You Can Spin Anything

• The Monologue:
• I don't think I've done this blog regularly in about three weeks. Three weeks worth of jokes!
• The NFL wussed out because of snow in Philadelphia and then everyone got a blood libel against them. Am I right?
• Never mind, we'll just start over again tomorrow.
• Random Pop Culture:
• The ending of the winter finale of How I Met Your Mother only works if the next episode was appropriate. It was pretty good. A lot of the jokes missed, but Jason Segel did a really, really nice job. We'll see if the death was for just this one-off episode or if it hangs over everyone for the foreseeable future. Grey's Anatomy did a great job of that with the shooting, but we'll see.
• Matthew Lillard looked about 45 on House tonight. After writing that sentence, I looked on IMDB and he's 40. 40!
• Okay, I never did my best of 2010's TV. It's pretty simple. We lost Lost and Aaron Paul killed on Breaking Bad. Terriers became one of the great one-season shows in recent memory and FX dropped a couple of other tremendous shows in Archer and Louie. You want to know the best show, the best acting, and the single best episode of the year? Easy. Six words: That's. What. The. Money. Is. For.
• Random Video:
• On nights on which I put the baby to bed, I'll provide the song to which she fell asleep. The baby, by the way, is awesome.

Movies

Crisis of motivation lately. Vacation, work trip, no great ideas. Anyways, I forgot that I had seen 'The Kids Are Alright'. I take back what I said about 'The Social Network' being the most overrated movie of the year.

Why Bother?

A break from an intense work trip to touch on how people react to Sarah Palin. She used the term "blood libel" in her unconciliatiory video about the shooting in Tucson. Yes, that is inappropriate and connotatively anti-Semitic. You can get angry about it, but why scream or tweet or whatever? She doesn't care what anyone says. The people who love her aren't going to change their minds. The people who hate her will hate her no matter what. I can't imagine there are any people with no opinion any more. Screaming only makes one seem like they're screaming for their own good. Just let her be. Indifference can be more powerful than emotion sometimes.

Playoffs? Playoffs?!

2010's TV still to come. First this great story and then my picks for the NFL playoffs this weekend.

Saints at Seahawks: The Saints are the defending champs and the Seahawks are the first team to make the playoffs with a losing record. The Saints destroyed Seattle in New Orleans earlier in the year thanks to the hard feelings between Reggie Bush and Pete Carroll. I'm taking Seattle and the 10-1/2 points here. New Orleans has no running game and that number is just too big for me for a home team.

Jets at Colts: The Colts defense is horrible, but the Jets offense is inconsistent. Do you trust Sanchez on the road if the Colts decide to take away the run and make him beat them? I'm rooting for the Jets because I want to see them play the Patriots next week, but I'll take Manning and give the 3 points here. At home, I think he can flat out outscore the Jets.

Ravens at Chiefs: The Chiefs beat one playoff team, Seattle. I don't really need to say much more than that. Ravens and the 3 points.

Packers at Eagles: I keep going back and forth on this. The Eagles defense is actually slightly better against QBs than Green Bay. Vick was exposed against Minnesota, but you would think that it's unlikely that they would fall for the same safety blitz that the Vikings ran, oh, every single play with success. Green Bay is one-dimensional on offense, but that one dimension is really good. Give me Green Bay plus 3 points on the strength of their defense and their momentum.

2010: Movies

I don't follow new music enough to say anything. I bought four albums all year: Eminem, Kanye, Ben Folds/Nick Hornby, and the Treme soundtrack. All great -- Kanye's the best, but you've probably heard that everywhere -- but nothing new, per se.

Ditto books. I read seven books that I can remember, two of which that are new. Team of Rivals took me about six months of sporadic reading and then I relatively burned through the Stieg Larsson trilogy and the Hunger Games trilogy. Again, all good, except for maybe The Girl Who Played With Fire.

TV will take a bit longer, so I'll just go with movies tonight. I saw a total of two movies in the theaters after mid-August, but I tried to see a bunch before that. Some lists based on what I saw, which I'm sure will change as I see more of the Oscar movies.

Best Scene:

• 3. The Last 30 Minutes of The Expendables -- Okay, not really, but it was freaking awesome.
• 2. Andy Gives Up His Childhood, Toy Story 3 -- One of the great tearjerker scenes in recent memory.
• 1. The Turning Room, Inception -- An amazing special effect; you could tell it wasn't CGI but it still looked as stupendous as almost anything in Avatar.

Biggest Disappointment:

• 3. The Social Network -- I saw it after all of the huge hype and it may win Best Picture, but I just don't think it was "Best Picture good." Some all-time moments but a lot of flaws, glaring ones if you've read the book.
• 2. The Losers -- An awful, awful movie, but you'd think it would be a lot more entertaining with its cast (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Jason Patric). Nope.
• 1. The End of Iron Man 2 -- Okay, so they have this huge fight with tons of unbeatable robots and then he just presses a button and shoots a super laser that kills all of the bad guys? Then, he beats the ultimate villain by crossing the streams? Iron Man 2 ripped off its ending from Ghostbusters. Shameful.

Best Acting:

• 3. Chloe Moretz, Kick-Ass -- She's 13. Seriously. And awesome.
• 2. Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network -- He really was quite good. I remember a few years ago when Adventureland came out and I thought Eisenberg was the guy you cast when Michael Cera wasn't available. But then came the perfection of Zombieland and I hit the turning point on him.
• 1. Jeff Bridges, True Grit -- He may not be getting award mentions because people take him for granted. He acts better in moments in this film where he is silent and moving one eye than most actors ever will with a great script.

Worst Movie:

• 3. Little Fockers -- I didn't see it, but you know it belongs here.
• 2. The Losers -- This movie is seeing for one thing and one thing alone: Jason Patric's acting. It's a clinic. I've never felt more uncomfortable watching someone butcher the art of cinema than any time that he was on the screen.
• 1. Robin Hood -- I almost walked out forty-five minutes into the movie, but thankfully it got merely boring after that. Those first forty-five minutes, though? Oh. My. God.

Best Movie:

• 5. Kick-Ass -- Slick, fun, and even Nicolas Cage was great in it.
• 4. True Grit -- You know I love the Coen Brothers.
• 3. The Social Network -- It was flawed, but the good parts were brilliant.
• 2. Inception -- I actually have it saved on Amazon VOD to re-watch because I feel like I was able to nitpick the hell out of it after the initial amazement.
• 1. Toy Story 3 -- Inception is great and I can totally understand why people have it as #1, but any movie that can stir the mix of strong, strong emotions that this one can? You don't find that too often.

Just This Once

You know, liberals can really piss me off. I'm all for fair and equal treatment of everyone, people with money giving back or having to pay taxes to support society, and plenty of other ideals that people would call liberal. It's the political correctness that can kill me. I see tweets from people that are outraged that Huckleberry Finn is being censored. It's one printing from one publishing house. Not every copy of the book ever. Chill the f*** out.

Getting There

Been meaning to do a "best of 2010" bit, but I've lost motivation. Between vacation, football, not watching a bad movie over the weekend, and playing NBA 2K11 a lot, I'm a little off on this right now. Maybe tomorrow, unless I watch a bad movie. I thought about doing it tonight, but got sidetracked when I was infuriated by the awful How I Met Your Mother episode. The jokes were probably average quality for the show, but the episode included numbers that kept showing up on various books or TV screens that counted down from fifty. When they got to one, the show ended on a huge non-sequitir. So they're making you not pay attention to anything going on and then they drop something that didn't fit with anything else. Okay...