minneapolis, MN (162); Brighton, MA (155); Washington D.C. (154); Somerville, MA (151) and Biloxi, MS (138)
Ad revenue – $13.46

That's right, I'm rich! RICH.

The Anna Kendrick picture at the top is from here. Alison Brie's image is from here, and Marla Sokoloff's is from a spam site I'm not going to link to.

Hey, why the heck am I following you?

A good post over at Fourth Grade Nothing by Ally concentrates on the whole idea of unfriending and defriending and un-following people on Blogger. While I've never unfriended anyone, I can certainly understand why some people think it's necessary. A couple of ex-girlfriends and people I dated have given me this treatment, which made me cry myself to sleep is understandable.

However, the entry did make me realize that I should probably explain myself to the whole blogging community, since I am following (as of this entry) 151 different blogs. The reason why I'm following tends to fall into one of four categories:

1) I know you personally. This applies to my friend Amanda, who lives in Boston and I've been to sporting events with, and my friend Adam, who I've just conversed with online.

2) You're funny. This is a much wider range, and it constitutes the bulk of the people I follow. The first blog that got this treatment, and one that inspired me to get more into blogging myself, was Brick Sexplode (or as the rest of the world calls it, Bricks Explode). Josh is a heck of a writer, and I love some of his lists, like the Top Ten Selfish Sports Teams Since 1980.

Lately, the best funny blog I've been following has been Sadako's Dibbly Fresh, which offers alternating dry and spastic commentary on 1990s fare. Confessions of a Cashier reminds me of my own past time at Dunkin' Donuts. I'm also a frequent commentator at Just The Cheese and Not Worth Mentioning, which is a delightfully random mish-mash of stuff, and 30 other blogs that I don't really have time to highlight individually. A lot of the pop culture critiquing would fall into this group.

3) You write about sports. This group is second to the funny blogs in terms of who I follow. At some point, I started following a good group of Canadian bloggers who linked to one another - Tao of Steib, The Blue Jay Hunter, Sporting Madness, and Sports and the City.

Of course, this led me to poking around for other sports blogs on Twitter. When it comes to Red Sox division mates, I'm a big fan of the Orioles' blog Dempsey's Army. (Note to self: If I ever do a strictly Red Sox blog, it seems the key to success is naming it after a good but non-Hall of Fame pitcher. Tim Wakefield, Mike Boddicker and Bill Lee seem like good candidates.) When it comes to the Red Sox, Off The Monster is a nice balance between passionate fan and logic.

4) I know absolutely nothing about which you write, and I'm interested in expanding my knowledge. This is a much more random group, although there are big segments - fashion and being a housewife - within this group. Generally, I'm following all of the blogs in this group because I saw them leave a funny or interesting comment on a blog from one of the above sections. While I personally might not have much knowledge of school psychologist issues or the newest fashions or housewife stuff, it's interesting to me because the writing is solid.

The defriending cartoon is from here. The "know nothing" picture is from here.

Who's on first? What's on second? Queued up material.

So, you have no doubt noticed the abundance of television reviews on the blog lately. This shouldn't be an irregularity – I've been substitute teaching more lately, which in turn gives me more time to write about the television, movies, radio and podcasts I've been enjoying lately.

However, as a result, I have quite the backlog of shows and episodes I need to get to. Since I'm always so sweet and receptive to my audience, feel free to advocate and pontificate on any of these shows in the meantime, since they are in my “to cover” or “will cover” list:

The Ricky Gervais Show
LOST
Community
The Office
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
The Soup
Loveline
Parks and Recreation
The Marriage Ref
Parenthood
Archer
Aqua Teen Hunger Force

The picture of Lauren Graham (who is looking super foxy) is from this site. The queue is from this site.

Revealing more stuff, and blog stuff.

So, I've joined another Internet fad. If you ever had the burning desire to ask me a private question, then you can do so on my Formspring account, accessible here. Thanks to Maggie and Kerri D. and others for getting accounts, which spurred me into getting my own.

