Morning, Sunshine!

It is a New Day, and all that perfunctory bullshit. As Occam pointed out to me last night, we no longer have to see those morons wearing 200X glasses on new years eve because next year it’ll be 2010. Huzzah!

Was it me or did the telecasts last night feature more product placement and in-camera advertisements than ever before? The fucking hideous nivea tophats. I’m sure they paid a shitload of money to NBC to keep cutting to shots of people wearing them. Sometime soon either I or an associate of ours is going to do a post on advertising and how not cool and sexy it is like they show on Mad Men.

mmhmm

Meh. Granted, it’s a New Day now and all, but I still feel the need to look back over 2008 and offer some worthless thoughts on it. I would have done some earlier, but Marco was on a roll. But still, who the fuck is Eartha Kitt? Also, maybe I’m a callous asshole — okay not maybe, I am — but I just don’t feel great sadness when very old people pass away. Sure, death sucks and all and we’ll miss those who’ve gone away, but if you reach 80, it’s kind of like, hey man, you had a good run, save us a window table in hell.

blah blah blah. My favorite word of the year was “contraflow.” What a fucking awesome word, should be used way more often.

“Meme,” on the other hand, was my least favorite. Thousands of naive little Obama supporters running around the internets “meme this” and “meme that.” Basically any time somebody wrote anything not laudatory of Mr. O, some twerp would pop up screaming about how this is the latest MSM meme dsfasd sgadg. Fuck em. And retire that fucking word.

My least favorite journalistic trend of 08 was every third headline being “XXsubjectXX set to XXverbXX.” This, along with the rise of over-covering press conferences, is indicative of the media’s new lazy standards. They don’t cover a story anymore, they just announce that something is going to happen sometime soon. We seriously don’t need to go live to the scene where Brett Favre’s plane is set to land. If you want a culprit for the slow death of print media, don’t look at the Internet, look at cable television and the fucking associated press.

My favorite news story of the year was this:

Man jumps from plane with no parachute, dies

Saturday, June 7, 2008
(06-07) 16:51 PDT Duanesburg, N.Y. (AP) –

A 29-year-old man leaped out of a plane at 10,000 feet with a camera but no parachute Saturday. His body was found next to a house with a damaged roof, police said.

Sloan Carafello of Schenectady, who was observing on the flight, followed an instructor, student and videographer out the door, wearing no skydiving gear, officials said.

Police said they did not suspect foul play but would not elaborate.

Robert Rawlins, pilot and owner of the Duanesburg Skydiving Club, said he was flying the single-engine plane and had begun to close the door when Carafello jumped.

His body was found next to a house west of Albany.

Never jump out of an airplane without a parachute or a gun. One of those two.

Sublime.

What to look for this year from Counterforce: I’d like to get us a real domain and maybe even migrate the page to our own design and depart from wordpress. Or maybe we’ll all get bored and stop posting. We’ll see.

Prince Caspian is the new Douchebag. From now on, instead of calling a long, or even shaggy-haired guy a d-bag, we shall call them prince caspian.

I really enjoyed the Stars Sad Robot EP this year. Anathem was a great read. Having not seen any of the winter oscar bait, and not being very impressed by the buzz, I’m going to declare Wall-E the best movie of 08. There were many many many movies tied for the worst.

I did see most of those.