165) Terrible Songs

Terrible songs wouldn't bother us so much if they weren't so unceasingly shovel-fed to the large Terrible Person demographic, thus making them a veritable fixture in public places like malls, grocery stores, and chain restaurants, all of which we non-terrible people occasionally find ourselves at out of not more than necessity. And thus, though none of us have ever voluntarily listened to terrible songs, we still know the opening chords to them, most of the lyrics but certainly those to the chorus, and the name of the terrible "artist" responsible for recording them.


Plain White T's, above, were the result of an experiment wherein the five people least-likely to write a good song were put together in a room with a variety of musical instruments. Researchers were thrilled when, in addition to writing a remarkably terrible song that exceeded all expectations, the five young men also managed to brazenly misapply an apostrophe to their terrible band name.

Maybe worst of all, though, is that the terrible songs tend to make a lot of money, so that when he hear the terrible songs, we think to ourselves, "Wait a second, self: you can make a lot of money by rewriting every other song and changing the lyrics to something osut of a 7th-grader's diary and calling it 'Hey There, Delilah', or, as another example, by simply rhyming basic nouns and singing the word 'beautiful' repeatedly? Well, then...touche, James Blunt. Touche.

Ass."

164) "Drip Coffee"

Those of us who make the northeastern portion of the United States home are accustomed to the use of the qualifying adjective "regular" to signify a cup of coffee loaded with cream and sugar, which would annoy those of us who like the actual taste of coffee - and thus drink it as coffee - if we didn't stop to think about the fact that most people indeed load their coffee with lots of cream and sugar, making it, by definition, pretty regular.


Coffee, which, for thousands of years, survived without the assistance of adjectives

But this is entirely different than the experience of anybody who has had the misfortune of ordering a cup of coffee on the west coast of the United States and found they needed to add the suffocatingly unnecessary word "drip" to specify that the desired coffee does not incorporate any number of shots of espresso, any amount of foamed or steamed milk (nor, thus, any specifications for the density of said steamy foam), nor any cripplingly obnoxious body-image adjectives that have no place in the beverage industry such as "short" or "skinny".

We like cappuccinos and all, we just know they're not coffee. They're cappuccinos. Coffee was doing just fine as a one-word, qualifying-adjective-free drink before the unappealing word "drip" awkwardly sidled up to it and sat around doing nothing.

Still, the rise of this gratingly superfluous term is not that surprising, coming as it does from the coast that gave us surfers, Blink 182, Ronald Reagan, and Californians.

163) Athlete-Hosted "SNL" Episodes

As if the buildups to and incessant coverage of the Olympics or the Superbowl weren't sufficient in their unending insistence that we care as they attempt to strangle our collective ability to notice any other goings-on in our otherwise chaotic world, when both those sacred events finally go away, we are inexplicably and inexcusably post-event-ally punished by an often painful, never funny gold-medal winner/victorious Quarterback-hosted episode of the recently finally-sometimes-to-often-funny-again "Saturday Night Live".


Unfunny swimmer Michael Phelps helps to uphold that nugget of conventional wisdom which states that there is a difference between "swimming" and "being funny"

At least when Dane Cook hosts "SNL", you can just be like "Oh, okay...Dane Cook...so, what's this infomercial two channels away trying to tell us about?"

But when Michael Phelps/Tom Brady/Nancy Kerrigan/Kurt Warner* hosts, we are still compelled to watch, just because we owe it to ourselves and to SNL's victimized writers to determine whether or not a sketch would have been funny had the good-looking-in-that-athlete-kind-of-way yet wholly uncharsimatic host not been gazing awkwardly and obviously away from his co-stars and performing a cold, lifeless recitation of a cue card.

*Please be Kurt Warner

162) Fluorescent Lights

Because nothing makes us want to conserve energy and do the right thing for the environment more than trading a light source the brain registers as "somewhat natural" for one the brain registers as "somewhat unbearably unnatural and prone to making our skin look green and sickly and consistently reminding us of the static nothingness that is our meaningless, short, and empty lives".



It's sort of like how we'd feel about recycling, if every time you recycled a can a Diet Dr. Pepper, it stabbed you.

