Thursday, April 05, 2007

Blogs and Happyness

I must tell my readers (however many of you there may be, anywhere from 3 to 30 but probably no more than that based on what I'd assume to be a completely artificial reader to commenter ratio of 1 out of every 10 people) about a few blogs that have been inspiring me lately. You'll find them all in my links to the right, but let me just sing their praises for a moment.

First of all, Matthew W's blog is always an interesting place for me to go explore the worlds of film, music, books and art that are beyond the usual fare but are potentially great discoveries of his that he has been kind enough to share. I have also been finding his blog at times thought-provoking, at times humourous, and at other times just curious. Always something there.

Secondly, I have to heartily recommend John Stackhouse. I've done this before, but I have come to highly respect this writer's thoughtful style and theological approach. His most recent post, which among other things defends his use of the word "wuss" in a challenge to the president of a Southern Baptist Seminary, is priceless.

Thirdly, my most recent discovery is that of Colin T (actually, he found me) , whose last few posts have raised my eyebrows not a few times. I hope he keeps it up, he's got some good writing skills, some great perspectives, and it would seem a lot of good stuff to say.

I should also mention the addition of Mike K's blog. It tends to be all over the place, which is one of the things I enjoy about (it besides its author). He is a long time friend and a real good guy, even though he is a Man U fan.

I am trying to keep my links down only to those (besides family blogs) that I visit regularly, so I recommend them all, but I did want to mention these in particular because they've been getting me thinking a lot lately.

On another topic, I also want to say how hard I found it to rate the movie The Pursuit of Happyness. On the one hand I found it inspiring to watch this character's persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I also enjoy Will Smith and thought he did pretty good. I liked the tone of the film-making and the feeling it gave me of the struggle of the life it portrayed. On the other hand, however, it was frustratingly capitalistic in its ideals, and it climaxed happiness in a way I found incredibly disappointing.



Maybe I read it wrong, I mean, I suppose it portrayed capitalism well and showed what it takes to actually make it in this society. But it seemed to say this was an inherently good thing, and that all anyone had to do was pull themselves up by their boot straps and they'd be okay. I'm not sure that is true.

Truthfully I'm not exactly sure what this movie was saying, but it gave the impression it was trying to say something of substance, and in my opinion it failed to deliver. Worth watching all the same.

4 comments:

Monson said...

Hey Jon,
Have you heard of Google Analytics? You might want to check it out. It'll give you all sorts of cool stats on readership of your blog. You'd be surprised to see all the random readers you have! http://www.google.com/analytics/

Tony Tanti said...

I was about to come on here and make the same recomendation monson has. I've been using Google Analytics for a few months now and you'll be surprised how many more people read your site than you think.

According to my blog's comment to reader ratio it's more like 1-50.

I've been to Matthew W.'s blog a few times too, good stuff there for sure.

Haven't seen Pursuit of Happyness yet, I will but something keeps me from it.

Jon Coutts said...

I suppose I should follow up on that. Although I might be happier in my ignorance thinking that no one is reading my crap!

At first I was going to attribute lofty readership stats to the randomness of spam-search-engines giving false hits, and I was going to site the example of monson's comment, saying, I don't know monson so it must be a search engine finding me in order to advertise.

but i looked at monson's picture and I know monson! hello monson! good to hear from you. what church are you interning at?

crazyness

Monson said...

Hey coutts! I was interning at a church in Egypt called Maadi Community Church. I finished that last June, though. I'm back at CBC (or whatever you wanna call it) finishing a few courses up. Now I guess I'm looking for a church to be a youth pastor at...

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