The Best Of 2011, and My Predictions For 2012 (Today: Sports!)

Today, the first of two things from 2011 that I didn't want to like or even think existed, but which ended up being The Best of those things around, this one from the category of:

SPORTS:

I don't like Bill Simmons, okay? More often than not, when I mention him on my sports blog it's to make fun of him and/or accuse him of stealing my ideas, which, to be honest, he does a lot because my ideas are awesome.

So when I first heard back in May that Bill Simmons was going to have his own website called "Grantland", news I got via a blog post on Slate which I didn't really understand, I said:

I only understand about half of that, but from what I gather, it's making fun of Bill Simmons, who deserves that because when he's funny at all it's because he copied me, and he's rarely funny. So I wholeheartedly support Tom Scocca in whatever it was he was writing about there -- and hereby forgive Tom Scocca for having himself kind of stolen my idea a while back, too.

And with that, I decided that I'd never have to read Bill Simmons again, since I never went to ESPN anymore because I'm sick of ESPN, and "NFL Today" and other sports websites; I don't really get my sports news from them at all. When I want sports news -- which is about twice a week -- I get it from a few sources, those sources having been:

1. The Dan Patrick Radio Show

2. The Sports Economist website.

3. NPR's Frank DeFord

4. Deadspin

5. Sometimes that one TV show with Colin Cowherd and Michelle Beadle, about whom I can't decide if she's hot or just sports hot, because sitting next to Colin Cowherd has to make one look better, doesn't it?

Or does it? People think that if you sit next to someone ugly you'll look better, or if you sit next to someone fat, you'll look skinnier, but as I think about it, I question that logic the same way I question the logic of going to an amusement park on a Tuesday or Wednesday because you think the lines will be shorter: if everything thought that way, Tuesday and Wednesday would be the worst days to be at the amusement park, wouldn't it? Which means you should go on Saturday, when nobody's there, except that's what we all think, so we all go on Saturday, which means...

... you can see why I never go anywhere, and instead just sit around pensively listening to Butterfly Nets by Bishop Allen.

That kind of logic isn't the same flawed logic as "let's sit by someone fat and ugly so we look skinny and pretty", which is also flawed logic, because isn't there just as much of a chance that people will look in your direction and say "Man, look at that whole group of fat, ugly people"?

I think that system only works if you are already hot/skinny, or if you want to make yourself look bad. For example, if you take a Ferrari (or, fill in the name of the car you like, or, if you don't like a car, then fill in the name of something you, personally, find beautiful/hot, like, say, Vanessa Williams or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in which the jelly is spread evenly among every bite.)

(Or, Vanessa Williams making you that PB&J. Man, that's HOT!)



Note: There is no sandwich in that picture. Also note: I am attempting to include more pictures in these posts because Michael Offutt, Author/Mincemeatarian (you're not the only one who can bestow titles, Mr Offutt) thinks I need more pictures, which I'm trying not to take as a criticism of my writing style, but how can I not? Do people go around telling [fill in name of author later, because right now all I can think about is Vanessa Williams, and that's going to seem a little obsessive if I say her again] that she needs more pictures in her work? They do not! Probably! I'm going to listen to Bishop Allen again.

Okay, I'm back. Where was I? Oh, yeah, hotness and how to improve oneself, which isn't at all what this post is about but I've vowed, in 2012, to do two things:

1. Not make any vows, and

2. Finish at least one thought this year, and

iii. Not be tied down by conventional ways of numbering things and let my imagination flow.

[stemella coeruleoalba]. Never admit up front how many items ought to be on a list.

So if you took your hot thing -- Vanessa Williams Making A Perfect PB&J being about the hottest thing anyone can imagine, so we'll go with that -- and put it among ugly things, it wouldn't look any hotter, would it? Sure, it would emphasize the hotness, as in this fictional conversation in which I, and Grumpy Bulldog, and Andrew Leon because I already mentioned Michael Offutt, Author/Higgs Boson, are sitting around having lunch:

Me: This is really weird, isn't it?

Grumpy: I hate everything, especially that girl because she looks like she might not like Kurt Vonnegut.

Andrew: I don't really have a catchy nickname for myself. Should I get one?

Michael Offutt Author/Palindrome, from off to the side: I recommend it! Also, you should have invited me! If I just mention people, they get, like 43,000 hits!

Grumpy: I hate him, now, too.

Me: Hey, is that Vanessa Williams making a PB&J sandwich over there?

Andrew Leon: I don't know, I can't see past all the fat, ugly people in the way.

Grumpy: I hate how much hotter she looks than everyone else.

Rusty Webb, in a surprise guest appearance: Vanessa, let me help you get away from those people at that table.

Michael Offutt Author/Pope Of The Church Of Ridley Scott: I would never have done that to anyone, unless by doing so I could get a sneak peek of Prometheus.

And... I officially have no readers anymore, correct?

On with thinking stuff about other stuff!

