As Woody Allen said, the heart wants what it wants. So, why are you here?

Favorite Blogs

I was asked to make a list of my favorite blogs, so that everyone can learn where my good taste comes from. I don't need to point you to the friends that I have already linked to on the side; though if you haven't checked them out, make sure to do so, particularly my dad's, Assistant Village Idiot, which continues to improve daily in quality and depth.

In all honesty, I don't troll that many blogs - I keep up with the ones that my friends update, and then I've got maybe a dozen or so more that I subscribe to, some of which never really update all that often.

Still, I'm awfully fond of the ones that I do frequent. Here are my top 5 blogs, in no particular order:

1000 Tiny Things I Hate - A comedy writer at the BBC1 decided to begin cataloguing, day by day, all the things that got on his nerves. It started with the way the man sitting in front of him was eating his carrots ("If Satan has a ringtone, this is it"), and continued on through Glastonbury, the 'hey everyone, I got that intellectual joke' laugh, tall grandmothers, shower radios, people who live next door to serial killers, goths who go to Disneyland then act all miserable, and the sentence "you should write a sitcom about this!"

Here's a link to #80, Photos of Girls With Their Friends. Oh, and just for fun, #95, 'Wogging.'

Stuff Christians Like - I'm a much bigger fan of the original, Stuff White People Like, but as soon as Christian Lander snagged that book deal, the site declined precipitously, and new material is rare these days. Still, of all the Stuff ____ Like sites out there: Stuff Educated Black People Like, Stuff Jewish People Like (check out "Remembering The Holocaust." Wow.), Stuff Nobody Likes, and Stuff God Hates - I'm fondest of SCL, probably because it hits closer to home for me. Jon Acuff's toned down his frantic overposting habit that was clogging the site - an audio-minded friend of mine noted "the signal-to-noise ratio's not so good" - and the site's finally fully hit its stride. Plus, Acuff seems to be an overall nice guy - he adores his readers and loves giving credit on items sent in. I emailed him with a small critique early on in the site's history, and he wrote me back immediately in cheery agreement with a "thanks for the help!" I've posted from the site a coupla times before, so I'll just link to one of my new favorites, #394, Dressing up for Sunday lunch in college so it looks like you went to church (Yeah, I've totally been there), as well as his self-deprecating post after his SCL meet-and-greet failed completely.

Surviving Grady - As a Sox fan, I'm fortunate to a) have a team that's suddenly consistently competitive, and not just competitive enough to break my heart in September and b) support a team that has hordes of fans across the whole country. But it doesn't hurt to have a good Sox blog to help one through the tough times, like tonight's shellacking. Yeck. Between liveblogging important games, waxing nostalgic over Sox teams of old (even bad ones), inventing new Pedroia-themed drinking games, and proposing wacky sitcoms starring various Sox members, Surviving Grady chronicles daily the obsessive live of a pair of die-hard Sox fans. Read their post-mortem on the Manny years from the night we shipped Ramirez out west.

Pajiba - The tagline is "Scathing Reviews For Bitchy People," and it passionately strives to live up to its word. A collective of outrageously insulting and extremely well-educated film snobs who know exactly the debts modern-day horror directors owe to Jean-Luc Godard and hate them for not knowing it too, yet spend a good portion of their day trolling the web for any news item that demonizes Katherine Heigl. In a sentence, brilliant and maddening all at the same time. Urban dictionary defined the site as such:

A pretentious movie site that looks down upon places like Ain't It Cool even as they steal news from them. Reeks desperately of writers wishing they had the talent and/or the determination to write movies themselves, alternating with lazy douches content to make snarky, obvious jokes in the hopes of eventually getting paid by Gawker, the Onion AV Club, or Entertainment Weekly. Visitors consist primarily of liberal, Obama-loving, Weezer-glasses (or Lisa Loeb) using, sweater wearing, office dwelling, coffee drinking, iPod listening, twee expression using hipsters that are the downfall of society. You know, the type of people who type thing like "I heart Jim from the Office", "Christian Bale is teh sexy" and *reads about new Judd Apatow/Joss Whedon/Wes Anderson project* *squees* *hides in office giggling*. Those people.

Pajiba's response to the post was "seems about right."

The site is the best place to find buzz on smaller, underground or web-based projects by some of your favorite actors or directors, plus purely random pop-culture tidbits. Check out the daily "Pajiba Love" for the choicest bits, though it's gotten Palin-bashing obsessed these days. So here's the review of this weekend's Quarantine, the first paragraph of which the reviewer uses it to explain how the film refutes Marshall McLuhan's most famous proclamation (he's wrong, but I do give him credit for trying).

Animal Review - The guy reviews animals. He looks at a platypus, gives it a score on a scale of one to ten and then explains his decision. That's all it is. I love it.

posted by Ben Wyman @ 10:56 PM