Year End List 2009

Top 10 things we could have done without:

1. Orly Taitz and the Birthers
2. Teabaggers and their stupid parties
3. The Balloon Boy saga
4. Lady Gaga
5. Kanye West
6. The Snugee
7. Glen Beck
8. Jersey Shore (the “reality” series)
9. Adam Lambert
10. Governor Jodi Rell

Top 5 things I learned this year

Greek yogurt rules! That’s it. I didn’t learn much of anything this year except maybe that when you think things can’t get any worse, they can. However, that’s not so much a lesson as it is a fact that I don’t like to ponder with too much vim.

Books:
Franklin’s Autobiography – Benjamin Franklin
The Major plays of Anton Checkov
Lake Wobegon, Summer 1959- Garrison Keillor
The Return to Depression Economics – Paul Krugman
Mine Enemy Grows Older – Alexander King
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Flash of Lightening Behind the Mountain (New Poems) – Charles Bukowski

Music:
Wilco the Album - Wilco
Sea Sew – Lisa Hannigan
No Line on the Horizon – U2
Draw the Line – David Gray
Electric Arguments – Paul McCartney

2008 Year End Wrap Up...

Top 10 Things We Could Have Done Without

1. Sarah Palin
2. Joe the Plumber
3. PUMAs
4. The writers’ strike
5. The new iPhone
6. $4 a gallon gas
7. Tom Brokaw hosting Meet the Press
8. Sex and the City (the movie)
9. Windows Vista
10. Black Friday and all the morons who participated

Top 5 things I learned this year
1. Depression and grief are not the same, though both totally suck.
2. Couples therapy is silly.
3. The Hotel Chelsea is the most disgusting lodging this side of Calcutta.
4. No matter how hard I try I just don’t like Feist.
5. Absinthe is everything it’s cracked up to be and sometimes more.

Music Pics
1. Back to Black – Amy Winehouse
2. Frank – Amy Winehouse
3. Collected – Massive Attack
4. Unbreakable: A Retrospective – The Afghan Whigs
5. Oh My Nola – Harry Connick, Jr.

Books
1. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity – David Lynch
2. The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby
3. Free Thinkers: A History of American Secularism – Susan Jacoby
4. Acting In Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making – Michael Caine
5. The Great Derangement – Matt Taibbi
6. Obsessive Branding Disorder – Lucas Conley
7. A Mencken Chrestomathy – H.L. Mencken
8. Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom – Dr. Christiane Northru
9. Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers – Thich Nhat Hanh
10. The Federalist Papers – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

2007 Year End Wrap Up

Top 10 things everyone could have done without

1. Restless Leg Syndrome
2. Brittany, Paris and Anna Nicole
3. Simulated drowning (Waterboarding sounds like too much fun)
4. Presidential Debates
5. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
6. Dancing With the Stars
7. iPhone
8. H-3
9. Feist
10. The Simpsons Movie

Top 5 things I learned this year

1. organic cranberry juice does exist
2. the more electricity I waste, the lower my bill
3. Beck is a Scientologist
4. 38 is the new 38
5. you can’t find a good therapist in December

Music pics

1. Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
2. Steve Earle – Washington Square Serenade
3. Lyle Lovett & His Large Band – It’s Not Big, It’s Large
4. Garden State soundtrack
5. Steve Earle – I Feel Alright

Books (I read a lot this year – here are my favorites)

1. The Complete Gertrude Stein
2. Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti
3. Smells Like Dead Elephants – Dispatches from a Rotting Empire (Matt Taibbi)
4. Generation of Swine (Hunter S. Thompson)
5. The Complete Dorothy Parker
6. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac
7. Creating A Character – A Physical Approach to Acting (Moni Yakim)
8. West of Rome (John Fante)
9. I Am America and So Can You (Stephen Colbert)
10. Nobodies (John Bowe)