The other thing standing near a group of people can do is make you look bad. If I, in that hypothetical lunch scene above, had done to stand near Vanessa Williams, I (a) would have been violating both restraining orders, and (ochre) would have been exposed for being completely not hot -- my lack of hotness becoming extremely apparent in comparison to extreme hotness, the way you don't really notice how white that one shirt is in the detergent commercial until they put it next to the dingy shirt washed with that offbrand soap that your mom uses because she hates you.

Which brings me back to Michelle Beadle:



Hot? Or Sports Hot?

Which in turn brings me back to Bill Simmons and Grantland, which is what this post is about, remember.

I only read Grantland, originally, out of spite, to see just how bad it was and laugh at it and feel superior to Bill Simmons in the way that a guy who has his own sports blog with 0.03 readers can feel superior to a guy who makes his living watching sports and saying stuff about it.

And then I liked it. From the Bad Quarterbacks league to the shout-outs to pop culture to the for some reason Chuck Klosterman writing on it to the fact that they put a 2011 Song Round Up on the site that made no references to sports whatsoever to the fact that they had a great article about how basketball owners have their priorities all wrong... Grantland really stepped up sports writing and managed to do it with a mix that somehow manages to be sports-geeky with references to stats and fourth-string-wideouts and stuff nobody but nerds cares about but also in a way that manages to be fun.

Reading Grantland is, to me, what would happen if the smartest kid in high school got injected with Captain America serum, only the Captain America serum made him funny and interested in sports, a little, too, and so he began writing about it and posted it on a website with a super-pretentious name only somehow it all worked out and made it interesting, and also, let's pretend this metaphor never happened, it was just my way of working in a reference to Captain America, which I watched last night and which was pretty good, except that if Captain America's metabolism really worked at 4 times the rate of ordinary humans', he would need to eat at least 8,000 calories a day, and likely more considering how hard he's working at all other times, so his food bills would be enormous.

And, on Captain America, too, after it was over, Sweetie asked me "How could he be alive after all these years?"

And I said: "Well, you have to assume that he crashed into the ocean and froze pretty quickly, and since it was explained that his body could heal itself, he was in suspended animation with his body healing itself, too," and then I added "Or, more appropriately: something-something-something-science, he's healed!" which is what all science is about in comic books, anyway.

And that is why I like Grantland: because this post, which is about Grantland, also manages to be about how hot things are and PB&Js and Captain America and science. I'm not a sports junkie; I don't care much about the Xs and Os and stats unless you manage to make it interesting to me. Grantland manages to do that: be interesting, plus plus be smart about sports so that I can learn things and make sense of it.

So, in conclusion:

*. The numbering system you use is heterofascist; free your mind and the body will follow.
17. Grantland is The Best Sports Whatever Of 2011.
3. Michelle Beadle is not as hot as Vanessa Williams.

PRIOR BESTS of 2011:

Music.

Celebrities

Books (And Other Smarty-Pants Things)

Santa, Godzilla and Jesus Walk Into A Bar...

Nick, a nearly-failed UFO maker, finds a tiny brass trumpet lying in a gutter – moments before a dead body drops from the sky and he’s chased down the street and into a major adventure by Sexy Cop. Before he knows it, Nick is doing battle with Wenceslas’ Xmas Machine, helped by Angels, the Secret Army Under The Bed, and a man in a robe, as attempts at world domination mix in with Nick’s attempts to convince Sexy Cop that they are soulmates.


Santa, etc… is a hilariously offbeat, thrill-a-minute otherworldly adventure that attempts to answer the question “What is the most ridiculous possible explanation for Christmas as we know it.” Said one person: “If Douglas Adams had teamed up with Robert Heinlein to come up with a story to make everyone forget A Christmas Carol, they’d have simply ended up copying this story.” (That person was the author of this story, but still… he said it.)

Go buy the book on your Kindle.

Available on Amazon as a paperback; click here for that version.

The Best of 2011, and my Predictions for 2012 (Today: MUSIC!)

Ever stop and think why you like a particular song?

I do, and when I stop and think about it, oftentimes the reason why I like a song has less to do with the song itself and more to do with what's going on with me at the time I hear the song. Other times, there's one particular moment or piece of the song I like so much that it makes me like the whole entire song. (Something I've commented on before, here and here.)

So here's my list of The Best Songs I Heard For The First Time In 2011 -- which, note, some of them may not have first been made in 2011, but who cares about that? They were new to me this year and why I liked them. Feel free to add your own nominees in the comments.

The countdown is to the Best Song of 2011:

12. The Presidents, Jonathan Coulton:



Why I Liked It: I first heard about Coulton on a podcast in which it was revealed that he made thousands (hundreds?) publishing his music through his own website, making him something of a hero to me because that's what I'd like to do with my writing. (So far, I'm not making thousands unless I count the money in decimals, the way England used to with the ha'penny, and I really think that we lost something in society when we stopped having money you could break into usable bits.)

