2009 in review

It's Dec. 31, which means I’m parked in front of my television starting my annual personal Twilight Zone marathon. Though I stole the idea from the SciFi channel, mine’s better because a) there aren’t any commercials and b) I have the full complement (the original series and the remake from the ‘80s).

But, as with whenever I watch movies, I need something else to do at the same time. Since my blog has lain dormant for more than a month, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to update with a summation of this year. However, seeing as how distracted I am (“ooh, pretty flickering black-and-white television!"), it’ll be largely composed of lists

Thoughts that have occurred to me only since I've lived in Idaho:

• "When that nice young man driving by as I was walking down the road yelled, 'I will set you on fire!' at me, was that a threat or a come-on?"

• "Hmm ... It's New Year's Eve, and my apartment faces both downtown and the outskirts. From which direction am I least likely to get hit with a stray celebratory bullet at midnight?"

My top entertainment products produced this year:

• Castle (TV show)

• The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell

• In The Loop (movie)

• God Is A Twelve-Year-Old Boy With Asperger's, by Eugene Mirman (standup)

• Zombieland (movie)

• The Unusuals (TV show)

• Star Trek (movie)

• My Weakness Is Strong, by Patton Oswalt (standup)

• The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

Things I miss about Pullman:

• A bus system that takes you everywhere in town, for free

• Bars populated by people that don't look ready to kill me for being younger than 40 and/or giving them unwelcoming looks when they loudly proclaim their bigotry

• The town being small enough to walk everywhere you could want to go

• New Garden

• The people

Job titles of four positions I applied for but didn't get:

• Anything with the word "newspaper" (a few small-paper editors, sports writing, etc.)

• Social networking director

• Text processor (for a bible software company, but I withdrew from that one fearing damnation)

• Editor, I Can Haz Cheezburger group

Discomfiting realizations from 2009:

• Remember how much we were looking forward to 2009? Look how that turned out. Now consider how optimistic people are about 2010. And how often do the expectations of optimistic people come true? We're in for a rough year.

• As our body of knowledge amasses in ever greater qualities, our ability to use the truly innovative kind of imagination decreases at a similar rate. In earlier times, people were able to conceive of interplanetary travel with relative ease. Now that we know how difficult and expensive such trips would be, we can walk into a movie like Avatar secure in the knowledge that, if such things are even in the realm of human possibility, they are so far off in the future as to be fictional.

• Much along the same lines, as interdisciplinary studies become the norm, the propensity of revolutionary new ideas appearing will decrease drastically. Great breakthroughs are usually found by people who have no knowledge of dogmatic "facts" (generally accepted principles that may not be the case) in a particular field. Obviously, most people who claim such things (think perpetual energy) are cranks. But Einstein was able to formulate his theory of relativity because he didn't know the rules of the system. Once everyone is grounded in precisely the same knowledge, the chances of a brilliant outsider to see something no one else did are greatly diminished.

Things I'm sad are no longer with us:

• The Post-Intelligencer

• A friend from high school

• Jon Updike

• B. Dalton stores

• The Rocky Mountain News

• Ted Kennedy; and with him, civility in the Senate

• Walter Cronkite

Things people thought might have disappeared I'm glad are still around:

• Ernie Harwell

• Web comics

• Used bookstores

• Sbarro's

• Borders

• Miramax

Things I wish would disappear:

• Athletes in the news for things other than athletics (Michael Phelps, Tiger Woods, etc.)

• The phrase "raising Cain"

• People being surprised when politicians act like politicians

• Archie comics

• Printed phone books

• TV news

Technical skills I have learned while on the job that weren't strictly necessary:

• How to use XSLT to style/translate XML files

• Working knowledge of ASP.NET

• Advanced Javascript magic

• Useful tricks for AfterEffects, Illustrator and Blender

Women I would gladly marry if only they would rescind the restraining orders:

• Tina Fey

• Sarah Vowell

• That one girl from high school

• Zooey Deschanel

The Six Most Recent Additions to My "To Read" List:

• Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger

• Gilligan's Wake, by Tom Carson

• Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Barton Gellman

• The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture, by Nathan Rabin

• Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, by Nevin Martell

• His Name is Still Mudd: The Case Against Doctor Samuel Mudd, by Edward Steers

Things I’ve learned from watching The Twilight Zone:

• Most alien planets/asteroids look like Death Valley

• Windows in the 1950s had the tensile strength of wax paper

• Time must have worked a helluva lot differently back then (direct quote: "Well, we can't see the movement of a clock's hands, but they move")

• In most alternate realities, Earth ceased to exist by the mid-80s.

• Military officers can be knocked out with a swift punch to the gut

• I'm 90% sure the father of Tim Matheson (Otter from Animal house) wrote for the show

• All scientists are required to possess a full complement of chemical-filled beakers. Even if you're a physicist with a time machine, next to it should lay a full spread of fancy tubes and Bunsen burners on a table.

• Turns out it was earth all along