My five favorite songs of 2008, which may include music made and released in ‘07 but which I in my infinite out-of-touch-ness only became aware of this calendar year:
“Strange Overtones,” Brian Eno and David Byrne
“Me + Yr Daughter,” Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head (g0d, what an awful band name)
“Escape City Scrapers,” Mono in VCF (okay, I [...]

It’s profoundly shitty and tedious.  I shelled out $15 to see it in IMAX when the special effects are mediocre CGI and you barely see anything or anyone, in the sense that the destructive quotient contains no human scale nor much in the way of grandiose devastation.  War of the Worlds was much, much better, [...]

I haven’t tried booking a flight with jetpunk yet (it merely aggregates expedia, kayak, priceline, etc.) but at least their internet-1.0 style format contains fun quizzes.
I am really bad at naming sports teams, even after doing it several times.
Who knew that Arlington, TX was the 50th biggest city in the US?  And St. Louis, which [...]

The funniest thing I remember reading all year.
Also, “LEGGS” was a down clue in yesterday’s NYT crossword.  My ‘09 resolution is to have that retroactively refer to me.

I’m going to come in my pants, Nate Silver!
It’s the congressional districts of the US, colored by which party holds them (duh; obv).  If you read the post, he even has a cute little bit about how he tried to make it pretty and accurate and shit.
Secondly, the 2010 Census reapportionment that once looked bleak [...]

San Francisco etches the names of the streets into the sidewalks at intersections.  This is so blind, armless citizens who left their Birkenstocks somewhere can read where they were the moment before a car ran them down.
Near my house, there is this:

Which would be fine, except…

Oh well.  I actually like “Multrie” better, anyway.

Thomas L. Friedman’s column today is quite accurate.  Pleasantly so.  Unfortunately, the requisite Cliche/Mixed Metaphor is actually two cliches, which earned their own paragraph:
Have a nice day. It’s morning again — in Saudi Arabia.
But the rest is good.  The alignment of bad writing with a trenchant analysis of the need for a [...]

I mean, what?

It feels gratuitous even to comment on this.  So I will restrict myself to stupefied rhetorical questions.  Why is such a bad pun commercially viable?  Who screens these things?  How can anyone who’s not stupid be unemployed if this is what someone does for their job?  Why would anyone want to associate a [...]

First, the Democrats lost a seriously weird election yesterday in New Orleans.  Corrupt douchebag William Jefferson, who hid bribes in his freezer, lost to Joseph Cao, who will be the first Vietnamese American in Congress.  Pretty surprising, because the district has a PVI of D+36–making it more Democratic than any district in the whole country [...]