The First two-and-a-half Hours of 2009 - What you need to know

1) it is 2009 - this is important for reasons not worth going into here.
2) it is 8 degrees in the area where I am. Apparently when variables like wind and awfulness are factored in the outside world feels like -22 degrees. This is hard even to begin to understand, especially if you come from a time period or society that lacks the concept of negative numbers.
3) about 16,000 people worldwide have died since it became 2009 in the EST timezone.
4) I was wrong about a number of things in my predictive post regarding 2008. This included what the best movie of the year would be (I said Brothers Bloom which was pushed back until 2009 after first simply being delayed twice - shit, this year's best movie was, of course, Wall•E), the best video game (I guessed the most recent iteration of Smash Brothers when in fact it was Braid), and I was wrong about how I would abandon this blog - instead I just started that other one. What was I right about? I predicted we would elect a new president - check, and I was right about the best album.
5) That's about it

Here is 2008

Author's note: It has been a while since I spent any significant amount of time crafting a New Year's Blog Entry. Please enjoy this afternoon's endeavors.



A lot of the internet is busy listing things from 2007: best-of lists, most important this or that’s, lists of authors who died, etc. Stuff like this is all well and good, and merits existence inasmuch as it makes it easy for amnesiacs and the absent-minded to review what it is that's happened since last January 1st, but they do very little in the way of preparing us for the upcoming year, and it’s always been this website's job to present some things that are urgent, and some that are not. Well, the future is urgent, and the past is not.


In the interest of preparedness I will go ahead and give you the main important information of the upcoming calendar year.

Best Movie:
The Brothers Bloom

Why will this movie be the best movie of 2008? A lot of reasons. The first is that Rian Johnson directed it. If you’ve been paying any attention to living your life you’ve already seen his first movie and spent a lot of time figuring out how the hell he accomplished this. Furthermore, The Brothers Bloom has Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo and Nora Zehetner (who, you might be interested to know, won a grammy for Best Shoulders in 2006, 2007 and will again win in 2008). Also, it is about con men.

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Best Album:
The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

A year from now all the music blogs and the seemingly-informed will be collecting their best of 2008 album lists, and there’s a good chance that this album won’t show up on those lists; this is because most (though by no means all) people who run sites of the aforementioned types are the kind of mistake-makers who put the lackluster, the lousy, and the downright annoying on their best-of lists this year. Why will Heretic Pride actually be the best album of 2008? Because it’s fucking awesome, that’s why.

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Best Video Game:
Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii

This does not require an explanation. What’s more, I’m aware that, save for a few, the audience to whom I’m writing is not one that is particularly interested in video games. Those interested don’t need this choice explained to them, and those who aren’t don’t want to have to read about it.



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Other Things That Will Happen:

America Gets a New President (this doesn’t happen until November, but everyone seems pretty set on broadcasting every detail about the stuff that leads up to it starting last month. Some stuff has to happen before we even know who we’ll get to vote for, so don’t worry about it right now.)

NASA Sends Another Thing to the Moon or Whatever

California will have a natural disaster

I will get tired of doing this blog and abandon it

Now you know, plan accordingly. And you’re welcome.