Video Games, 2000-2009

January 22, 2010September 22, 2010 / Jared / 7 Comments

By no means am I a big gamer. There are probably great games from this decade that I’ve never even heard of, let alone played. And I know for a fact that there are great games out there that I haven’t played; I currently have a stack next to my TV of unopened games that includes the well-reviewed Left 4 Dead 2, Fallout 3, and Assassin’s Creed 2. I should also include the caveat that I’m not a big sports game person, or a huge first-person shooter fan, as evidenced by the fact that there is no Halo to be found here. But in the imperfect spirit of my lists, here are my 20 favorite video games of the decade (along with the year of release and the console on which I spent the most time playing them):

20) Crackdown (2007, Xbox 360)

This game seems like an afterthought, and sort of was. I’m guessing that it’s most remembered for being the game that came with an access code for the Halo 3 beta. But it’s a game that I find myself coming back to on Saturday afternoons when I’m bored and just feel like throwing cars and jumping over buildings. Great arcade-y fun, and the orb collecting is completely addictive.

19) Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 (2009, Xbox 360)

I guess, according to this list, this is my favorite first-person shooter of the decade. The levels in this game are much more varied than most shooters; it sort of reminds me of my favorite FPS of last decade, GoldenEye 007. That’s also the reason that I picked this over the original Modern Warfare. Even though I don’t really play video games online (probably the main draw of this title), I didn’t mind that the single player story was pretty short. There are so many great games coming out lately that I don’t have time for all of these 30-hour epics.

18) Wii Sports (2006, Wii)

I don’t really play the Wii that often. Most people that own them seem to stop using them after a while. But when I do revisit the system, this is what I want to play. And everyone who plays this game for the first time wants to go buy a Wii. The most brilliant system and game bundling since the NES and Super Mario Brothers.

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The Golden Globes, 2010

January 18, 2010January 17, 2011 / Jared / 4 Comments

Ah, The Golden Globes, a time for dressing up and drinking single malt Scotch.

Johanna and I were on a big delay for the event, due to other activities, and also due to the fact that we wanted to be able to fast-forward through all of the commercials. Just as we were sitting down to start it I got a text from my friend Mike that, while ruining one of the winners for me, gave me the idea of (not really live) live-blogging the event. So thanks, Mike! Here are my thoughts, along with exciting updates about my winner-picking competition with Johanna (all times listed are Eastern Time Zone, and not when I actually watched it; not only did we start it late, I had to pause it every ten minutes or so to try to find the mouse that we keep hearing in our kitchen).

8:00-8:04 – A nice open from Ricky Gervais. Even if I weren’t such a big fan of his I would applaud his selection as host. He’s exactly what these things need, someone who has no interests to protect and no problem poking fun. His jokes seem to be hitting with the audience, but it’s almost like it’s canned laughter or something, because the wide shots of the big stars up front aren’t revealing too many smiles. Maybe the laughter is coming from the people in the back. Hollywood, as always, taking itself too seriously.

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Songs, 2000-2009

January 15, 2010May 10, 2010 / Jared / 8 Comments

I debated how to best represent the decade in music in list form. Eventually, I decided on songs over albums; it seemed more fitting in the era of iTunes.

This list shows that my musical tastes, like my politics, are pretty middle-of-the-road. I like the most mainstream and accessible indie rock and I’m a sucker for the occasional pop song.

I should also point out that I think this might be longer than anything I wrote in college. It’s entirely possible that the length of this will make it completely unreadable. But whatever, brevity has never been my strong suit. Here they are, my 150 favorite songs of the decade (music videos when I was able to easily find one that I liked that allowed embedding):

150) Cannibal Ox – “Iron Galaxy” (2001)

This album has such a singular sound that it’s weird hearing Vast Aire rapping over any other production. I think that’s why I could never really get into Look Mom…No Hands. The Vast Aire verse at the end of this song is sort of the end of the golden age of underground hip hop for me, a topic that will definitely be more thoroughly discussed if I ever do a list of my favorite songs of the 90s.

149) Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – “Johnny Appleseed” (2001)

The best part of John from Cincinnati. Almost makes me want to check out the rest of Joe Strummer’s post-Clash career.

148) Air – “Universal Traveller” (2004)

The only song from Talkie Walkie that holds up for me. Really the only Air song that I listen to on a regular basis. Pops up on the occasional Rick Steves podcast, so that’s a plus.

