Listing Back and Forth

Happy New Year to all! I hope that you celebrated energetically but sensibly last night, and, if not...well, I hope you slept it off this morning (or afternoon?).

I'll save the big topics for one more day and instead talk about a couple of lists that were released at year's end:

• The Top 10 Greatest Unknown Artists of 2007. From what I could hear, the bands listed ranged from "Oh, that's kinda cool" to "Meh." I say "from what I could hear" because I made a valiant attempt to listen to these, although NPR's media player stopped every thirty seconds or so to re-buffer; it was as bad as using the old RealPlayer back in my dial-up days. (Incidentally, RealPlayer found its way onto PC World's list of The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time.) But, as I pointed out at Althouse, who blogged about this a few days ago, it should have been called the Top 10 Greatest Unknown Pop/Rock Artists of 2007, since no other genres were represented. In the comments over there, I suggested this guy and his big band as my favorite "dicsovery" of the past year (more on the group here).


• On the other end of the spectrum, here's a list of The Worst Band Names of '07, from the AV Club. Read the whole list and laugh (some are NSFW, I'd say, though I hope nobody who reads this is working today). Some of my favorites (at least the ones that can be printed in this blog) are Dyslexic Speedreaders, Haunting Oboe Music, Dance Me Pregnant, and Happy Mothers Day, I Can't Read. (SInce my band, Team Demon/Dingus, is about to rise from the dead again, maybe we can make next year's list.)


• AOL Autos puts forth a list of the Best and Worst Road Rage Cities. Somehow, Dallas/Ft. Worth ends up at #5 on the "most courteous" list.


• Forgotten in last week's busy-ness was the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities '07. I like the one that doubles as a cuckoo clock and the one in which all the characters are rubber ducks.


• In an annual tradition, Lake Superior State University released its list of useless words and phrases for 2007. Among the winners: Waterboarding, perfect storm, under the bus and "It is what it is."


• And finally, BabyCenter has the top baby names of 2007. Some of the rhyming in the top ten for each gender is comical: On the girls' list are Madison and Addison, while the boys' contains Aiden, Caden and Jayden. (Meanwhile, I won't have many new counterparts out there, as Kevin failed to crack the top 100 this year, falling down from #98 in '06.)

But the name doesn't matter if you forget the baby altogether: A man and his wife accidentally left their infant in a stroller on a New Jersey train platform; each one thought the other one had the baby, and they didn't realize their mistake until the train had already departed.

C'mon, Topanga! Former child star Danielle Fishel, best known for her portrayal of Topanga on Boy Meets World, was arrested on drunk driving charges right before Christmas in California.

Poultry in motion: A tractor-trailer in Pennsylvania overturned on Thursday, spilling quite a bit of its load of 6000 chickens.