I like this song of his the best because (a) it's catchy, (b) it mentions William Howard Taft, who is a lead character in a book of mine that I'll probably finish this year (you can read most of it for free here) (c) It's catchy. That's worth mentioning twice, because you try writing a catchy song about the presidents.

What I predict for Jonathan Coulton in 2012:

He just got his breakthrough song, Code Monkey, turned into some sort of musical by some sort of group, so by the end of the year, and zombies are big, so we can expect a guest shot from him on the final season (this year) of The Walking Dead, where he'll play an office worker turned into a zombie in homage to his song RE: Your Brains.

Here's that musical:



PS: We can hope that The Walking Dead ends this year, can't we?



11. Friday, Rebecca Black.



Why I Liked It: Mostly because people hated it, which is how I get to like a lot of stuff, because screw you, world, don't tell me what to like. When I heard how much everyone hated the song, I went and listened to it, and it wasn't that bad. I explained it more at length (of course!) here.

What I Predict For Rebecca Black In 2012: Did you know that Rebecca Black's video spawned its own pop culture spinoff already? The Girl In Pink who rode in the car apparently was elevated from "person" to "person some people know about," thanks to riding in the car with Rebecca. She's even released her own single:



Which leads me to my prediction: A reality show for Rebecca Black and The Girl In Pink, a sort of "Teen Moms" meets "American Idol."



10. Butterfly Nets, Bishop Allen



Why I Like It: Sometimes -- most of the time -- I am in a quiet, pensive mood . The raucous jabbering persona I play on the Internet isn't really me; that's just a character I put on for your entertainment. Soft, quiet songs that make me remember my life only in my memories it's tinted like a yellowing newspaper are one of my favorite things.

Also: that sax solo midway through puts a lump in my throat.

What I Predict For Bishop Allen in 2012: I don't know anything about this group. I don't even know how I came to have their CD or where I heard about them or whether they're even a group anymore. So I'll say... they will do the score for that Prometheus movie. That seems timely.



9. Friday (literal version.)



Why I Like It: Just because something's played out doesn't mean I can't like it. In fact, I'm planking right now.


8. Music For A Found Harmonium, Ferny Grove Percussion Ensemble:



Why I Like It: I love Awesome Covers of Already Awesome songs, and these kids are good. Plus, they look like they're having fun.

What I Predict For Them In 2012: They've probably graduated and gone on to boring jobs by now -- but maybe the fame engendered by making this list will get them into a reunion tour and they'll cover other songs? They're really good:





7. Their Duet, Wim Mertens:




Why I Like It: Someone put a video on Youtube of the "Baby Einsteins" only instead of the "Baby Einsteins" soundtrack, it had this song as the backing. I don't know why people do the things they do, but Mr F and Mr Bunches liked the video and I liked the song so I put it on my playlist.

What I Predict For Wim Mertens in 2012: More people pirating his work in obscure and nonsensical ways, until SOPA goes into effect and we all get sued into oblivion by Viacom and J.K. Rowling.



6. Golden Phone, Micachu & The Shapes:



Why I Like It: When Sweetie and I went on a date night this year to State Street, she was shopping at Urban Outfitters and this song was playing. I found it catchy and it reminds me of that night, which was marked by pleasant weather, an excellent sandwich that probably killed two chambers of my heart, and a mysterious animal that made me realize Sweetie and I were soulmates.

My Prediction For Micachu et al in 2012: I will hear their new song while picking up take-out at Chili's and mention it on December 31, 2012, but by then the world will have ended 10 days earlier, making it somewhat of a moot point.



5. Almost Every Single Song By Slow Club, Ever, But I'll Just Pick Out "Me And You"




Why I Liked It: Slow Club was my 2012 version of Noah & The Whale, a band I became enamored of, but they've outlasted my Noah obsession and earned spots on four different playlists on my iPod (Running, Upbeat, Indie, and the After, which is the music I listen when writing that aforementioned book starring Taft.) Rhythmic music, obscure lyrics, and a sort of Zooey Deschanel-esque vibe without actually being Zooey Deschanel, which is important because I really kind of feel like Zooey overdid it this year.


What I Predict For Them In 2012: They've been featured in a commercial, and their sound was ripped off for some car commercials, but the life cycle of quirky almost-folksy duos is a short one; Quirky, almost-folksy duos are the fruit flies of the music world. We'll probably never hear from them again, just like Noah & The Whale, which, I know, not a duo, or maybe they are. I really know very little about the bands I like, as I don't particularly care about them, I like the music. I don't need to know anything about the band to enjoy the music, anymore than I need to know about Patricia Cornwell's private life to have enjoyed the Kay Scarpetta books before she got all whacky about them.


4. Will You Be There, Ida Jo (and the Show?)



Why I Like It: I've always liked this song, and Ida Jo's mournful, folksy take on it elevates the song to a spiritual level. Plus it lets me like the song without the moral quandary of liking something Michael Jackson did. Moral quandaries ruin music for me.

