2006 Best and Worst!

I like year-end lists, so here's mine.

Worst

Worst actress about whose life direction to care: Katie Holmes. I held out hope there for longer than was even vaguely reasonable, grasping at the breakup rumors and conspiracy theories like so many promises to train the Iraqi police, but it was all in vain.

Worst Media Trend: YouTube. I realize I'm in a tiny, cave-dwelling minority here, but when I'm reading a blog entry discussing how, say, Clay Aiken put his hand over Kelly Ripa's mouth and then Rosie O'Donnell called Kelly homophobic, I don't wanna have to watch a dozen (OK, one) YouTube videos to see what happened. Those things are MINUTES long! Since when does the MTV generation attention span accommodate that? I want SCREEN CLIPS, people! (Plus, the sound tends to blow one's cover at work.)

Worst fashion trend: Obvs, no underpants. Britney, whatev, but Linds, you're breaking my heart.

Worst speech trend: Unnecessary shortening of words. This one is even more pernicious than the vortex that was "izzle," because it actually saves time and thus could accidentally become perm. Anent.

Worst Presidential Candidate Launch: It pains me to say this, being from Iowa and all, but Governor Vilsack's appearance on The Daily Show. His takeaway line: We're creating a "culture of dependency" in Iraq. Are we giving them excessively generous welfare benefits? And shouldn't you be criticizing, oh, say, the President whose deeply unpopular policies you are presumably running against rather than the victims of his geopolitical folly?

Worst switcheroo in Blogland: Above the Law replaces Underneath Their Robes. Probably AtL is more lucrative and David Lat doesn't have time to do both, but wahhhhh. Where UtR was so snarky and bitchy that I was able to nearly ignore its raging Federalist Society undertones, Above the Law has a fairly boring, lawyery voice and is all about how big the bonuses are going to be at various big firms. Bring back Article III Groupie!

Worst movie: X-Men 3. OK, possibly not the absolute worst--I didn't see Lady in the Water--but the most disappointing. It didn't even know what its overarching metaphor was: is the cure for mutation the Holocaust, abortion, or the ex-gay movement? Because, nooooot the same things. Also, SPOILER ALERT the ending is a blatant rip-off of the Buffy-has-to-kill-Angel-even-though-she-loves-him-in-order-to-save-the-world thing, except not touching and with a thick overlay of misogyny.



Best

Best Top 10 Lists of 2006: Best Week Ever's lists o' Movie Cliches, Reasons to Hate Singing and Dancing, and, most of all, Celebrity Body Parts. 100% awesome.
Best movie: The Departed. This surprises me, because Cops, Gangsters, Boston, and Father Issues are not normally my movie topics of choice, but it approached The Godfather (Part 1) levels of greatness. I haven't been as impressed with Leonardo DiCaprio since he was a child, and Matt Damon convinced me he's really an actor. Also, Martin Sheen just broke my heart. Also, Marky Mark. Mmmmmm.

Best sign for the future of mankind: The election. :) :) :) :)

Best new (to me) blog: ApartmentTherapy. It inspires me to want to paint! wallpaper! un-clutter! entertain! Not to say that I have actually done any of those things, but hope springs eternal, and looks very attractive in the meantime.

Now I will cop a tactic from Scrubs, and swerve disjointedly into Very Sincere Mode. Cue the strings.

Best personal development: Getting married! Awwww. Not that I've become a big booster for heterosexual hegemony! But it was just unparalleledly great to have so many of our friends and family all in the same place being happy for us. So, thanks, guys. :) Also, married life is pretty much the same as living in sin life, which is as I had hoped, EXCEPT! It seems to have turned our BoyKitty into . . . a lapcat! At first when Mr. T&A advanced the hypothesis that BoyKitty felt more secure knowing he was in a stable home, I told him he was batshit crazy. But. The cat who previously spent most of his time skulking, sneaking, lurking, and glowering has, since October, become an actual cuddler. Of course I know that correlation is not the same as causation, thank you very much. But. He sits in your lap! Awwwww.

Reminder: Bill Frist Kills Kittens

As former Senate Majority Leader Frist puts Congress back on the shelf, looks around to see if anybody noticed what he did to it, and slowly backs away, I think it's important that we take the time to remember who Bill Frist was before he became a heart surgeon and presidential hopeful.

A kitten murderer! I am not exaggerating in any fashion. As you can read in his 1989 book Transplant (discussed in this Wikpedia entry, and here, and here), when he was in medical school Frist did research using cats. OK, yuck, but that's what scientists do, and I can get behind science. However, when Frist ran out of his supply of lab cats, he visited multiple animal shelters near Boston, told them he wanted to adopt cats as pets, and then killed the cats as part of his experiments.

Again: he told the animal shelter he was going to adopt the cats as pets, and then took them to his lab and cut their hearts out. I've adopted a cat from an animal shelter, and it's a fairly involved process; you have to fill out a bunch of forms, provide proof that your landlord has given you permission to have the cat, promise that you're going to get it fixed when it's old enough, and discuss how much you're going to feed it and what kind of cat litter you're going to use. It's not just a Madonna-goes-to-Africa drive-by adoption situation. Frist did this multiple times.

He later apologized for his little Jack the Ripper phase, saying he'd been "a little crazy." Which is really nice, and all. In closing, I leave you with this thought:

Please be OK, Sen. Johnson, but if not . . .

These guys said it best: South Dakota Governor Rounds, don't be a dick.