Feel free to ask me just about anything - It doesn't mean that I'll answer it. I'm still getting troll comments from time to time, so while I'd like to take off the comment moderation, that moves isn't forthcoming. Sorry folks. I will say that I have accepted just about every comment that I've gotten in the past couple weeks, so if you didn't see yours posted for some reason, feel free to e-mail me about it - sgre6768@gmail.com. I'm guessing it might have gotten eaten by a spam filter, or something.

The lolcat picture comes from the awesome i can has cheeseburger?

Ack.

I had posts queued for last night and today, but Blogger isn't showing up with them right now, so I have no idea where they want or why they haven't posted. Sorry, I'm been teh fail with it the past couple days! As penance, I'll try to double up on entries for Tuesday and Wednesday. Sorry about that folks!

Image is from this site, which has a sweet YouTube compilation of the various cartoon commercial bumpers.

What Steve Reads: Brick Sexplode and Carly Googles

If any of you have ever spotted my blog roll, and I'm guessing you have because it is conveniently displayed on my profile and the right-hand side of the blog, you might have noticed that I follow a lot of them. As of this writing, this number has swollen to 85, with varying degrees of publishing frequency between them.

The purpose of this series of entries - What Steve Reads - is to shine the spotlight on the various crap I read. Obviously. I'll do two per segment, once a week or two weeks, depending on lots of different factors, such as the airspeed velocity of unladen swallows. Typically, the blogs will have something in common, such as the one I'm doing tonight. On to the actual blogs I read...

- Brick Sexplode. Well, actually, the name of the blog is Bricks Explode, but whenever I glance at the name, I think it is Brick Sexplode or Brick Sex Plode, so I am calling it that instead. Sorry.

The author of the blog is Josh, and I quite enjoy his writing, such as a list of things nobody in your office will ever want to hear about. I also have no idea what he looks like, so I hope he's cool with my using a picture of the fetching and vexing Katie White from The Ting Tings instead. (Sorry again Josh.)

However, to get sentimental for a second, when I was first starting this blog, Josh's was one that I randomly read a lot of the back entries for. To get very specific, I absolutely adored his listing the Mighty Ducks from The Mighty Ducks 2 as one of The Top Ten Selfish Sports Teams Since 1980. One, because they totally are, and two, because it was the sort of plucky pop culture analysis that I was hoping to do myself.

- Carly Googles. So, one of Josh's latest entries noted that Carly Googles had used him as a source for an entry. Intrigued, I checked out her blog, and immediately started following it. I mean, how else am I going to find out what the origin of the word seersucker is, how big the moon is, how close the characters in Archer and Frisky Dingo sync up, and other wonderful random information?

I suppose some of you are saying, "Well, you could just look up the information on Google yourself." To which I say... no. You go look it up. And Carly does in fact look it up for me! Listen, sometimes I don't know that I need to know what a cashew tree looks like. Carly does, and she shares it with me.

The Katie White photo is from here. Carly's photo is from her blog. And the picture at the top is from here, and solely used because I thought it was silly.

On growing a beard and more later

So, this isn't tonight's actual entry. But, I did want to put a placeholder in to say that it would be on karma and statistics, as ambiguous as that sounds.

The title of this entry refers to my beard right now, which is getting to ridiculous thickness, at least for my taste. We're talking about "Jack Shepard in Lost levels", which is cooler than it sounds, since I otherwise do not look like Jack Shepard. (Still, I must admit a certain pang of admiration for supporting similar muttonchops. However, I do zealously shave my mustache still; that is the only part that comes in blonde, as opposed to reddish, and I think it looks stupid.)

I'm not sure why I haven't shaved - I'm guessing laziness, since, although I don't like feeling it on my face, it does take a good 10 to 20 minutes to do a good shave with my electric, and I just keep on putting it off. Also, I feel like this particular beard has grown in fast. The last timed I shaved was two, maybe three weeks ago, and I already have it all grown in. I look a bit like a young Santa Claus, except not nearly girth-y enough. (Maybe next year, ladies.)