What I Predict For Ida Jo in 2012: God, I don't know. I'm just going to stop predicting stuff. It's getting old.



3. Graphology, Olivia Mancini & The Mates:




Why I Liked It: First, it's the kind of song you can see yourself driving to, say, through the plains of Kansas on an early, slightly chilly June morning when the corn isn't that high and the sun has only just come up and everything is flat and shaded bluish-gray except the horizon itself, and you're on your way to an adventure you can't really imagine yet but which will clearly be a lot of fun.

Second: Try writing a catchy song about studying graphology, which is the study of handwriting.

Third: The song seems to be about never stopping learning, and that is something I aspire to. The amount of knowledge I add to my life each day only makes me realize how many more things there are out there that I don't know yet, which makes me sad sometimes but then makes me excited other times, because in both cases, there's still lots for me to learn.



2. Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk, The New Pornographers (Acoustic Version)




Why I Like It: Not only is it a catchy, uplifting song by a group I love, but also: Mr Bunches loves this song, and we watch the video together and name the instruments they play. Then he sings along with it, which is really amazing considering that not many 5-year-olds know the word byzantine, let alone how to use it in a song.

And The Number one Best Song of 2011:

1: Friday, by Stephen Colbert:



Why I Liked It: It's clearly the Best Song of the Year: It combines Friday, which really was an earth-shattering song when you think about it, with Stephen Colbert, who is himself a pop culture force like no other, and they raised money for charity by doing this, which I found admirable especially in that by doing so, Colbert helped offset the incredible harm he's doing by siphoning money off from Democrats to fund his "Colbert SuperPAC" joke which is intended to make a point but which point it makes is likely to be "helping elect a Republican by getting liberals to give money to a joke cause rather than real causes."

Also: Ladies and gentleman, Taylor Hicks! ought to be said more often.


Previous Bests Of 2011:

Celebrities

Books (And Other Smarty-Pants Things)

The Best Of 2011, and My Predictions For 2012 (Today: Celebrities!)

Back when I was a kid, I regularly read Doonesbury comic strips. I still do, in fact, but now I read them on the Internet whereas back then I would check compilations of Doonesbury strips out of the Hartland Public Library, an institution I used so often that I still remember my library card number (it was "4002.")

Back then, you checked books out by having the librarian write your library card number on the little card and take it, and then stamp the book with a due date and send you on your way. I bring that up in order to compare it to how I checked out a book the other day from the Madison Public Library: I logged on to the website, found the book I wanted, entered my 13-digit library card number (actually Sweetie's; I use her card because of my ongoing feud with the Middleton Public Library, a feud that I'm fighting in part by not paying a late fee on my own card, so I can't use it), clicked a few buttons, and then went upstairs and began reading the book on my Kindle.

My, how things have changed!

Except that they haven't, not really, because this little jaunt down memory lane has a point, and that point is that way back then, Doonesbury did a series of strips where Rick Redfern went to work for People magazine and had to go to a gossip symposium where he learned how to be a celebrity journalist. One of the strips commented that the then-modern-day "celebrity" had not really done anything worth celebrating, and proposed rebooting the whole system (presumably, not a gritty reboot) to refocus on those people truly worth celebrating.

That debate has gone on, obviously, for at least 30 years, and maybe longer; I'd be willing to bet that if you go back and look at a 1920s newspaper (or, as they were called back then, event-o-printoriums)(but they still had horoscopes, which said things like "Today, you will do the jitterbug in a speakeasy with a tall, dark stranger.)(Yes, my knowledge of the 1920s is based exclusively on once watching the film version of Chicago.)




if you went back to the 1920s, you'd find that back then, people were griping about other people being famous simply for fame's sake.

So maybe it's about time we stopped debating whether people are famous for the "right" or "wrong" reasons, and just accept that people become famous for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes once they become famous we want them to keep being famous, for whatever reasons. After all, is it any better to become famous playing an ultraviolent delinquent who rapes people than it is to become famous for nothing at all?

Which brings me to the Best Celebrity of 2011:





Oh, come on. Who else could it be?

Once you stop obsessing over whether celebrities need be required to do something worth celebrating before we obsess over them, the choice of Kim Kardashian as 2011's Best Celebrity is a no-brainer, much like the people who obsess over Kim Kardashian's fitness for the public eye.

The answer to whether celebrities have to do something worth celebrating lies, like a zen koan, not in the external world, but in the meaning to the question itself. When people say things like "Kim Kardashian is famous for nothing! She has no talent!", they are exposing their own ignorance and biases.

I note that I do not pay attention to those who say she's famous because of her sex tape. Kim's sex tape, like Harrison Ford's gig painting a doorway, allowed her the entryway into show biz, but, like Harrison Ford, Kim has stayed around longer than her dearth of any displays of talent would allow her to do so. If you say that Kim Kardashian is famous, now, because of her sex tape, then, you are saying that Americans will pay attention to someone for four solid years because of one sex tape, and while Americans will pay attention to a great many things in hopes that there's some sex in it somewhere (see also: all those Dragon Tattoo books), four years is a lot longer than one sex tape can hold even our addlepated attentions.