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Extremely helpful online reviews

January 9, 2010May 10, 2010 / Jared / Leave a comment

One of my favorite things about online shopping is the reviews. It’s nice to have other consumers like myself share their experiences with a product that I’m thinking of purchasing. It’s also fun to read reviews written by people that have very little conception of how the internet works, are confused about how a product is supposed to be used, or just have a funny way of talking that doesn’t translate well to writing. I thought I would share these as I come across them. Keep in mind that some of them might not be funny to anyone but me; I’ve found that to be the case with a lot of things in life.

Here’s one I found tonight while looking for a coat rack from Target:

3 stars

Color was too dark – NOT cherry December 6, 2009 Reviewer: GatorGirl (Kansas City)

The rack is sturdy and I like the design, but the color was not cherry. It was much darker. Almost black. Fortunately, it is usually covered with coats.

Was this review helpful to you?

Why yes, it was helpful by making me laugh. There is really nothing wrong with GatorGirl’s review. It actually would be good to know that the wood color was not as advertised if you really want all your woods to match. The last line just cracked me up for some reason.

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Books, 2000-2009

January 8, 2010September 19, 2010 / Jared / 3 Comments

This list is sort of paradoxical, in that I don’t feel at all qualified to write it, considering how many great books I haven’t read this decade. At the same time, I feel extremely passionate about my choices near the top here, even more so than in my other lists. Here it is, completely subjective, and knowingly ignorant, the list of my thirty favorite books of the decade (as a side note, I’m still unsure about the legality of taking photos from other places on the internet for these entries, so I’ve elaborately staged my copies of these books for photos; this was fun for me, because I got to think about how to stage them, and fun for Johanna, because she got to laugh at me every time she walked into a room and caught me staging a photo of a book):

30) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)

I expected to like this book more. It seemed to have everything I usually love in novels, and received overwhelmingly great reviews. I ended up feeling a little bit disappointed; it didn’t totally click with me. It reminds me a bit of Everything is Illuminated: a relatively unknown author, interwoven storylines with different settings and time-periods, a main character with an unorthodox way of speaking, an underwhelming movie adaptation (the Oscar Wao movie isn’t out yet, so I’m just guessing). There are actually almost certainly other books that I enjoyed more than this one from this decade, but like the next entry, the list would have felt odd if I had excluded it. It sits on my bookshelf next to Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem in the “Disappointing books about comic book nerds that I should probably give a second chance” section.

29) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)

Obviously this doesn’t make the list on merit alone. The writing is pretty excruciating at times; I remember being particularly taken aback by the part where Langdon is teaching some inmates about the Mona Lisa:

“I heard he was a fag,” said a small man with a goatee.

Langdon winced. “Historians don’t generally put it quite that way, but yes, Da Vinci, was a homosexual.”

“Is that why he was into that whole feminine thing?”

Actually, Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female. He believed that a human soul could not be enlightened unless it had both male and female elements.”

“You mean like chicks with dicks?” someone called.

This elicited a hearty round of laughs. Langdon considered offering an etymological sidebar about the word hermaphrodite and its ties to Hermes and Aphrodite, but something told him it would be lost on this crowd.

“Hey, Mr. Langford,” a muscle-bound man said. “Is it true that the Mona Lisa is a picture of Da Vinci in drag? I heard that was true.”

[skipping down a bit…]

“You sure that’s not some Harvard bullshit way of saying Mona Lisa is one ugly chick.”

[a bit more…]

“Has anyone heard of an Egyptian god named Amon?”

“Hell yes!” the big guy said. “God of masculine fertility!”

Langdon was stunned.

“It says so on every box of Amon condoms.”

Yikes, Mr. Brown. As a reader, I’m insulted, and sort of offended. I love the fact that he goes out of his way to make the prisoners seems like the world’s biggest lummoxes, yet they’re still engaged enough in Langdon’s lecture to participate, and even seem to spend their time in the yard discussing whether the Mona Lisa is actually a drag self-portrait of Leonardo. I enjoy picturing someone checking this book out from the prison library and then shaking their head in disbelief as they read this chapter.

Anyway, the book is still here at number 29 because when I stop to think of the books from this decade that almost everyone I know is at least aware of, it’s basically this and Harry Potter. And that should count for something. Plus, it’s fast-paced, fun, and considerably better than most of its ilk.