The photo of Jack comes from this newspaper / blog.

Scheduling and News - Sunday, September 13, 2009

An example of the Adult Swim schedule. Click here for full-size.

Here is a tentative schedule for the blog in the coming weeks, since I've always liked when Adult Swim posts their schedules on a bump:

- Sunday: Miscellaneous fun
- Monday: iTunes running diary
- Tuesday: A wrap column about how the weekend football picks went
- Wednesday: Miscellaneous fun
- Thursday: NFL picks on early weeks / miscellaneous fun
- Friday: NFL picks on normal weeks
- Saturday morning: Kristin's football picks on normal NFL weeks
- Saturday night: Storytime with Amanda Meyer

With this current schedule, there are three regular features (iTunes running diary, NFL picks and Storytime) and a smattering of other content every week. I will continue to sprinkle in my other semi-regular features, such as Inexplicable Movie Reviews and At The Commercials, instead of giving them their own specific day.

And speaking of a regular feature, let's do one I haven't done in a while - The news!

- Click here for a really good article from The National Post about how the Mexican government is having a big problem cracking down on the drug trade. It reminds me of some of the better work that you'd see in The Wall Street Journal; I think journalism needs more international reporting like this.

Along similar lines, in terms of the war on drugs, The Guardian also had a nice piece in an August issue about cocaine bars in South America, and Bolivia in particular. While I think the article is a bit soft on the abuse aspect and danger of the drug until the end, the enterprise nature of the report is still surprising and interesting throughout. And although the content is a lot different, the enterprise reporting going on in Afghanistan is just as impressive, according to American Journalism Review.

- In stripper news that is actually realistic and not super-sleazy or funny, a Vancouver paper did a really good piece on how strippers and prostitutes are still using Craigslist to setup jobs. The reporter sets up meetings with several of the escorts, and although he compensates some for their time, which is normally a journalistic no-no, the results seem to be worth the overlay. Informative and interesting read.

- In stripper news that is bizarre and surreal, although not what you'd think, a Connecticut man was arrested for dumping paint stripper all over his wife's car, which he then draped with her wedding dress and bouquet. The only thing surprising about this story is that it happened in New England, and not Germany or Florida.

- And in stripper news that is completely what you think, a guy is trying to use pictures of a stripper on a police car near a police deputy to blackmail the deputy from testifying against him in court. Whew; that's a mouthful.

Blogging about tweeting

[Left] Not about her.

I got a Twitter account a couple months ago, although it was primarily to promote this blog; I had no real desire to post 140 character updates about my life. Yet, this minimalist format has indeed snagged me a bit, as I've done 552 updates - tweets, as the kids call them - in the past four months or so. (I wish it was easier to look-up when I joined, but I can't find that button right now.)

Because you are so limited in terms of length, it forces you to be brief and to the point. It is kind of the opposite of blogging, where I just ramble for 800 words and then post a silly picture.

The oddest thing to me is how easy it is to add other people. There are things like a Major League Baseball feed that I'll normally add a person or two from each day, along with The Match Game's Charles Nelson Reilly, which is maintained by friends of the late comedian. (By the way, future idea for a posting - Best game shows of all-time, since The Match Game is on it.)

I also wonder what the semi-professional bloggers and writers and journalists think when they see my updates to my high school and Internet friends. I'm sure they are very interested in my comments to my friend about how I did an article about our mutual friend and my former roommate about him competing in some lifeguard games. The guys from Gamezebo probably get a real kick out of it, and think to themselves, "This is so utterly relevant!"

Professional and personal updating

So, updating at 4:30 p.m. everyday isn't working out so well. Not because I'm having problems writing or keeping up with that pace, but because the audience has clearly fallen off. It seems more people read when I posted later in the evening, so from now on, entries will drop at 7 p.m. daily.

... Yet ironically, sorry for the shortness of this entry, but I've been busy the past two days and I haven't had much time to write, excluding for work. Monday I played in an all-day beach volleyball tournament that had an opening round of nine games. My team went 4-5; I'd rate myself as average in all aspects of the game, without any real strengths, so I was happy (in retrospect) with that finish. I'm not so happy with the severe sunburn that is covering most of my hands and feet. Today at the driving range didn't help, since it was more than 90 degrees out most of the day.

On the plus side, I did manage to get out to Ninigret Park for a 30-minute basketball and jogging session. I've decided to start monitoring my weight daily, and trying to exercise at least once per day, even if I can only manage a 15 to 30 minute run. I've lost some weight since two weeks ago, but I'm trying to make a more dedicated effort to do so.

Masterpiece Book Theatre

[Left] My favorite book of all-time, The Phantom Tollbooth, and by the way, you can bet your sweet ass that I'm upset it didn't make this list. What gives, BBC??? No wonder you're a broadcasting company.

So, my friend Danielle tagged me in this survey the other day on Facebook, and because I couldn't answer it right away, I thought I'd do it here on the blog. I added comments where appropriate. Since Saturdays are normally slow days for hits anyway, I didn't think anyone would mind. Here we go!

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - x
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - x

Total: 5. The Lord of the Rings is really, really dry, and I wish people would just admit that the movies are better, as opposed to insisting that others read 1,500 pages of sluggish material about Elven words. I find Jane Eyre and 1984 just as sluggish and bad, but Mockingbird and Great Expectations are great and good respectively.

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total so far: 8. I read Tess, but it was for some research paper in high school, and barely remember doing it. Catch 22 took me three attempts for no discernible reason; I loved it. And The Hobbit is Tolkien's actual great work, since it is accessible by just about any person or age grouping.

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total so far: 12. I share Hunter Thompson's opinion that The Great Gatsby is the best-written novel ever. It doesn't mean that it is my favorite book, but in terms of tone and skill of writing, I think it is what I grade out as the best. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the quintessential "wacky" book that everyone should read. Alice in Wonderland is overhyped a little; the movie is better. And Grapes of Wrath is important, but a bit dry and depressing to re-read.

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - x
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total so far: 14. The CS Lewis books are a lot more accessible than Lord of the Rings, too. Oddly, I didn't have any sort of religious backing as a kid, so all of the symbolism and ideology inserted by Lewis went over my head. Also oddly, I haven't seen any of the movies.

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total so far: 17. I had to read 1984 when I was in high school, but now, they make the kids read Animal Farm. I wish I had had that assigned to me instead, because I think it's easier to read and its political symbolism is better. I hated Lord of the Flies in ninth grade, but I had to re-read it in college, at which point I found it a lot better. I read Far From The Madding Crowd at the same time I did Tess, and I can't say I remember it any better. Given its title, I imagine that is the one about the harsh, silly judgments of society.

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total so far: 18. Brave New World was yet another book I had to read for school. I think between high school and college, I had to read it four times; ugh. The first half of the book is great, with the explanation of how the society worked, but the last couple chapters I just wasn't into at all.

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total so far: 20. Yeah, I've read Bridget Jones's Diary. So what, big whoop, you wanna fight about it? I thought it was a decent, breezy book, but I definitely wouldn't put it on the same scale as the others on this list. Speaking of, Count of Monte Cristo is a great, compelling story.

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante - x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total so far: 21. In ninth grade, I thought the concept of the book sounded neat, since it's about Hell and what not. Actually reading it was Hell. har har!

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total so far: 23. Charlotte's Web is a classic, and I think I read it for class in fourth grade; it was the first chapter book we did. I've read various Sherlock Holmes tales, inspired by my childhood love of Encyclopedia Brown, and I liked them all.

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -x

Total: 27. Le Petit Prince! Our final project in high school French V was reading that book and translating it to English, I believe. It was a sweet little story. Likewise, although Les Miserables has a completely different tone, I did check out an English version after we covered it extensively in French class. I've head Hamlet a half dozen times for various classes, but I still enjoy it. And Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, while a solid book, is better as a movie with Gene Wilder. The book's sequel is one of the first novels I actually owned, so it has a special place in my heart, even if I did find the vermicious knids scary at the time.

