Wonderings and Wanderings

I rue the demise of Google Reader and its capacity for sharing. I miss my passionate, scholarly community with great taste and interesting attentions.

Lately, I've been finding things online and emailing them to friends, who sort of indulge me here and there by glancing at them. I didn't expect more than that with Google Reader, either, but Email isn't fitting for this sort of casual dissemination.

I thought I'd try something new, based on a blog I've been reading for a while. He does something called "The Weekly Town Crier" where he does sets of links of interesting internet things, and I enjoy them. He mostly posts on Fridays. I can't say how regular I'll be, but maybe if I consistently did this, it would lessen the inbox burden I can sometimes create for you.

Enjoy!

• Foo-Fighters frontman Dave Grohl  talks about a documentary that inspired his music career, while he's promoting an interesting one he made himself. I loved this quotation: "I honestly believe if you had more stuff, like music documentaries, or live performance shows, that people would be more involved and love music more. Because you can see that it’s people.” Yes. Music isn't must music. It's people.

• California-based mega-retailer Amoeba Music, the last big record store on the block, has moved into the digital age with both feet, with its inauguration of a revamped website. And possibly the most intriguing element of that site, and a direct reflection of Amoeba's dig-deeper philosophy, is the so-called Vinyl Vaults section -- thousands of rare and out-of-print LPs, 78s and 45s that flow through the company's three outlets in any given week -- now available for sale via download. READ THE REST here.

• Why Men Still Hate Going To Church - An article in Leadership Journal makes a few suggestions about what we need to do to make church more palatable to men. An excerpt that stuck out to me: "I get more pushback from men who are well-established in the church than I do from women. Women sense the need. Women see their husbands bored. They see their sons dropping out. They see their brothers irreligious. They sit on the pew with nine other women. They know the situation on the ground."

• An insane surfer sets the world record for tallest wave ever surfed. This was amazing.
  

• A famous article in the Atlantic about Introverts that mainly started the conversation about introverts and extroverts, and its follow-up piece about the dating life of introverts and extroverts. The woman in this TED talk about the Power of Introverts is less belligerent than the Atlantic guy is, but I'm really stuck on the subject of Introversion and Extroverts because of the bizarre chemistry of our leadership team. My friend Nathanael would dislike most of these because they work in stereotyping and don't really address the complexity of the relational and internal worlds of both introverts and extroverts.
  

• My friend Troy  thinks about Henry David  Thoreau and Facebook today: "Much of the time, when I look at Facebook (or Twitter, or Instagram, or whatever other social medium), I end up wondering what the point is. Did I learn anything? Did I add anything of value to my life? We live in a time when instant (or near-instant) communication is viewed as a great achievement, a time when almost everyone has the ability to say almost anything to almost anyone...I should say: I'm not a Luddite. But I am worried about something that I think Thoreau points to here, to our inventions being "pretty toys" and "improved means to an unimproved end," and I think we'd all be better served by a serious consideration of the ends, than by a fascination with the newest means."

• The Clocks at Grand Central Station Are Permanently Wrong, And they're that way on purpose. I loved this. But my clocks are also all wrong.
  
  
  
  
• A new band I found, The Lone Bellow, covers a tune by John Prine, another folky new favorite. This is a good introduction to them both. The Lone Bellow covers John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery".  --There are some tight harmonies and a good percussive guitar style that make re really excited for what 2013 holds for these guys. They are trying what Delta Rae was going for, only they do it better. You may also really like their track "The Two Sides of Lonely". HERE is the review of their album in PASTE magazine.
  

• This list is hilarious. It has Marvin Gaye, the Beatles, Dave Matthews.. Some of these are really spot-on. Sort of a Rorschach Ink-blot test for music nerds. What Your Favorite Record as a Kid Says About You Now

•  Avant-garde musician Beck Hansen recently produced a new “album,” Song Reader, that was not released in stores or via mp3 files. Instead, he released the score and asked his fans and other musicians to upload their interpretations of the score for others to hear. The tagline on the website says, “Only you can bring Beck Hansen’s Song Reader to life.”  THIS author thinks all this is somewhat of a metaphor for what God did for us with the scriptures. Thoughts?