The Great Gatsby Book Cover [borrowed from Google images]

Top 10 Best Lists in Literature

I have measured out my life with lists. Every single day I make a list of the tasks I need to accomplish. You’ll never find me leaving for the grocery store without a list. Growing up, those sweeping VH1 lists that spread over hours and hours would beckon me—the top 100 artists of all time, the 50 most awesomely bad songs ever. Only ten artists were covered each hour, so that means they had me for entire summer afternoons.

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Jacob Fisher: The 911 Listener

May 3, 2013
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The name Jacob Fisher used to make me think of a crunchy fish taco that tends to consume the spiciest hot sauce from a Mexican grocery store. However, when I made time to get to know this super-senior in the past five years, his wonderful character and intellect exceeded my taco analogy. Thus explains this article’s title—Jacob Fisher is always a listening ear to his friends when they express themselves, and always replies to his friends with a text saying, “Okay. Smoke time?”

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Shelli Cammenga’s Top Photos of 2013

April 19, 2013
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Picking the top ten photos of the past four years is a momentous task for a photographer who is overly attached to her work. With over 109, 250 pictures from over the past few years is daunting. Then one must add into consideration the wide range of criteria for what “top ten” may mean–composition, personal attachment, the best representatives of said years, etc. After sifting through the archives on the terabyte external hard drive that I had to buy to store them because my computer literally ran out of memory (it would no longer let me create word documents), I have settled on the following ten.

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Senior Profile: Interview with Carissa Knol

April 5, 2013
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This week, Sam Bice sat down with senior Carissa Knol to get to know more about her life and interests.

Bice: Over spring break I saw pictures of your family farm and it looked pretty awesome. Can you tell me about it and what it was like growing up there?

Knol: Well, by Alberta standards we’re not considered a farm. It’s only a hundred acres so we’re really not that cool. I remember when I was a little kid, we always had goats, and it was my chore to milk the goats every morning and every night. That was fun. We had cows, sheep, and horses. But my horse died last year. We have lots of other horses though and we used to have chickens, pigs, peacocks, dogs, and cats. And I learned to drive when I was like twelve in a little Ford Rangers stick shift in the back of the field.

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Top Pasadena Coffee Shops

April 5, 2013
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As a kid I always wondered why my parents and their friends drank that hot dark drink every single morning without fail. I had tried it a few times and remembered it to be one of the worst tastes that had ever entered my mouth. I never would have guessed that I would become a huge fan of such a drink. College came and I began to love coffee and I am now a fan of the art and science behind the drink. Here is a list of my top four coffee shops in the Pasadena area.

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Social Media Fast: Think Before Facebook

April 5, 2013
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For lent I decided to take a break from social networking. I have never observed lent before, but after realizing that I had become too attached to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, I decided lent would be a good time to learn some discipline.

It started at Jones Coffee in South Pasadena. I was there with the Creative writing club, reading poetry and talking about our childhoods. This led to a discussion on social media and how much we have changed since it was invented.

As college students who grew up in the 90s or earlier, we experienced the rise of the internet as we grew up, so many of us didn’t get Myspace or Facebook until we were in high school or college. When we were children, we spent our free time much differently than we do now. Over that Jones coffee table, we reminisced about how we used to write plays and perform them with our siblings, make dolls out of paper, or turn our backyards into imaginary battle zones.

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Most Thought-Provoking TV Shows of 2012

March 8, 2013
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I watch quite a bit of television. My tastes are apparently pretty varied, as I discovered when I wrote up this list, ranging from fantasy to history, science fiction to drama, and mystery to horror. I’m not going to go into detail about what makes a television show a good television show, but I will say this—a good show isn’t just entertaining; it makes you think. It makes you think about life, about death, about God, philosophy, religion, good and evil, etc. Good television makes you ponder and mull things over when the hour-long episode is over. The following is a list of my Top Twelve Entertaining and Thought-Provoking Television Shows of 2012.

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Naruto: Sacrificial Love in Anime

March 8, 2013
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These are the words of Japanese anime character Yashamaru, Gaara’s caregiver, in the show Naruto: Shippuden, episode 297. The conversation reflects one of Naruto’s main themes—the only cure to wounds of the heart is sacrificial love from someone else. I recently talked with Providence alumna Kim Postma discussing our favorite anime shows, and Naruto was mentioned as usual. Postma shared that “many people think (and I say this, because I was one of them) that there is little by which to recommend anime and/or manga, which are similar to American comic books. [People think that] Those who read and/or watch [anime] are immature nerds with too much time on their hands.” However, Kim’s perspective changed when she watched an anime show and discovered its surprising and pleasing aspects.

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Bryan Punter: From Parties to Frankenstein

March 8, 2013
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Bryan Jan Punter loves a well written sentence. He loves books, well written books, like Moby Dick and Frankenstein. But before he fell in love with books—and his wife Deb—Bryan loved partying. Punter grew up in Allendale, Michigan, where his parents own a turkey farm. He remembers going out as a young boy and working for a nickel an hour. Punter has two siblings by birth, and three more that his family took in as foreign exchange students. They are not officially adopted or even fostered by the Punters, but Bryan speaks affectionately of them, especially, of Vaan Huynh (senior at Providence).

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WASC: What it Really Does for Providence

March 1, 2013
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Last week, on Feb. 21, Dr. Dominic Aquila (President of Providence Christian College), and team-members Mrs. Dawn Dirksen, Dr. Russ Reeves, Mrs. Mary Ellen Godfrey, and Mr. Pete Nanninga, met with eight WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) commission members near San Francisco as one of the final steps toward Providence’s accreditation process. Dr. Aquila presented the President’s statement and the WASC commissioners asked questions of the five Providence representatives.

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