I think this list does underrate how much I read - My primary interest is non-fiction, so a lot of great non-fiction books, like All The President's Men, Moneyball and Outliers aren't even eligible. Boooo again, BBC!

Steve Greenwell, narcissist, and the blog business

So, Dr. Drew has a personality test that you can take online that assesses how narcissistic you are in various areas. If you're interested in taking it, you can click here, and find out your own score. The higher the number, the more narcissistic you are, although Drew does stress that this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If you want to have some fun with it, I can try to guess your score before you post it. My score probably isn't that surprising – I've taken the test twice and gotten a 21 and a 25, putting me well-above the “average” score of 15. The maximum is 40. I write a blog that is basically just me pontificating on various subjects, and think that other people enjoy it, which takes a certain amount of narcissism to believe.

And because the post the other day on the scheduling of this blog got such a great response, I've decided that from now on all scheduled posts will drop at roughly 4 p.m. EST every day. As long as issues don't pop up, there should be a new post at that time every day. This does not apply to “news” posts, although I don't do as many of them now, and any sort of “spur of the moment” post.

Scheduling

So, what time would people prefer to see this blog updated? I recently found out that I can schedule posts for public consumption at certain times, which is great in terms of helping me get organized. For example, I'm currently typing this on Saturday morning, and I already have the iTunes post queued up to go Sunday morning.

I realize that my readership might prefer seeing posts at a certain time. They're currently set to post at 9 a.m. EST, I believe. (It might be PST; I haven't been home to personally monitor it.) This is really early, so there is something for people there to start their workday with, or to distract themselves from work with. I also like getting the comments in my e-mail while I'm at work, so that I can properly ponder a good response.

However, I don't mind queuing them up for a later time, if people would prefer that. I know #1 commenter and former Tag Team participant Danielle Membrino normally comments at night, so 5 p.m. or 8 p.m. EST can also be accomplished.

How say you?

p.s. Also on the plus side, I finally found a place at the driving range where there is wireless internet available. So, I can update the blog and Twitter from time to time here, which is nice.

Summer vacation

[Left] The definitive summer vacation movie.

So, unannounced, I decided to take a few weeks off from the blog. This was partly because of my new job, which sucked up a lot more time then I would realize, and also as a way for me to just recharge my own brain and what not. It didn't hurt that a couple people I'm doing tag team blogs with took a while to respond, and that my #1 commenter went on vacation for a week, meaning that there wasn't a ton of outside pressure on me to write entries.

But. I'm back into the swing of things now! A couple of random notes:

1) I won't be including as many links and images on my posts. Sadly, some posts take far longer for me to format with various fun things than they do to type. It doesn't help that the computers I use – a desktop from 2002 and a laptop from 2005 – are really showing their age at this point. Right after I manage to move out, buying a new computer, even if it's using credit, is on my list. Maybe even before I move out.

2) Another way I can tell that this new job is sucking up a lot of my free time is by monitoring my weight. At one point I was at 200 pounds, ugh. That's not really acceptable for me, since I'm 5'9” and don't lift weights for a living, and my high school weight was around 160. For the past week, I've been trying to exercise at least once a day, and that has kept it in check for the time being, and I'm back down to around 190ish. Still, it's something I'm going to have to monitor. I'm not crazy about the idea of turning into Kevin James or George Costanza.

3) I've kind of stayed off Twitter during this hiatus, but I imagine I'll be back on it regularly now that I'm blogging again. To give people a bit of a peek behind the curtain, a surprising amount of my traffic is directly referred from Twitter, which has a different set of friends on it then here.

4) Speaking of hits, I should mention that I have officially made money off of this blog - $0.98. Woohoo! AdSense tells me that it is in my account, but I don't think I'll have them cut a check for me just yet...