a couple months ago, just after the recording academy announced their 54th annual grammy nominees, i blogged my predictions. those are set to air tonight and i thought just prior to the ceremony, i’d repost this to serve as a guide of just how wrong i’ll likely be.

here’s what i predicted in december.

yesterday, barack obama’s campaign released a 27-song spotify playlist that serves as the “official” playlist of the president’s bid for re-election. you can see the track list here or you can actually access it via spotify by clicking here.

why am i blogging about penn jillette? moreover than that, why am i blogging about penn jillette again?

if, over the last couple days, you were to take a peek at the theological social media circles i run in, you’d be hard-pressed to miss the stunning story that matthew paul turner shared on his blog. delivered in 2 parts (part 1 and part 2), he shared the story of a guy named andrew who, until recently, was a member of mark driscoll’s mars hill church in seattle. you can read turner’s posts to get the full story, but in essence, this guy became subject to church discipline for confessing to sleeping with his fiancée and for having an inappropriate (platonic) relationship with another girl.

over the last couple weeks, as jeff bethke’s video (above), ‘why i hate religion, but love jesus’, was hitting critical mass on the web, i began writing a post about it. that post quickly made its way to my ‘drafts’ folder (which only has 5 posts all-time). it wasn’t that it was particularly controversial or incomplete, it was just that i felt like the support & the criticism across the internet was overstated and largely unhelpful. the web really didn’t need one more blog post.

but.

we’ve spent the better part of the last 12 months watching the dog and pony show that is known as the republican primary season. this entire process has been, to say the least, entertaining to behold. this is quite the crop of candidates. i mean that in the so-painful-to-watch-yet-so-awesome sense of the word.

i’ll reserve much political commentary in this post. quite frankly, i have plenty of opinions of the republican field, but regardless of who wins the nominee, i’ll be voting for barack obama. and i really think you should also.

2011 was a good year for music. not necessarily a great year, but certainly a good year for music. it featured quite a few surprises and new discoveries and also had its fair share of albums that were highly anticipated. personally, i haven’t anticipated albums as much as i did elbow’s build a rocket boys and kanye/jay-z’s watch the throne (among others) in quite some time.

much the same as last year, there’s a handful of albums that i expect to be great albums. and while it’s always dangerous to inflate expectations to non-attainable levels, i’ve narrowed down a list of nearly 50 albums to 12 that i am eagerly anticipating this year.

i’ve broken down the list into 2 categories: confirmed (or as close to confirmed as possible) and i’m-not-holding-my-breath-but-this-rumor-is-worth-believing. first, the confirmed albums: