The Ritualistic Year-End Top Whatever List

Like salmons swimming upstream to spawn, writers are compelled by powerful inchoate longings to make year-end lists of the Top Ten, or Top 100, or Top 17, Things That Sum Up The Year In Some Vague Silly Way. For this blog, I thought I'd do a nice self-referential "snake eating its tail" one -- and do a Top Ten list of the blog itself.

Here are the rules. I tallied up how many comments each blog posting gathered. I subtracted comments I made myself (it seemed like cheating somehow to include my own posts). So here are the blog posts that y'all thought were most chat-worthy -- followed by a brief list of the blog posts I thought would collect a zillion comments but didn't.

10. Tied for 10th place with 7 non-Greta comments each (thus actually making this a Top 12 list), we have:

The Aging Slut

But Maybe They Didn't Mean "Ha-Ha" Funny: Bravo's 100 Funniest Movies of All Time


Mutant Sci-fi Dahlias: The 2006 Christian Dior Paris Runway Show


Tied for 8th place, with 8 non-Greta comments each:
Grand Theft Auto: Jerusalem

Tag, You're It


#7, with 9 non-Greta comments:
North Korea, and Reason 8,624 that the War on Iraq was a Bad Idea


#6, with 10 non-Greta comments:
Going Wild: A Feminist's Defense of the "Girls Gone Wild" Girls


#5, with 13 non-Greta comments:
Transcendental Skepticism: My Letter to Mark Morford


#4, with 16 non-Greta comments:
Oh, The Believer and the Skeptic Should be Friends...


#3, with 18 non-Greta comments:
If You Believe in Bisexuals, Clap Your Hands: My Letter to Dan Savage


#2, with 19 non-Greta comments:
How Fred Flintstone Got Home, Got Wild, and Got a Stone Age Life -- what does it mean?


And the clear winner, the post that inspired the liveliest debate and conversation by a significant margin, with 23 comments not counting the 7 that I made myself...
#1 Why I Like "Harry Potter" Better than "Lord of the Rings"


My conclusion: Y'all like a good intelligent debate. You care about literature, sex, religion, politics, film, and deeply weird fashion.

But above all else, y'all are nerds.

And I love you all.

And now that I've buttered you up, I get to berate you for your shocking lack of interest in what seemed to be to be obviously compelling and controversial topics. I bring you the Top Three Posts On My Blog That I Really Thought Would Generate A Lot More Conversation Than They Did.

#3, with 3 comments:
Oral Arguments (A Dyke's Defense of Blowjobs)

Actually, I think I know what happened here. Laura D's comment was so thorough, and so articulate, and said so clearly what lots of people were thinking, that nobody felt they had anything to add.

#2, with 1 comment:
Domesticity and Degeneracy

This one surprised me. I really thought I'd hear more of all y'all's stories about how you balance your wild lives and your domestic lives. But maybe this wasn't as big a revelation to y'all as it was to me.

And my Number 1 Post That I Thought Would Generate More Conversation, with 1 -- count 'em, 1 -- comment:
Hurricane Katrina, and What Government Is For

What the hell is wrong with you people? Where are the anarchists, the libertarians, the "government is inherently evil and oppressive" folks? Where are the hard-assed realists to tell me that my vision of government is hopelessly idealistic and naive? Where are the political science majors to tell me what government really is? Shame on you.

But seriously, folks. I love you all, and I've loved every one of these conversations. You've made me clarify and re-think my ideas, and you've kept me wildly entertained. I hope you've enjoyed it a tenth as much as I have. Let's have as much fun in 2007!

Comments

[Bill Brent]

It was fun to read your lists. At the moment, I'm too full of writerly New Year's angst, or I'm sure I'd say something clever, witty, and provocative.
;-)

My personal favorite was your article on your "writer's process." I definitely need to re-read that one.

--Bill

[Jane Shaffer]

I think your Katrina post was so thorough that there was nothing else to say. We all just nodded our heads at our computer screens and said, "Yup, that's it."

[Laura Deal]

I agree about the Katrina thread, especially since it lends weight to your theory that I killed the blow job thread by being clear and articulate and not because my reply was so fucking long nobody could finish reading it and therfore never got around to writing their own comments.

Of course, the length of that last sentence tends to add weight to the second theory ;-)

[Seth]

I would hate to see your top 10 list show up on next year's top 10 list, so I'm not going to comment. Go that? No comment.