The Listomania I make the lists, you shoot them down. Quid Pro Quo.

This is What Happens When You Take My Contests Seriously. Cake.

Sometimes, I get a little cocky. Shocking. I started working on the Top 151 a few months ago, in the summer. This kind of thing takes a long time, and I put a lot of man hours into that text document. The people around me (admirers, onlookers, gawkers and the like) started to take notice and get suspicious. And this is when one of my bouts of arrogance hit.

Shannon said she could guess most of the songs on my list. "This girl?" I thought. "She didn't know who Bob Dylan was when I first met her." I had hundreds of songs on the initial list, and I felt like the general public had heard well less than half, so I decided to make an ill-fated, bravado-induced wager.

She had until the week after Halloween to send me a list of her own 150 guesses. And if she got more than 50 right (how will she possibly get a full one-third of them, thought I), that's right, I'll buy her a cake. Her choice of cake.  All to herself, a la Kevin McAllister and his very own cheese pizza.   And so, over Thanksgiving, this happened:

thelistomania.cake

God Dammit. She got 75 right, half the list. Which seems fine in retrospect and gives me a good feel for the list as a whole.  I now know that half of the songs are immediately recognizable to a fairly astute music fan, and half the list is unknown or out of left-field or incorrect (Ha). But still, I had to buy a cake. My one caveat? I'm writing the name of my blog on the cake. And I'm posting a picture.

And yes, I have the icing-penmanship of a 2nd grader. Eat it.  More songs on the next chunk of the list coming soon.