Here are three things I have entirely missed:

1) Harry Potter: This one I’m a bit embarrassed about, because I suspect if I read the Harry Potter books or watched the movies I’d enjoy them. But to date, I have not read a word in any of the books or seen a minute of any of the movies. I have entirely missed Harry Potter. I recognize some of the names and words associated with the series — Dumbledore, Muggles, Hermione — but I have no idea what they mean.

Thing is, the first Harry Potter book blew up when I was a senior in high school. At that time, I thought I was super awesome because I read books for leisure and not many people I knew my age did. When people started blabbing on and on about how great Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was, I assumed it was a book for people who don’t normally read books — whatever that meant — so I avoided it.

I stopped thinking like that sometime in college, but by then it seemed too late to just take up the series from the beginning. Now the last movie is the hottest ticket at the box office and I’m still out in the dark. Maybe at some point in like ten years I can start reading them, when it seems nostalgic and cool or something.

2) The Casey Anthony trial: So I went on vacation for a week, then came back to find my co-workers huddled around the TV awaiting a verdict in the Casey Anthony trial like she’s O.J. Simpson or something. Who is this lady? Is she famous? Who is Nancy Grace?

I’m not aiming to make light of the trial or the verdict. I just missed the whole buildup, so the subsequent outrage seemed really bizarre.

I will add that I learned afterward that they used Anthony’s Google searches as evidence in the trial, which is rather terrifying. I had no idea that was admissible. I hope I’m never framed for anything; I Google some messed-up stuff just out of morbid curiosity and following what auto-complete suggests.

3) Bill Simmons: Amid all the hoopla surrounding the launch of Grantland.com, I realized I had never read anything Bill Simmons had written. It was not a conscious decision. It so happens that I never worked in front of a computer in the years Simmons was first making his name on the Internet, I’m not a huge NBA guy and I have very little patience for Boston sports fans. Plus I’ve always read more in print than online and more fiction than sportswriting.

But now that I’ve come this far without having read any of his work, it seems like a neat trick to keep it up. So many of my friends and colleagues seem to, for whatever reason, have such unreasonably strong opinions about Grantland.com that my innate contrarian finds it best to maintain no opinion whatsoever.