Derek Jeter, Man of Mystery

I understand baseball about as much as I understand gay Republicans, but usually I can spot me a hottie. However, the supposed allure of Derek Jeter alludes me. First of all, what I do know about sports is what my mama taught me: the Yankees are evil. (Please don't kill me, Amy Blair.) Also, and I realize the contradiction here, but I often confuse Jeter with that supposedly gay guy from the Mets with the terrible facial hair.

But apparently a number of people disagree with my assessment. Word on the street is Jeter's dating Jessica Biel, who according to some is the Sexiest Woman Alive. (I don't think I'd go that far, but I'd give her Top Two Hottest Jessicas, and Hottest Former Seventh Heaven cast member, for sure.)


Jessica isn't Derek's first brush with massive hotness, either. According to this, he's also dated Mariah "Crazy But Hot" Carey, Lara "Miss Universe, Need I Say More" Dutta, Jordanna "C-List, But Yale-Educated" Brewster, Vanessa "My Appeal Is Also Somewhat Mysterious" Minnillo, Jessica "Yeooooowww" Alba, and Scarlett "Even Younger And Bigger-Lipped Than You Might Think" Johansson.

My explanation: groupthink. Jeter is the Bay of Pigs and the WMDs in Iraq all rolled up in one pudgy, oval-headed package, and these women are a bunch of scared foreign policy advisors working with doctored intelligence. Somebody get an outside expert in here, stat!

DC's Seamy Underbelly and My Close Encounter Therewith

Wonkette has been running an awesome series Last Week's Shots about this "closed social networking site" called Late Night Shots. Late Night Shots is a kind of exclusive MySpace for the boat-shoes-wearing, Confederate-bikini-flashing, foreigner-hating crowd. It holds happy hours at establishments like Smith's Point, in Georgetown (which you may remember as the site of some of Jenna Bush's underage drinking antics) and also hosts a message board on which members discuss such matters as . . . well, I really couldn't do it justice. Courtesy of LNS via Wonkette:

Lying about Greek affiliationPosted By: very concerned on 10-19-2006 11:20 At age 29 if you’re dating a chick, how big of a problem is it if you’re digging through her desk and you find out that she was lying about what sorority she was in. This happened to a friend of mine.

RE: change of pacePosted By: Anti on 10-20-2006 2:38 pm If I have said it once I have said it 1000 times. DO NOT EVER, EVER even go near Adams Morgan. That place is Ghetto.

RE: change of pacePosted By: Boat Shoes on 10-20-2006 2:49 pm Everytime I’m in Adams Morgan, I take on at least 3-4 Ethiopans. Skinny little bastards are feisty.

RE: what are acceptable handouts from parentsPosted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pmSomeone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.

Most Diverse Thanksgiving EverPosted By: PBP on 11-23-2006 10:07 pm Report as shockingly offensive Wow, that is all I have to say. This Thanksgiving goes down in the history books as the most diverse-liberal one ever. Let me describe the dinner table: First there was there was the Haitian ex-con and his white girlfriend from California, a gay Republican from Alabama, a Paki from GA, a crazy lib from MS and an idealistic Jew teacher/grad student from CO…lets just say that my flowing locks and pink Lacoste did not fit in. In between bizarre conversations about how much Bush sucks and bong hits, I learned more about the fucked up idealogy of left wing libs. It was rather amusing, but it being Thanksgiving and all, I was tolerant and had a good time. Luckily the copious amounts of wine I consumed made up for the twilight zone atmosphere. Whoever thought that a Haitian turkey could be so damn good…

In DC's defense, these people live in an entirely different city than I do. (Literally, they almost certainly live in Virginia.) I don't work with them, I don't hang out with them, I don't frequent the same restaurants, bars, or stores as they do, they don't ride my bus (they don't ride the bus at all, natch). Sometimes I probably see them on the street on my way to work, but what with the homogeneity of business casual clothing, one can never be sure.

But . . . this world is not entirely unfamiliar to me. Many moons ago, last century in fact, I moved to DC after college, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, knowing basically no-one, and without the ability to handle being alone. This unfortunate characteristic led to my ill-advised decision to agree to look for an apartment with a girl I had never met; let's call her Cassie. Cassie and I ended up living in Georgetown, which is basically an outdoor mall with historic architecture, no public transportation, and a history of racial exclusion. I later realized this was because Cassie did not like neighborhoods which contained non-white people (she called them "Browntown.")

As I said, I knew very few people in DC, and in my loneliness was prone to take desperate measures to socialize with other human beings. Thus, on several occasions I went out with Cassie and her friend Crystal, whom Cassie had met because they had been in the same sorority. Crystal was an interesting character, if you viewed her as a kind of performance-art piece; she had a penchant for telling elaborate lies about herself (she was a gymnast, a spy, an escaped mental patient, etc.) and for removing her top in public. She later became a Redskins cheerleader.

Going Out with these people resembled normal going out in exactly the same way that The Real World: Season 3759 resembles the real world. Rather than sitting down, ordering a drink, and talking to the people with whom you had come to the bar, as sane persons would, in this post-apocalyptic version of Going Out the girls would stand near the bar alone, coerce a strange man to buy them drinks, listen to said stranger talk about his Job On The Hill, which might more accurately be described as an unpaid stint as a receptionist for the junior Congressman from Idaho, and then ditch the stranger, generally after giving him an inaccurate version of their phone number.

My pronouns are vague because even now it is difficult for me to believe that this was my life for maybe two months. Apart from the amusement of some of Crystal's more fanciful stories and top-removal escapades, the only redeeming thing about this portion of my life is the eternal gratitude I experience when I read Last Week's Shots and thank the fates for sparing me from it. So, a late Thanksgiving shout-out to you, Wonkette, for reminding me of my good fortune.