Thursday, December 31, 2009

2009: What I said, and when I said it

Here is my yearly compilation of what I consider to be worthy stuff posted here over the last twelve months. Enjoy. Or not.

First, a couple of notes on various posting series from the year. I stalled a bit on Fixing the Prequels, about halfway through Attack of the Clones, but that series will continue quite soon. I also started a new "label" for posts that rely heavily on photographs to convey their content, called Photo Posts. Most of those will be individually linked below, but the label's there for those interested. Also, I went through and personally rated each of the fifty "Statehood Quarters". I also had a series of posts of photos of myself, responding to dramatic moments from Season 7 of 24, called, creatively enough, "Watching 24". While I watched the entire season, I didn't get through the entire season of posting reaction shots, mainly because the season really petered out in the back third of episodes. I'll still be watching the impending Season 8, though, mainly because of my massive new crush on Annie Wersching.

Speaking of photos, I posted a lot of stuff to Flickr this year; here's a mosaic of my favorites from the year (but I easily could have chosen more):

2009: a year of snow, festivals, gifts, trips, food, and overalls!

Click through for the "annotated" version, with links to the actual photos themselves.

Finally, there was Ask Me Anything! 2009. The 2010 version is coming up next month, yay!

January

Twenty Years of Shiny Discy Goodness
The "Five Questions Game" returns!
NFL 2008
Alas, Ricardo....
A moment long awaited
My mother-in-law passes
Flying: not a big fan
The Facebook "25 Things" meme that ate the world

February

Twenty Men I admire
Twenty women I admire
My favorite newspaper comic strip panel from 2009
On "comfort food"
The Proud Tower: an illustrative historical tale in this, the Era of the Constant Filibuster
Dollhouse, episode one (and I've never watched any of the subsequent episodes!)
The "Trilogy Meter"
Behold...the Philanthropist! (And yet, no one ever took up my call for an origin story....)
Commenting on a list of fantasy movies
A grim realization
On George RR Martin and productivity
The Wife's birthday
What's a pie in the face among friends?
Preparing to re-read all of Guy Gavriel Kay

March

Guy Gavriel Kay: where to start?
On Jack Bauer and "enhanced interrogations"
A quiz on faith
From the books: Robert and Clara Schumann
Chicken Wing Soup, version 1.0
I can't help noticing that all the would-be John Galts didn't go anywhere....
Thinking about Galactus
My Geek Life (a questionnaire)
From the books: Dungeon, Fire and Sword
The 11-in-1 screwdriver: The Excalibur of hand tools!
Chicken Wing Sour ver. 2.0
(The two Chicken Wing Soup posts are, by far, the most frequently-hit posts via search engine on this blog!)

April

My so-called High School Life (a quiz-thing)
My first foray into the wonderful world of power-tool injuries
Thoughts on the end of ER
An appreciation for Genesis's Invisible Touch
On being seat at bad tables in restaurants
The Teabaggers: seriousness in action!
A night at Panera Bread
A very odd passage from a very odd book

May

On the short Starfleet career of Lt. Saavik
Eight things (a quiz-thing)
Thirty Fantasy Movies (!)
On romances and teevee

June

Music and Children
Used Book Sales
A Book Quiz
Children and Music: more thoughts
International Talk Like Jayne Cobb Day!
Love and Hate (a quiz-thing)
First impressions of The Mentalist
People who annoy me when I'm driving
Twilight really sucks

July

On Steve McNair
Little Quinn's finer moments
Trains: I like 'em
A Taste of Buffalo
Remembering Walter Cronkite
Earlier versions of WD-40
From the books: Carl Sagan on the legacy of the Apollo missions
No hard feelings, JP Losman
The Annotated Stars and Stripes Forever
The coming of TRON 2.0

August

Best movie marquee EVER
Michael Vick returns
Taking an author's politics into account?
Favre: still an arse
On design and Star Wars
Reflecting on Magnum, PI
Further errors on design and Star Trek

September

A really yummy sandwich
In defense of the word "Moist"
Remembering Erich Kunzel
Colin Cowherd is a giant doodie-head
A brief detail from Star Trek IV
Previewing the 2009 football season
Finding things at the Library Book Sale
The darker side of sports fandom
On the liking of crap
Overalls: on the way back?
Ten Filmscores (a starting point)
Kicking the Patriots!

October

On the birth of my nephew Jaxon
On the passing of Gourmet Magazine
Ten Tools I use a lot
On "Nutraloaf"
Farewell, Soupy Sales!
Ten Captains
An Alphabetical quiz-thing
Thoughts on The Office

November

On the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street
Not watching the Bills anymore!
When the Berlin Wall fell
On Darth Belichick and fourth-down conversions
A pretty random quiz thing
Why the Bills continue to suck
On animated movies
My 50 movies from the Aughts
Things I'm thankful for
The "Dumbass Quiz"

December

Riding the Christmas Train
Sausage Baked Beans (a recipe)
Western New York in Winter
Pass the Bill!
A Walk in the Woods
An enormous Christmas quiz

Fiction from 2009

The Balance in the Blood, a serialized novelette
(posting began in 2008)
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Only Begotten Son
Partita for the End of the World

Book-specific Posts

Games of Command by Linnea Sinclair

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqualine Carey

Twilight sucks.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Rereading The Fionavar Tapestry

Bookhunter by Jason Shiga, The Arrival by Shaun Tan, the Flight anthologies

A few more thoughts on The Fionavar Tapestry

The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Tigana

The Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi; Moon of Three Rings, Andre Norton; Space Viking, H. Beam Piper

Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck, Christopher Moore

The Terror, Dan Simmons

The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers

A Song for Arbonne, Guy Gavriel Kay

The Player of Games, Iain Banks

The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch

Firefly in comics

Bone, Jeff Smith

The Zero Stone, Andre Norton; In Conquest Born, C.S. Friedman

Year of the Cock, by some guy (I hated this book a lot.)

Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Mark Richardson; The Ridiculous Race, by Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran; A Walk in the Woods and In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson

Pirate Curse by Kai Meyer; Starcross and Mothstorm by Philip Reeve; Westmark and The Kestrel by Lloyd Alexander

It, by Stephen King

Infrastructure, by Brian Hayes; The View from the Bridge, by Nicholas Meyer; Made from Scratch, by Jenna Woginrich

Water Baby by Ross Campbell; House, by Josh Simmons; Madame Xanadu, by Amy Reeder Hadley and Matt Wagner; Cairo, by G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker

The Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald; Pandora's Star, by Peter F. Hamilton

Last Words: a Memoir, by George Carlin; The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, by John Ortved; Across the Face of the World, by Russell Kirkpatrick

Film-specific Posts

Far From Heaven

Once

Charlie Wilson's War

Bull Durham

Atonement

Kingdom of Heaven

Random thoughts on Casablanca

The Indiana Jones films, with particular focus on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Cousins

Sabrina

Star Trek, first thoughts

Sunshine

Thoughts on The Godfather

Thank God It's Friday

The Abyss

Fame and Alien

The Black Hole

More thoughts on Star Trek

Elizabethtown

3:10 to Yuma

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

On Pixar's recent films: Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up

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