The real Dan Brown mystery is why it took him so long to capitalize on this book’s success. He took six and a half years to release The Lost Symbol, which has, predictably, sold like hotcakes, but no one cares as far as I can tell.

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Movies, 2000-2009

January 2, 2010April 27, 2010 / Jared / 4 Comments

This list was much harder for me than my television list. Even more than before, this is definitely a list of my favorite movies of the decade, not the best. There are movies not on this list that I know are qualitatively better than some of the ones on it. This line of reasoning affects the order of the list as well. The only real objective sacrifice I made was in leaving Kingdom of Heaven off. I love that movie. It was the first movie I bought on Blu-ray. But I couldn’t bring myself to list it here. I was also hindered by the fact that there are a lot of movies, some of them likely outstanding, that I just never got around to seeing. So really, this list is flawed, but it’s the only list I’m qualified to write. Here goes, my 25 favorite movies of the past decade:

25) Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Those of you who read my television list will probably not be shocked to find this on my movie list; I’ve been a big Jason Segel fan since the Nick Andopolis days. I also liked Mila Kunis in this, which is surprising, since she annoys me in pretty much everything else she does. And while I’m concerned that the upcoming spin-off movie Get Him to the Greek will end up being a disappointment, I love Russell Brand as Aldous Snow. He’s perfect as a narcissistic and selfish rock star who turns out to be both charming and mostly warm-hearted. Which I guess shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering that seems to be pretty much who he is in real life.

24) 9/11 (2002)

I love documentaries that, through luck, fate, or circumstance, end up becoming far more interesting than the filmmaker probably initially imagined. Would anyone remember The War Room if Clinton hadn’t ended up winning the election? One of the movies listed in the honorable mentions below, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, morphs from a movie about the making of a record and the inner workings of a band into a movie about the failures of the record industry when Reprise rejects Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Probably the best example of this, though, is 9/11 by Jules and Gedeon Naudet, who set out to make a documentary about the life of a rookie firefighter on the FDNY, and end up right in the middle of the defining event of the past ten years. The movie features one of the few existing shots of the first plane hitting Tower 1, and contains fascinating footage of firefighters attempting to coordinate rescue efforts from inside the lobby of the WTC. Johanna and I seem to get on a kick of watching things about September 11th every three years or so, and when we do, this is the first place we turn.

23) 24 Hour Party People (2002)

I don’t know how I heard about this movie. I don’t know what motivated me to buy it on DVD. I hadn’t even heard of half of the bands depicted in it when I first watched it. It just seemed to appear on my DVD shelf one day, and then quietly, over repeat viewings, become one of my favorite movies. It’s a fast-paced depiction of the music scene in Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s, and it might have been somewhat forgettable if not for the great performance of Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson. Like pretty much everything in this movie other than Joy Division and New Order, I hadn’t heard of either Coogan or Wilson before watching it, but I quickly became fans of both.

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Television, 2000-2009

December 28, 2009April 28, 2010 / Jared / 4 Comments

This has been a great decade for television, so much so that the list of my favorite shows of the decade pretty much doubles as the list of my favorite shows of all time. Other than Seinfeld and the nineties-era Simpsons, I’m struggling to think of a pre-2000 show that would make the cut. It’s amazing how far television has come as a medium over the past ten years. Anyway, here they are, not the best, necessarily, but my favorite shows, 2000-2009 (clips when available and appropriate):

30) Sealab 2021 (Adult Swim, 2000-2005)

A bizarre show for a bizarre decade.

(I couldn’t get the embed code from Adult Swim to work for my favorite clip for some reason, so here’s the link. If I can figure it out, I’ll fix it.)

29) Extras (HBO, 2005-2007)

It’s not The Office, obviously, and parts of the series finale were painfully earnest. But Ricky Gervais (on television, at least) is always worth my time, and about half of the guest stars were hilarious.

28) The “House” Series (Frontier, Colonial, etc.) (PBS, 2000-2006)

It’s almost always entertaining to watch the types of people who sign up for reality television on PBS. For instance, Michelle Rossi-Vorhees, of Colonial House, is simultaneously attempting to recreate the life of a female pioneer in 1628 while staying true to her 21^st-century ideas about feminism and atheism. In doing so, she basically undoes the premise of the show, but it makes for great drama, and the PBS veneer allows viewers to pretend that it’s not just a higher-class Wife Swap. Very sad that there hasn’t been a new installment since 2006.

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