Top Five It's A Magical World! Series

Today, in honor of our 300th post, we recognize the top five series of thematically-related posts here on the blog.

1. Westward Ho! (August 2006)
Normally, my idea of a trip to find some foreign city or three, spend about six days there, and run around trying to see as much as possible. Well, back in August 2006, I broke all those rules. Instead of a foreign country, I stayed in the USA. Instead of a city, I focused on national parks. Instead of six days, I spent thirteen. And instead of running around trying to see as much as possible, my best buddy and I went driving around trying to see (and hike) as much as possible. Needing some outlet to share the glory that is the Western United States, I made a series of posts describing the trip. Sadly, successive incarnations of Yahoo! Photos destroyed the hyperlinks I had set up between my narrative and the pictures I took, but hopefully, my words can still do at least some justice to the wonders of nature in the Mountain Time Zone.

2. New 7 Wonders (May-July 2007)
When I heard that Swiss adventurer Bernhard Weber had the ambitious goal of naming a new list of seven wonders for the third millennium, I couldn't let him just go ahead without sharing my opinion. Of course, instead of just naming my choices from his pre-prepared list, I launched a full-on assault on his list, critiquing his choices and then projecting what should be included had the criteria changed. It ended up being a rather involved survey of global engineering projects.

3. Playing The Spread (Sep 2006-Feb 2007 and Sep 2007-present)
Playing The Spread was a column I wrote for the Brown Daily Herald during the four years I was an undergraduate student. It was inspired by a similar syndicated column written by Norman Chad. Instead of focusing solely on humor, my column mixed humor with serious analysis while providing a brief commentary section in addition to the individual game selections. After graduating, Playing The Spread was retired, since I no longer had a print outlet for it, but this blog gave me just the medium I needed to bring it back. I love picking games against the Vegas line (for fun), and in years past, I tracked my picks even though I had no outlet to publish them. However, immortalizing them in print makes me take things just a bit more seriously, even though nothing more than bragging rights are at stake.

4. 50 State Quarters (April and December 2007)
This series has elicited several "what's this stupid quarter thing you're doing?" comment. While I've been informally collecting these quarters since their inception, and while I've given thought to what makes a good design, it never previously occurred to me that I could evaluate the quarter designs in comparison with one another. I also wanted some sort of quantitative rating system, so a scale of zero to 25 cents was a stroke of genius that just occurred to me. The final post in the series will be made by December, once the U.S. Mint releases the designs for the last set of five states. (Possible designs have leaked out, but I am awaiting official confirmation from the Mint before evaluating them.)

5. Trivia (ongoing)
Unlike the other entries on this list, the series of trivia posts lacks any sort of coherent plan. I just throw a trivia question (or a set of them) online when a good one occurs to me. My love of trivia dates back to my high school days when I was a member of the Academic Bowl team. The format of our competitions largely foreclosed my favorite type of question: the multi-part question where you either need to deduce subsequent answers from previous answers or figure out which items from a list will answer the question. Now, I'm able to think up my own brainteasers and try them on people.

Honorable Mention: Retrospective Posts (ongoing)
Whenever It's A Magical World! reaches a certain milestone, be it in years or numbers of posts,
we like to celebrate it and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. One of the ways in which we do so is through a retrospective post, which is usually a top five list pointing out some of the best work we've created here. These posts tend to include an honorable mention that takes self-referentiality to a whole new level.