#1 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#1 - Prop. 8



When Barack Obama was elected in a landslide, those of us who care about radical concepts like civil and human rights, the United States Constitution, and having a law-abiding president who was actually elected couldn't hide our ecstatic delight behind the considerable beer-induced cloud of gleeful intoxication.

Then, just because you can apparently have too much of a just thing, our most reliably progressive state decides to take chip away at the ground-breaking symbolism of a member one oppressed minority claiming the presidency by infringing on the basic civil rights of another oppressed minority. And all this in the name of "protecting" a civic institution which more than half of those legally and arbitrarily allowed to engage in it fail to live up to. If California wanted to protect the "traditional" marriage, they should have outlawed divorce and re-legalized polygymy and spousal abuse.

Dicks.

So, um...just pretend this last sentence is really funny.

#2 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#2 - The Writers' Strike


Writers with jobs protest something about the internet, while other people in the world deal with real problems, like war, famine, natural disasters, losing their jobs, and not being able to watch "Conan"

Let's be clear: we're all in favor of writers, and we're certainly all in favor of strikes. Any reason to spend an extended period of time not going to work is good enough reason for us (though we rank holding signs, standing on sidewalks, being cold, and hanging out with the assistant script editors from "Two And A Half Men" all day among the worst possible alternatives to going to work).

Let's also be clear: If, for any reason, "Lost" is reduced to just a handful** of episodes; "Battlestar Galactica" takes a year to come back and then six months to conclude after the first ten episodes air (and right after Starbuck [REDACTED] and the Cylons turn out to be [REDACTED] and the [REDACTED] that [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] when [REDACTED] Cylons [REDACTED] lasagna [REDACTED]); "24" goes from sucking to not existing, meaning no good "24" episodes for two years; "The Daily Show" becomes the NEVER show (see what we did there?); and we have to go week after week without "The Office" and "30 Rock", then we are absolutely not in favor of any course of events that yielded such a state of affairs.

The Writers' Strike was one of the darkest hours in our nation's history, and because of the short attention span of the people it most affected, has probably now been largely forgotten. But for the rest of us who had to suffer through hastily-scraped-together "alternative programming" (which means reality shows) like "Sandwich Swap", "America's Next Best Futures Analyst", "What's John O'Hurley Thinking?", where veteran character actor and former "Dancing With The Stars" contestant John O'Hurley simply spends 43 minutes vocalizing his internal monologue, and "Who Wants To Randomly Be Handed A Million Dollars By A C-List Host Working Without A Script?!", we will never forget...

**We had our research team look in to this, and it turns out the average human hand is capable of holding between 12 and 14 episodes of "Lost"

#3 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#3 - Season 12 Of South Park


Stone and Parker, in the midst of telling an audience how much they still care about the quality of their show

In recent years, South Park had its share of episodes that spoke far more to Trey Parker and Matt Stone's laissez-faire, sceptical libertarianism ("Smug Alert", "Manbearpig") than to the prime objective: to be funny.

Still, the good managed to outweigh the bad, since the last few years also gave us some of the best ever South Parks, like "Make Love, Not Warcraft", "Trapped in the Closet", "The Death of Eric Cartman", and "Fantastic Easter Special".

We kinda knew the end was near when season 11's three-part, self-indulgent, and highly overrated "Imaginationland" episode (which stopped being funny sometime around the midway point of episode 2) was given its own DVD release (and way too much fanfare). Of course, "Guitar Queero" immediately followed that three-parter, and inasmuch as it was absolutely awesome, our hope was restored (a little).

Until 2008's season 12 came along.

With two and a half memorable episodes ("Canada on Strike", which is just amazing, "Over Logging", and the first episode of "Pandemic") out of 14, season 12 was proof the show has sadly run its course. Sure, it had its moments (a lot of the "About Last Night..." episode was inspired, except for the episode itself), but most of the season consisted of boring, badly concieved episodes ("Elementary School Musical", "Super Fun Time", "Major Boobage") or, worse, episodes that were offensive without being funny ("Tonsil Trouble", "Britney's New Look").

