:-)
The Greatest Films of 2005! 2005’s Most Essential Albums! The 34 Socks You Should Have Been Wearing This Year!
Why must we pigeonhole our cultural lives so? Why must we arbitrarily say, “this goes in the film list, simply because it was a motion picture entertainment released in cinemas”? Or, “this, being a CD collection of songs by the same artist, will appear on the album list”? Will we ever even know what great works never came into being – or were never recognised – because they didn’t fit into our cold, regimented cosmology?
Come now. These are blunt instruments. Is the list of top ten Xbox games really so crowded that there is no room for Richard Eyre’s Hedda Gabler? Would Kanye West feel threatened by the presence of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian on the albums list? Why shouldn’t Batman Begins be one of the budget restaurants of the year?
Well, here at flashboy.org, we have no truck with such outmoded categories. As such, here’s a list of the 26 best things from 2005:
26. Ed Matts’ Photoshopping Skillz
By far the most entertaining event of the 2005 General Election. (Wait a minute. There was a general election in 2005? Jesus.)
25. Pun.ctuati.on!
And weird spellings. In 2005, if you found your website missing vowels in certain crucial places, or with extraneous typographer’s marks scattered about the place like dead flies, then you were the King of the World and the fates bowed down before you. (This was all overseen, of course, by Freyr, the Norse God of Web 2.0 startups.) Prediction for 2006: diacritic marks to make a stroñg cömebåçk.
…related to which…
24. Yahoo! buying everything
Seriously, everything. And hiring everybody. If I added social tagging to this post, they’d probably buy me. Or, as Greg Knauss put it: “Web 2.0 – Money! The money’s back! Ha ha! Money!”
23. Despair in the face of Nature’s Awesome Power
After a few centuries on the decline, as mankind seemed to have things mostly under control, 2005 was great year for Sheer Terror at the Very Fact of Our Fragile Existence. Bad year for Hubris, though.
22. Yes
The old, old story: girl meets boy, boy and girl argue about the nature of identity and the conflict between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim East whilst speaking predominantly in iambic pentameter, girl loses boy, boygirl reunite in Cuba. Odd. Extremely memorable. Best Low-Cost European Airline of 2005.