Plus, think of all the other people who have released sex tapes and who have not maintained the level of fame that Kim Kardashian has.

No, the sex tape was what opened the door, but Kim Kardashian has kept her foot firmly wedged in that door since then, which brings us back to that zen riddle posed by people who say she's famous for doing nothing and has no talent.

Who do you suppose, in saying that, that those people are thinking about as the 'rightfully' famous?

Scientists?

Doctors?

Judges?

Social workers?

Soldiers?

I could go on.

People who say Kim Kardashian has no talent and doesn't deserve to be famous classify the world into "those deserving fame based on their talent" and "those not deserving of fame because they have no talent."

And then, under the deserving fame column, they put people like actors, and singers, and dancers, maybe, and directors, and possibly comedians.

All talented people, of course. Or many of them, anyway.

But the fact that those people are not arguing that doctors/judges/social workers/activists, etc. should be more famous shows that they classify talent very narrowly: the talent that deserves fame, they say, is the ability to make me laugh or cry or hum the tune to a musical about the 1920s.




I've been humming that song all week, since I jogged to it on Monday.

That-- that -- is the talent that most people say is deserving of fame.

That's why it's so ridiculous that people argue that Kim Kardashian should not be famous: because if there is someone deserving of fame, shouldn't it be the people that accomplish something that matters?

I love movies, books, (some) TV shows, music, art, sports, all that stuff. But do those things matter enough that we should be going nuts over them, and not over other things?

Here's a thought to mull on while you work through this. This past year, a boy named Luke learned to walk again after suffering a rare case of encephalitis that hospitalized him for lengthy periods of time and left him unable to walk for four months. With the help of 8 therapists, this little boy eventually walked on a treadmill, and 4-day-a-week therapy sessions built around a show Luke loved ("Wipeout") helped him build up strength and stamina.

Luke still used a wheelchair for many things when the summer came and he got to visit the Jacksonville Jaguars training camp, and, inspired by being there, Luke walked unassisted across the field.

That is a remarkable story, isn't it? Very touching and heartwarming and it was headlined:

Jaguars center Brad Meester inspires boy, 6, to learn to walk again

Now, I don't mean to diminish Brad Meester's role in Luke's recovery: Meester visited him and urged him on and invited him to training camp and was in general a wonderful guy.

But Luke was already learning to walk, and had his life saved by a team of doctors and therapists and surgeons none of whom saw their name in a headline as inspiring a boy to walk again.

So let's get a sense of perspective, okay? It was nice for Brad Meester to help a little sick boy recover.

It was heroic and talented and news- and fame-worthy of that team of doctors to use their skills, skills that did not involve "pretending people are shooting at us" or "standing resolutely in front of another large man for a few seconds at a time."

Whenever I hear people say "Kim Kardashian has no talent, she's famous for nothing," I think to myself "Yeah, but most people are famous for being marginally, if that, more talented." And the people who should be famous, the people who really are talented, rarely are.

With that out of the way, let's tackle the other big complaint about Kim Kardashian. No, it's not that she is serious about never being photographed from behind,




...it's that her wedding was fake.

That outraged people this year -- the fact that Kim Kardashian got fake married and then real divorced made people madder than any three things Netflix could have done; if I didn't know better, I'd have suspected that Netflix put Kim up to it simply so that they could get off the hotseat of "Americans being upset at stupid stuff".

But why?





Why, exactly, were people upset about Kim Kardashian's wedding-and-divorce news cycle? (The timing of it more or less exactly coincided with the premiere of various iterations of her shows, right?)

The general reason I hear is that she made lots of money off of it, and so people were really, really mad that she made them believe she was marrying for love and then she wasn't, really, and so she shouldn't have gotten paid for something that wasn't real and didn't matter.

Excuse me?

That is the standard we are now setting for our celebrities? You only get paid if we believe that what you're doing is real? I guess I ought to cancel my plans to go see Ghost Protocol tonight.

I can't believe that two decades into reality tv, this needs to be said, and I can't believe, further, that I'm going to mention Kim Kardashian and Erwin Schrodinger in the same sentence, but I just did.

Schrodinger, remember, famously said that it is the act of observing something that collapses the wave form and inevitably alters the possibilities of what can happen.




Schrodinger's cat is meant as a criticism of quantum mechanics; he used it to point out that the idea that all possibilities exist equally until we observe the outcome of an experiment; the act of observation reduces the waveform of probabilities to a single outcome.

Which is to say: observing changes the event.



Which is what happens when we create "reality" TV shows that follow people around and make them do things. No "reality" TV show is real because once you put a camera on someone, they stop scratching their butt and start doing things, and in the process of doing those things, they inevitably change their behavior, for better or worse.