Really, though, our ire is targeted primarily at Stone and Parker. It's not that they're out of ideas, it's just that they clearly don't care enough about what anybody else thinks anymore, and they're more concerned with us knowing what they think than making us laugh. Which is too bad, because, at its best, South Park was self-righteous as well as being interesting and, best of all, really really funny. But they're clearly doing the show for themselves and themselves only. And they can go ahead do that. It's their show. They just need to know that many of us aren't going to care anymore.

Anyway, to remember the good times, one of our favorite clips from one of our favorite episodes:

#4 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#4 - That We Still Have Not Discovered A Cure For Whatever Causes People To Believe Jennifer Aniston Is Somehow Worth Talking About


Last summer, Aniston was caught by cameras in the midst of what she has lately been most famous for: not doing anything. The photo made the July issue of Us Weekly its highest-selling ever.

One of the most baffling phenomena in the still early days of our century continues to be the inexplicable fixation on the least-interesting celebrity in history. Though a scourge upon us all since the 1990s, Jennifer Aniston continues to accidently find previouslyundiscovered reasons for not going away, abetted by a delusional belief by entertainment "journalists" that she in not only the least bit compelling, attractive, or enviable, but in fact supremely compelling, attractive, and enviable.

Data from 2008 alone:

• Aniston appears on a total of 3239 magazine covers in a 12-month span, accounting for over 600 individual publications
• Aniston, who is not the star of a successful sitcom, does not make an interersting or note-worthy motion picture. Further, Aniston does not launch her career as a model, writer, special new corespondent, or UN envoy
• Aniston appears in the critically shrugged-about "Marley and Me"; the film is just the latest in the worst sort of film adaptation, basing itself upon the worst sub-genre of fiction: the inspiring things dead dogs teach stupid, shallow humans about themselves
• Aniston continues to not be married to compelling, attractive, enviable, and philanthropic celebrity Brad Pitt
• Like most of rest of country, Aniston and equally uninteresting on-again-off-again boyfriend John Mayer publically support the candidacy of presidential hopeful Barack Obama, sparking widespread media attention concerning the couple's non-bold, non-brave endorsement of the mainstream candidate everybody already loved anyway

#5 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#5 - Plumber, Samuel Joseph
Wurzelbacher ( "Joe") The

American Presidential Candidate (Oct. 2008 - Nov. 2008)


Plumber and his team watch the Nov. 4 election returns, during which he amassed a record-breaking zero percent of the popular vote

When former presidential candidate, accomplished United States Senator, and renowned war hero John McCain ceded his floundering presidential campaign at the last minute to Mr. Plumber, we admit our hopes were high that now-President-elect Obama would finally have a worthy rival. Perhaps now, we hoped, the campaign will be about economic recovery, foreign policy, and the restoration of basic civil rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution, instead of about how well Obama does or does not know a college professor who had, in the past, worked with high-ranking and respected Republican politicians (and a radical domestic terrorist organization in the 60s).

After all, in their very first debate, candidate Plumber engaged candidate Obama in a serious analysis of Obama's proposed tax code. Presumably in purely hypothetical terms, Plumber presented himself as a future small business owner who may barely pass the minimum income barrier susceptible to Obama's proposed tax changes. Obama maintained that he merely sought to reconfigure the Bush administration's tax policy, which overwhelmingly and disproportionately favored the wealthy and punished lower-income families.

The promise of this debate, while far more substantive than any debate between Obama and his former rival Sen. McCain, was quickly dashed, however, when just days later Plumber's grasp on politics and reality came into question as it was revealed that:

• He suggested a prospective Obama administration would be "one step closer to socialism"
• He said he would "go ahead and agree with" a supporter who suggested a prospective Obama administration would mean "death to Israel", prompting dismay and shock from Fox News pundit Shepard Smith, which in and of itself is as shocking as finding the words "dismay", "shock", and "Shepard Smith" in a single sentence that does not contain the words "liberal", "atheist", "birth control", or "gay agenda".
  
