URLs du EOY Retrospectives

2007-12-29

It's coming up on the end of the year, which means a lot of Content that attempts to summarize the past 350+ days. (None of the retrospectators seem to want to wait until the year is actually over. I suppose that's understandable.)

Beware: the following links lean toward levity.

  • You'll certainly want to check out only year-end review that matters, from Mr. Dave Barry.
    It was a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history.

    It was year in which roughly 17,000 leading presidential contenders, plus of course Dennis Kucinich, held roughly 63,000 debates, during which they spewed out roughly 153 trillion words; and yet the only truly memorable phrase emitted in any political context was ``Don't tase me, Bro!''

    Also, I learned that if my name was "Alberto Gonzales" instead of "Paul Sand," I coulda named this blog "Gala Lobster Zone" instead of "Pun Salad."

  • But there are some retrospective sub-genres you might want to look at too. For those lacking the patience to wade through hours of online video to find the gems, Lore Sjöberg has done that for you in The Year in Online Video 2007.
    Where would we have been in 2007 without the power of online video? It made us laugh, it made us cry, and most importantly it made us laugh at crying people. Without it, we may very well have never known that prisoners in the Philippines like '80s pop, that prairie dogs look an awful lot like Alfred Hitchcock, and that somewhere out there an ottoman is seeking therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.

    Some might say we're better off not hearing Alanis Morissette croon about her lady lumps, not hearing a little girl swear like a drunken landlady, and not hearing Rick Astley songs in any context, ever. To them I say: Get your own year. This one belongs to online video.

  • When I was a mere lad, Cracked magazine was the unrespected runner-up to Mad. I don't know if the magazine still exists, but the Cracked website is pretty funny. They have a number of EOY look-backers, but the best is probably 2007: Seven Things We Should Pretend Never Happened.

Now a quick quiz: which event is mentioned at all these links? Hint: it contains both the words "tase" and "bro".