The most obvious example of this was Horrible Kate Gosselin, who used her status as a "mom" to forget all about being a "mom" and try to become a reality star.

I do not object to people becoming famous; I do not object to people becoming famous by using their kids, either [provided the kids aren't ill-treated]. What I do object to is people like Horrible Kate Gosselin pretending to be a mom in order to get on TV; that's misusing kids and once people realized that Horrible Kate Gosselin felt about those kids the way you or I might feel about something nasty we stepped in, they stopped watching.

But that's not the point. The point is that when Horrible Kate Gosselin first got on the air, she was a struggling "mom" of 8 kids with an idiot husband and a fetish for natural peanut butter, trying to buy groceries at a savings club to make ends meet.

Within a season, though, the money Horrible Kate Gosselin was getting paid to pretend to care about her kids on TV had changed things: they took those kids to Disneyland and ate breakfast with Mickey, and vacationed in Hawaii and shopped for houses that included a horse farm.

Simply paying Horrible Kate Gosselin to watch her changed what people were watching.

That is what happened, I figure, with Kim Kardashian's wedding. TV shows have long featured big emotional hooks and suspenseful cliffhangers, which is why it's so hard to make a life into a TV show. Rarely does your life have a big emotional hook or suspenseful cliffhanger at the precise time you'd like it. Kim Kardashian may or may not have liked Kris Humphries for real -- seems pretty clear she didn't, though -- and may or may not have ever married someone if it weren't for the TV show. But we all are -- well, you all are, because I don't watch -- watching her, and so she had to do something important.

Her sisters had gotten married and had babies with a guy who is actively trying to look like a fictional serial killer, which, what?! How does that not worry the bejeesus out of you?! Is there a context in which someone can try to emulate a serial killer in a non-sociopathic way?!

But Kim Kardashian hadn't done much of anything for a while, had she? I'm pretty sure she hadn't, and so she got married because what else could she do? Try out to be an astronaut? Learn to kayak? Switch to Hinduism?

Kim Kardashian is in the entertainment business, and wants to remain there. So she got married, and if you watched the wedding, and then watched the divorce, you were entertained.



And yet, people got mad, because Kim Kardashian's wedding, they figured, was not "real."

You know: real like all the other stuff you see on television. Real like, say, Miley Cyrus' career.

You remember Miley Cyrus, right? She was someone, once. Miley -- not her original name, by the way, she was legally Destiny Hope Cyrus before she changed it in 2008 to Miley Ray Cyrus -- got famous playing a teenager who pretends not to be a rock star, and now Miley Cyrus is a rock star who pretends not to be a teenager, and nobody hates her even though nothing in her life is any more "real" than Kim Kardashian's wedding was.

Like talent, we apply the word real in an odd way: Kim Kardashian did, after all, get married for real, even if she didn't really intend to be married for long. But people felt it wasn't real because they wanted it to be real real, not just reality show real.

And THAT is why Kim Kardashian is the Best Celebrity of 2011. Not because she's so famous that merely looking kind of like her can lead to sort of offshoot fame itself -- as with Not Kim Kardashian in the Old Navy Commercial:




And not just because she's somehow managed to make everyone pay attention for four years of not doing much of anything while getting people to watch, and not just because she and her family make in excess of $65,000,000 per year just for hanging around their house and talking about themselves, which is a good reason why we should give up on our current civilization and start a new one: in a post-apocalyptic world, we might have to fight ravaging mutants for a can of avocadoes, but we probably would have our priorities rejiggered to avoid voluntarily donating $65,000,000 per year to people who don't need it simply because we want to see what they do next (answer: not much of anything, which is all they ever do! From what I have seen of the Kardashians, they don't do very much of anything).

No, all of those things are just offshoots of celebrity the way it has existed prior to 2011, and those alone wouldn't get Kim Kardashian to be the Best Celebrity of 2011.

Instead, I'm naming her because she completed the transformation of celebrities this year, and, in doing so, proved me right, in part, and then went beyond that.

Last year, I said that 2010 was the year celebrity died:

Celebrity, as a concept: the idea that there are those out there who are famous, celebrated, for doing something the rest of us have not. Those people no longer exist, at least not in the form that celebrity has taken since the 16th century, when the concept of celebrity was invented.
...

The door is wider open than ever...and as more and more people get let into the celebrity compound, the people already there have to try harder to get noticed: everyone's doing something else and frantically trying so hard to become, or stay, famous, that they will do anything to stay in the spotlight.

...It's the corollary to Warhol's famous comment: When everyone is famous, nobody is famous.

That's what I said then, and I concluded that in 2011,

The only way celebs get noticed now is to not exist... Hunger Games like, our celebrities in the future will increasingly be pitted against each other in a deathmatch for the fragmented public attention.

And I pronounced celebrity dead.

