The best blog posts of 2009

Here they are, collected by Church of Rationality. He categorizes them by length and by "low-brow"/"mid-brow"/"high-brow."

I am biased since one of my blog posts is on the list. Mine is "long, mid-brow."

The post of "random thoughts" is full of life observations that I can strongly relate to. I do this all the time:

Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.

This is the one observation from that post that stands out as being off the mark: 

I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.

I have the opposite experience. If I look for music to listen to by scrolling through my iPod library arranged by artist, I always feel disappointed with how little of it I actually want to listen to compared with how much work I've put into building up the library. But if I put it on shuffle, I instantly realize that it's full of great music. My theory is that I enjoy the process of actually creating my own library more than the goal of having all the music I want. This might be why setting the music on shuffle is more enjoyable than trying to answer the question, "What's the very best music I could listen to right now?" -- because the shuffle simulates the more unpredictable process of discovering music in the first place.