Stupidfool.org

My favorite search query of 2010.

In past years (2008, 2005), I've listed my favorite search queries of the year that've led visitors to this blog of mine. In 2010, I have only one, but I need only one, because I'm that proud of it.

And here it is: now tayne I can get into!

#1. Thank you, world.

Favorites of 2010.

I didn't do this last year, and I kind of regret it; it's funny how easy it is to forget what was on your mind in a given year, if you don't write it down (2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003).

Music

For the first time that I can remember, I relaxed my arbitrary rule of one song per artist. Because it's my list, and that rule was stupid! Another stupid rule? Not bothering to order the songs. That rule? Abolished!

Here's a pretty picture:

And here's an eleven-song-strong list, where songs link to something appropriate, if possible:

1. Robyn, "Dancing On My Own"
2. The-Dream, "Yamaha"
3. Kanye West, "Runaway feat. Pusha-T"
4. Sleigh Bells, "Infinity Guitars"
5. Fat Joe, "(Ha Ha) Slow Down feat. Young Jeezy"
6. Big Boi, "Shutterbugg"
7. Robyn, "Call Your Girlfriend"
8. Mark Ronson & the Business Intl., "Somebody to Love Me"
9. Kanye West, "Power feat. Dwele"
10. Marnie Stern, "For Ash"
11. My Chemical Romance, "Na Na Na (Na Na Na...)"

Incidentally, Penelope's favorite song of 2010 (well, at least from the above list) is "Call Your Girlfriend", which she calls "I'm your girlfriend", and which we play, often.

And, a favorite album, despite the fact that none of the songs appear in the list above? The Roots, How I Got Over.

Reading

Last year, I started using goodreads to track all of the books I've read (I even imported the books I'd listed on Vox). And according to goodreads, I finished 25 books in 2010; I'll count that as 26, since I finished another on January 3, 2011.

My favorite of the year is easy: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. A gorgeous book; I want to read it again and again.

Food & Drink

And finally, cooking and, well, drinking. And that's easy: 2010 was the year of pizza! I made so many pizzas, all with the goal of getting better at making dough.

Everything I've ever read about kneading dough implies--or even explicitly states--that making dough is really easy. And it is! The problem is, the first time you make it, and maybe the second and third times, you've no idea what the dough should feel like, and so it's tough to know when it's ready. But once you've done it a couple of times, and have made a pizza (or bread) each time from that dough to see how it tastes--then, yes, it's easy.

My daughter (Penelope) is learning her letters. One of our favorite activities is to use the built-in say command in the OS X terminal: she types in a word, presses [return], and the computer speaks.

To make this easier, I wrote this tiny little script:

It's fun! And it's even more fun to use it to annoy the dog ("Maddy, go to your crate.").

a. partridge in paris.

I'm in the process of moving video content, from DVD to computer. Today was I'm Alan Partridge, and it got me thinking of Alan's sports casual line.

All of this makes me laugh (strolling pastel!), but I'll always love "cognoscens me (AHA) cognoscens te".

Rob Harvilla:

The answer to your question, Maura, about my favorite time-travel moment of 2010, is "Yamaha," which I am tempted to just add outright to Purple Rain's tracklist, maybe right between "When Doves Cry" and "I Would Die 4 U."

It's just that good. The-Dream was incredible in 2010.

Sam said:

A tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

Ben pointed me at this one. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to override my defaults for screen timeouts, and now I can!

Everyone needs Caffeine. And they really do, because every time I see someone's screen sleep during a presentation, I think, "everyone needs Caffeine".

Quaid Rules.

Evi Quaid called from a pay phone in Vancouver to say that she and her husband, Randy, the actor, had tried to drive to Siberia, but they “couldn’t figure out how to get there.” She said, “We’re running for our lives.” She wanted me to meet them the next day in Vancouver’s Chinatown—which couldn’t be arranged any other way, as the Quaids don’t use cell phones anymore, because, Evi said, “they’re tracking us.”

via www.vanityfair.com

This Vanity Fair article about the mental state of Randy Quaid was profoundly sad.

I like Randy Quaid! My favorite Randy Quaid might still be the short-lived television show "Davis Rules", from 1991-2. It had an all-star cast over the course of its two-season run: Randy Quaid, Jonathan Winters, Patricia Clarkson (also in the best film of 2010), Bonnie Hunt, Giovanni Ribisi, & others. I liked it so much that I taped every episode and re-watched them many times.

Things used to be better for Randy Quaid.

Shudder to Think: "X-French Tee-Shirt"

Gravediggaz: "Diary of a Madman"

Kanye in Hawaii

Nicki Minaj on recording with Kanye West:

When I picked up my head from sleeping, he was looking at me in the strangest way I've ever been looked at by a human being. He pulled his shades down and he looked and said, 'Oh, she's sleeping?' I wanted to crawl under a rock and die.

The whole article is incredible (via Jason).

So far? I appreciate MBDTF quite a bit, and I love many of the tracks; but it's a lot of work as an album, frankly, though I think it'll likely grow on me over time, and that's what I'm counting on.