And it was, for a while -- but Kim Kardashian resurrected it, a mad scientist working in a mountaintop lair (or, in this case, a blue lagoon somewhere in the tropics), and like Frankenstein (read here why I call it that and not Frankenstein's monster), what now exists is not recognizable as a living form of celebrity, but celebrity is no longer dead.

Instead, we have a hybrid form of celebrity that has talent, of sorts - -it takes something to keep people watching for four years, and lots of people have tried to do that and failed -- and is famous enough for us to care about but not famous enough for us to not care about -- nobody cares that Tom Cruise's marriage is a sham, after all, and nobody is mad at Britney Spears for her string of failed marriages including one that lasted what, a day? -- and in doing so, created a new reality. After Kim Kardashian's marriage, there is real like what I do every day, and there is real like reality TV and then there is a different real altogether -- a new sort of reality springing up the way DC Comics used to create new universes. Call it Earth-K, and on Earth-K, real isn't real yet but it can be, if we wish real hard.

Kim Kardashian's marriage was Tinkerbell's fading glow, with one exception: whether you clapped your hands or not as Tink lay dying, Tink revived because that story had already been written. On Earth-K, the stories are written by what you demand, and that is why people are mad: They watched Kim Kardashian and willed her into a marriage, observing her until she collapsed the waveform into the reality they wanted. They clapped as hard as they could, and it didn't work.

Maybe that's Kim Kardashian's fault, but it's also her greatest accomplishment yet. Kim Kardashian, I salute you.

RUNNER UP: Rebecca Black. Because I really do like that song, and you people are all mean.

Predictions For 2012: Kim Kardashian will host Saturday Night Live, which has somehow become a thing to do again, will appear as a guest judge on either X-Factor or American Idol (if Idol is still on. Is it still on?) and at some point will be photographed with a foreign dignitary, before she goes on to become a spokesperson for Netflix, creating a singularity of hate that grows and swallows all the enmity in the world and starts a new era of peace and love.




Prior Bests Of 2011:

Books (And Other Smarty-Pants Things)

The Best Of 2011... And My Predictions For 2012 (Part One: Books, and Other Smarty Pants Things!)

There are, as I type this, 111 hours and 14 minutes left in 2011, which makes naming the my Best Of 2011 somewhat less dicey than people who began naming their Bests days, or even weeks ago.

I always used to wonder about that: Naming the Best of this or that in early December leaves out the possibility that anything good will happen in December, doesn't it?

Then I wondered if anything really good ever happened in the arts or science or culture or style in the last two weeks of December, because if nothing like that ever did, then what's the big deal about naming Bests on, say, December 5?

So I investigated, the way everybody investigates everything, by googling it, and so I asked Google the question:

Did anything really important ever happen in the last two weeks of December?

And learned that somehow Britney Spears is involved:



Naturally, I didn't click that link, because even though Britney doesn't appear on the top 10 list of celebrity links most likely to infect your computer with a virus, it's abundantly clear to me by now that clicking any links on the Internet, ever will result in your computer starting to foam at the mouth and Nigerian princes being legally allowed to sublet your kitchen.

Also, yes, my computer has a mouth.

Anyway, Wikipedia, which is becoming surprisingly reliable (I'm using "reliable" in the sens of "easy to get to, and I'm lazy") has a series of pages by day and a list of things that happened on that day, so I picked out December 29 at random (I'm using "random" in the sense of "not random at all"), and found these amazing things that happened on December 29ths of yore:

In 1813, the British soldiers burnt Buffalo as part of the War of 1812.

In 1914, James Joyce began serializing his first novel, A Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Boy, in a magazine, (so if you, like me, like to serialize your stories, you're in good company as far as literary critics are concerned, but not as far as I'm concerned because I've never read Joyce and never intend to.)

In 1937, Ireland became a country.

In 1983, Alison Brie was born.

Sheer, random chance how that
came up.

So if you were, in any of those years -- or any of the other years in which there was a December 29th, for that matter-- putting up your "Best Of" list before December 29, you would perhaps miss out on some important events like "The Best Burning of An American City by a Foreign Power" or "The Best New Country" or "The Best Potential Source For Downloading Malware Onto Your Work Laptop 28 Years From Now."

Nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead and start posting my Best Ofs, because that's how I roll. I got 99 problems but a calendar ain't one, as I like to say.*

*That song played over the credits of the new version of Fright Night, which was the movie Sweetie and I watched on Christmas Eve, and I've decided to make that my catch phrase this year. Let's see if it sticks!

So for the rest of this week, I will be posting my Bests Of 2011, and, just for the heck of it, predicting what is going to be the big thing in those categories in 2012, and next year, I'll maybe remember to look back to this year and see if I was right, something I will have to do before December 12 next year, as that's when the world is ending. Live it up!

The Best In Books, 2011:

Best Of The Year: INDIE BOOKS and INDIE Writers.

2011 was the year of the Indie Book! Rather than focusing on any one particular book for this category, I decided to broaden the scope and point out that for people like me, and the Indie Authors I've begun reviewing, and people who like to write, 2011 was the year people began to realize you can do that.

