Month: December 2007

Best Music of 2007

I’m not a music blogger, but in the spirit of all the year-end lists that are popping up on proper music blogs, I thought I’d make my own. My criteria were simple. The disc had to come out sometime in 2007, and I had to actually care enough to buy it. I don’t buy that much music anymore, so my list of potential picks was mercifully small. Ranking was difficult, but I decided that if something was pleasantly surprising, it ranked higher than something that was just dependably good. So, here, without any real commentary, are my top 10 from 2007.

  1. Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
  2. Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
  3. Okkervil River – The Stage Names
  4. The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
  5. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova – Music from the film “Once”
  6. Apples In Stereo – New Magnetic Wonder
  7. Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
  8. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
  9. St. Vincent – Marry Me
  10. Interpol – Our Love to Admire

Outside the top ten:

  • The New Pornographers – Challengers
  • The Shins – Wincing the Night Away
  • Radiohead – In Rainbows
  • Stars – In Our Bedroom After the War
  • Peter Bjorn and John – Writer’s Block

Other great albums that I just haven’t got around to buying yet:

  • The National – Boxer
  • Beirut – The Flying Club Cup

How about you? What were some of your favourites?

Who Wants To Go Camping This Summer?

I have got to spend a few days here, in lovely Grantsburg, Wisconsin. Who’s up for a JamesMcNallyFest?

I found this, by the way, through the very cool, though slightly creepy Spock.com, which had already built a profile page for me before I ever visited the site. I joked on Twitter that that’s probably exactly why it’s called Spock.com.

Thank God For Evolution

I just read an interesting article on Wired News. Former evangelical minister Michael Dowd is now touring the United States in a van with an image of the Jesus and Darwin fishes kissing on its side.

Dowd is a proponent of evolutionary theology, which embraces the science of evolution while maintaining faith in God as the “ultimate reality” behind the process. The article refers to the work of Thomas Berry, whom I am eager to check out. The wikipedia article refers to him as following in the footsteps of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a fascinating thinker who was proposing this sort of understanding back when evolutionary theory was only a few decades old.

I’m sure I’ll be driven back to these thinkers after I finish reading the free PDF download of Dowd’s latest book, entitled Thank God for Evolution. I get the impression this guy likes to shake people up.

Iran: Deja Vu All Over Again

So President Bush remains adamant that Iran is a threat? Even after his own intelligence services have told him otherwise? Why am I not surprised? I’m reading Frank Rich’s book The Greatest Story Ever Sold right now, and it’s all sounding very familiar. I just hope that the presidential election campaign can steamroll any “ambitions” that Dubya has for adding to his collection of wars.