Top Five Top Five Lists

So I'm cheating by combining multiple posts into single line items group by subject. Big deal. I make the rules here anyway!

1. Top Five Reasons Why Yellowstone Is Amazing (August 16, 2006)
This post was the zenith of It's A Magical World's project chronicling my grandiose tour of the Western United States this past summer. As I said in the post, Yellowstone is the 800-pound gorilla of national parks with multiple diverse reasons to visit, any one of which alone would justify a trip. Since it was the centerpiece of the trip, it deserved a bit of special recognition, which I gave it through a Top Five list. (Since I originally published the post, Yahoo! Photos overhauled its interface, thus destroying the hyperlinks to my photos. You can still find them if you're willing to hunt around a bit.

2a. Top Five Most Difficult Types Of Reality Show Challenges (July 23, 2006)
2b. Top Five Reality Show Dismissal Lines (July 25, 2006)
2c. Top Five Reality Show Contestants (August 1, 2006)
2d. Top Five Cruel Reality Show Twists (February 3, 2007)
I love reality television. I love to brag about how much I know about reality television. And I love how it takes a total reality television geek to sort, compare, and contrast different challenges, contestants, twists, and dismissal lines across reality television shows. Why the heck am I so proud about it?

3. Top Five Airline Seats (December 24, 2006)
This post goes to show not only that I keep track of such minutiae in the first place but that I have a good enough command of the minutiae to rank them in a list. I love travel, and as a consequence, I spend a lot of time on airplanes. I can't understand how anybody who travels as much as me doesn't keep track of which seats they sit in, but then again, some people have more important things to think about.

4a. Top Five Objections To College Football Bowl Games (December 3, 2006)
4b. Top Five Worst Types Of Sponsored College Bowl Names (December 31, 2006)
In this pairing of Top Five lists, I injected a bit (okay, a lot) of cynicism into the regular happy-go-lucky posting where I share my feelings about how a bunch of different things in a category stack up against each other. While I remain largely critical about the hypocrisy of college athletics in general, my most intense vitriol is reserved for college football. I don't know what's worse -- the universities' shameless drooling over any dollar that might float their way or the laughable smokescreen they throw up, claiming that their number one concern is actually academics.

5a. Top Five Urban Panoramas (August 8, 2006)
5b. Top Five Foreign Natural Wonders (August 10, 2006)
This pair of posts, which were published in anticipation of my trip out West, recounted some of my past travel experiences. It was my goal to capture a little bit of the beauty I experienced abroad and communicate it to my readers. I have seen some truly other-worldly adventures in the course of my adventures, and while I know that the printed word or even photographs can hardly convey what I saw and felt, it's the best I can do with the tools I have.

Honorable Mention: Top Five It's A Magical World Posts (September 13, 2006)
What would one of these milestones be without a self-indulgent meta-reference? This list captured the best of the first hundred posts. My works have doubled in size since that time, but it's always great to look back at where we've come from and try to get a sense of where we might be heading.