A recent look at top sellers in books found encouraging and amazing results for people who just like reading or just like writing: Indie books are a majority of top-20 best sellers in every single genre.

That's right: no matter what genre of book you like reading, the top 20 is dominated by self-published writers realizing their dreams. Romance, sci-fi, and fantasy each had 16 or 17 or the top 20 slots taken by indie books, and thrillers, where large publishers have been making a stand of sorts, has become a Helm's Deep: 12 of the top 20 are indie books.

Why is that so good? Not just because I indie publish all my books and serialize them on my blogs and make them available on Scribd for free and otherwise do my best to just enjoy writing without ever bothering to write another query letter again, although that is good for me, but it's also good for reading.

Study after study shows that people who buy e-books buy more books than they would with hard copies, and e-books are the reason that more people can indie publish their books; books are easier to create, easier to sell, and easier to buy and read than ever before in our history.

At the beginning of 2011, e-books outsold paperbacks for the first time in history (on Amazon, at least.) With that, the floodgates were opened. Ebooks were the only area of publishing that saw a growth in income in the first 8 months of the year, and the numbers on top 20 sellers suggest that indie books are driving that growth.

"Traditional" publishing won't die out soon -- not any more than the ability to make a movie with an iPhone keeps Steven Spielberg from blowing $70,000,000 to make a movie about a fictional horse fighting a real war. (The pitch: "It's Saving Private Ryan meets Mr. Ed!") Or no more than the prevalence of mp3s and iTunes led to the demise of Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas.

What it does mean is that authors can now follow in the footsteps of Jonathan Coulton and Louis C.K. and take control of their creations themselves.

Special note to those who, like Garrison Keillor, would bar themselves in Helm's Deep and keep others out while they die inside: Will indie book sales maybe result in more authors sharing fewer dollars, as Keillor said? Perhaps... but the average wage in 2010 for people working as authors of one sort or another was $65,000. In 2008, half of all full-time writers earned between $38,000 and $75,000. And that's with the full benefit of the publishing industries -- all the publishing push the majors can put into it resulted in half of all writers earning less than $75,000 a year.

Consider this, then. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated 40,000 or so people worked full-time as writers in 2010. 24,000 of them earned less than $75,000 per year. (because half earned between $38,000-$75,000 and 10% earned less than that.)

Meanwhile, the top-10 highest paid writers in 2010 earned $269,000,000 between them. That list includes people like Janet Evanovich (who I've never read) John Grisham (who became a parody of himself long ago) Stephen King (whose hit-to-miss ratio is about 1-to-10, now) and Nicholas Sparks (who... enough said.)

There's a lot of money to go around. The Indie Book Revolution could be rephrased as #Occupy Random House: the top 1% of all authors have been sucking the air out of the room for a long time, and Indie Books just cracked a window.

The best books I read this year began as indie books or stayed indie books: Rusty Webb's novella A Dead God's Wrath was amazing and heralds more to come. John Dies At The End began its life as a blog before being picked up by a small publisher. Blood Calling and Lyon's Legacy brought new life to tired genres (vampires, and sci-fi otherworld travel, respectively). I've just finished Eminent Domain by Erin Riordan and Tit Elingtin, and that was good, too (review coming.) If, in 2011, you didn't read an indie book, you missed out.

RUNNER UP: POETRY.

This category on my blog is technically called "Books, and Other Smarty-Pants Things," and the while Indie Books were clearly The Best in that category in 2011, I'm going to pick poetry as the second best in that category for the year.

Everyone knows I post a poem nearly every Friday on my blog "Thinking The Lions". (You all know that, right?)

I don't want to brag it up too much, but I think poetry's starting to catch on. An author bragged about how he reads a poem a day. NPR's late-October-2010 contest seeking LeBron James poems led to students writing poems about the Packers reaching the Super Bowl which led to a free-verse compilation poem about Albert Haynesworth, as sports sought out the beauty of lyric poetry, and Google started creating poems, or something, and in Madison, Wisconsin, the city stamped some poems right into the earth.

So my favorite poem of the year was: "The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away." Go read it. It's incredible. And it's not all poem-y, so don't worry about that.

PREDICTIONS FOR 2012: You know it's going to be something about Indie Publishing, right? Well, here's what I predict for 2012: J.K. Rowling is going to leave her publisher and begin to publish Harry Potter sequels and spin-offs on her own, marketing them through her own website.

Crazy? Or not so much? Radiohead gave up on record labels in early 2011. Louis C.K. began releasing his own comedy specials this year through his website, earning over a million bucks in just over a week. Rowling this year said she might write more Potter books, and Rowling has been hard at work trying to get the Pottermore website up and running, with 1,000,000 members having already signed up for the beta version. It might not be long before we're treated to Ron Weasly and The Winding-Up Wizard, which, having printed that, will probably now get me sued for copyright infringement.