The end of the decade is a little over 12 hours away. Here’s a short collection of “best of the year/decade” articles I’ve been enjoying:
The Onion A.V. Club article on best TV of the decade
Roger Ebert’s best films of the decade article on the Chicago Sun-Times
Salon.com’s article on bogus stories of the year (and yes, death panels is number 1)
Paste Magazine has a meta-list of lists of the best of the decade possibly landing them the title of best list of the decade of lists of the decade. Parse that sentence, I triple-dog-dare you. I have a minor quibble with the list of best video game characters – I think the Big Daddy from Bioshock should’ve been #1 over Nathan Drake from the Uncharted Series.
I liked this list of the best cancelled TV shows of the decade only because it has one of my all-time favorite “shows-that-should-have-been-given-a-chance” on it; Andy Richter Controls the Universe.
There are nearly a gazillion “best-tech-of-the-decade” lists. I picked this one from the HuffingtonPost because I felt it handled “best” vs. “most influential” vs. “most recognizable” rather well.
Boston.com has, in my humble opinion, never missed the mark with it’s “Big Picture” segment. So I picked their decade in news photographs for my list. Fair warning, some of these pictures are both very graphic and deeply sad.
Rolling Stone gives the 100 best albums of the decade. I own maybe 9 of them and only 1 in the top 10. Does that say anything about my taste in music?
A Washington Post article on best tech innovations of the decade would’ve been better had it not been for the fact that navigating the Washington Post website is a nightmare made worse by the fact that tons of content is behind a pay-wall.
One more…Here’s Salon’s take on the best books of the decade. I’m proud to say I’ve read 6 on the list and one of them is still on my bookshelf, patiently waiting for me to get around to it.
I don’t have clear memories of the entire decade of the 90’s. The 80’s are, of course, less clear (I was only 10 in 1980). But the 00’s (aught’s? 2000’s?) are clear as crystal. It was the decade of my 30’s. The decade started with me only 4 years removed from the career that flung me out of its gravitational orbit with such tremendous centrifugal force that I’m still occasionally puzzled by how I got here, 10 years later. The decade ends with me as one of the millions who are still without permanent employment. And in between is too much good and bad to recount.
Every year’s end we go about the business of nostalgically recalling the previous year’s highs and lows and at the end of a decade, the exercise is elevated to a level of self-centered historical significance that baffles me a little. After all, it’s just another day. But this year, I keep reading stories about how the decade was such a disappointment, what with all of the disasters both natural and man-made (Katrina, 9/11, Bernie Madoff, the Bush presidency). Maybe, since it was the first decade of the new millennium, we expected too much of it. As depressing as all of that is, some of the most important and best things happened in my life. So I’m going to look back and try to remember the good.
