The CrimeNotes Year in Fun: 20-11

Introduction. A few weeks back, Flop and I discussed an appropriate send-off for 2005 -- or, as it's known in the Korean zodiac, Year of the Slaw. No cool-kid lists of top 10 albums or wackiest commercials for us, thanks very much. The premise is more expansive: What were the 20 most memorable, interesting and fun experiences of the year? Intangibles don't count; entertainment in any medium does. Halfbacks, novelists, rock stars and federal judges compete head-to-head.

At Cole Slaw Blog, it's apples versus oranges.

20. Cole Slaw Blog. Conceived a couple years back during a night of eating coleslaw in the East Village and birthed by yours truly during a bored March night, CSB has become my daily habit and minor obsession. We originally were going to write in the voices of two coleslaw-loving yokels. It is, instead, an unruly, arbitrary, sometimes tedious project. Though we may, in fact, actually be coleslaw-loving yokels, we do our best to represent.

19. Kafka on the Shore. Haruki Murakami's funny, eerie novel about memory, love and art was a singular reading experience. Following the duel stories of a teenage runaway and an elderly itinerant who communicates with cats, it's the rare instance when magical realism is not wholly annoying. I wrote a lengthy review here, and will only add that I've thought of the book more fondly with time.

18. Waterskiing Accident. On a trip to my parents' house in August, I took a waterskiing spill that left my rib muscles aching for the next month. I was in pain getting in and out of chairs, going to sleep -- even walking. It was a preview of old age, I guess. It also gave me something to bitch about for a month.

Am I a pussy? Probably. But let's see you injure yourself in a waterskiing fall and not be an asshole about it, hotshot.

17. St. Patrick's Day. Every year since 1999, I serve dinner for thirty, with beer and whiskey to boot. Over the years, it's become an unpredictable event. Like a resurgent Notre Dame under Charlie Weis, this year's party was a return to glory, with my apartment crammed to the seams and bastards staying past 4 a.m. One of my friends brought an authentic Irishman that she picked up in a bar, and Flop dazzled the ladies with his annual Yeats reading. What more could you ask for?

See you in March, bitches!

16. Democracy. No, not the Iraqi elections, or New York's collective brain fart formally known as Mayor Bloomberg. I'm referring to a play about West German politics in the late '60s, which made parliamentary democracy seem more exciting than any pack of aircrash survivors greeting polar bears on a desert island. More than any work since Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men, the play understood the idealism, cynicism and heartache of politics. It was smart as a whip, generally asexual, and kind of beautiful -- not unlike myself.

15. Let's have babies! This was the year my married friends went baby-crazy. Grad school roommate? Having a baby. College friends? Baby time. Go to Chicago and meet up with different grad school friends? Take a wild guess. People are reproducing like mad fools. While I question the wisdom of procreating in a world where Michigan goes to the Alamo Bowl, the executive branch has declared war on civil liberties, and My Humps dominates bar audio systems, I'm kind of digging this. It will let me buy lots of Fraggle Rock DVDs, and, in the long run, provide me with new people to terrorize.

14. Land of the Dead. Oh. My. God. Who knew that zombies could go underwater? And fire guns? This shit was the Gone With the Wind of zombie movies. Dennis Hopper plays an amalgam of Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg -- an out-of-touch real estate mogul preserving an island city against the zombies lurking on the outside. A small sliver of the elite are favored, while the rest of the citizenry lives a Hobbesian existence in streets. When he pisses off John Leguizamo, there will be hell to pay. Like all the great zombie movies, the real horror comes from the humans, not the living dead. When you combine zombies with an overt critique of out-of-control capitalism, the result is a thing of beauty.

13. The Polphonic Spree at Irving Plaza, February 16, 2005. Blog Pin-Up Brian ("BPUB") and I went to this show not knowing what we were getting into. It was Godspell meets Sgt. Pepper's meets the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 20 insanely gleeful people together on stage -- including a harpist, a flutist, and a dancing choir. More sound than any group of people should make. The show was pure, sloppy, unselfconscious joy. If they formed a cult, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

12. The Colbert Report. Skeptical? Sure I was. But when Ted Koppel left Nightline and that show rapidly stumbled into the breach, I had my replacement. Smart, funny, highly-specific satire of the highest order. Stephen Colbert has appropriated a discreet genre and turned it into a mockery.

11. John Roberts and Samuel Alito. The Terrence and Philip of American conservative jurisprudence. One (Roberts) is da bomb, and the other (Alito) is fit only to shine John Paul Stevens's shoes. And, alas, there was poor Harriet. Imagine the shitstorm we'd have if the president's criminal wiretapping exercises came to light while Harriet was in confirmation proceedings, or on the Court. Love them or hate them, for a nerd like me, it's been a slice of jurisprudential heaven.