• He reconfirmed his belief that Obama was a socialist and that he didn't feel it was right to take money from others who "worked hard for it", while also revealing he and his family received welfare while he was growing up
• Despite headlining a number of rallies for the Republican presidential nominee, was revealed to not, in fact, be said nominee himself, and that despite all evidence to the contrary, the old guy and that crazy lady were still "in it to win it"
• His last name was "Wurzelbacher" and not "Plumber", and, though unlicensed, he was, in fact, an actual plumber
• The McCain campaign, though still somehow ostensibly taking itself seriously, had actually come to this
  

#6 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#6 - Sex and the City, the Movie


Soon, this image will come to embody feminism as universally as F. Clark Howell's "March of Progress" has come to embody evolution

When a TV show was really awesome and funny, but was cruelly cancelled before its time, what do you do? Make a movie. Case in point: Arrested Development.

But suppose that the show in question was one that was neither awesome nor funny. Suppose that the show was, in fact, boring, badly written, and full of portrayals of shrewish, disempowered, materialistic women that were repeatedly identified as being feminist? That would be a show whose ending would be gladly welcomed. Instead, however, they made it into a movie.

Miraculously, the two-hour-long Sex and the City movie (it should have been a red flag that no one could come up with a better or more clever title for it than "Sex and the City: The Movie") managed to embody everything that was wrong with the six-season show. That included racial sterotyping (the overweight black "Mammy"/personal assistant, the angelic and silent Asian daughter), an obsession with ugly yet expensive clothes and shoes, and "romantic" plotlines with men who are cold, distant, and square-jawed. So much for a show allegedly about single, empowered women who "had sex like men": the movie revolved around Carrie "Scary Sadshaw" Bradshaw's over-the-top wedding to Mr. Big, the man who ignored her, yelled at her, cheated on her, cheated with her, and moved to California to get away from her during the course of the series. That's what we should use as a model of "true love," after all. Because he's rich. And has a very square jaw.

If there's anything positive that came out of this upchuck of a movie, it's the knowledge that it will provide another Daily Hated entry sometime in 2009 or 2010 when "Sex and the City: The Movie: The Sequel" hits theaters. Because the only thing more pathetic than a bunch of annoying 40-something women teetering on high heels and eating designer cupcakes is a bunch of annoying 50-something women teetering on high heels and eating designer cupcakes.

TDH Presents: Weirdest Voluntary Typecasting Of 2008

Shenae Grimes, the lifeless star of the thoroughly unnecessary 90210 "sequel series", which features grown-up versions of some of the original series' stars, one of whom now works at West Beverly High School, also starred in Degrassi: The Next Generation, which featured grown-up versions of some of the original series' stars, one of whom then worked at Degrassi High School.


Grimes (fourth from left) and apparently the cast of '90210', including that old lady from 'Arrested Development' (third from left) for some reason, Aunt Becky from "Full House" (fourth from right), and assorted extras from 'Entourage' and 'Gossip Girl'. (Not pictured: the '90210' theme, currently playing in your head)


In a rare demonstration of TDH's presumptive clairvoyance, we present the following upcoming reports from Variety:

'90210' Star Grimes To Star In Updated 'Saved By The Bell: The College Years' Sequel Series
May 19, 2012

Hollywood, CA- Shenae Grimes, who recently left the cast of The CW's remake/sequel series '90210', will star in a retooled sequel series to the short-lived 1990s primetime sitcom, 'Saved by the Bell: The College Years'.

Grimes will play Vanessa, a high school graduate from Madison, Wisconsin, who enters her freshman year at California University upon learning her acceptance to Stansbury has been revoked when she is falsely accused of having cheated on her SATs. Vanessa finds herself sharing a suite with Shannon and Danielle, two recent graduates of the nearby Bayside High. Living in the suite next door are Shannon and Danielle's three best male friends and fellow Bayside grads: Dash, a pretty boy with a heart of gold and a penchant for trouble-making; Gino, a vaguely-ethnic-yet-somehow-broadly-stereotyped jock; and Tweeter, their lovable, loyal nerd friend.

Titled 'Saved', the series will welcome back Dustin Diamond as thrice-divorced father of three Samuel 'Screech' Powers, now co-chair of CU's astrophysics department and struggling with an addiction to prescription pain killers, and Patrick Fabian, who played Prof. Jeremiah Lasky in the original and will now take on the role of Dean Lasky. The launch of the show will reportedly find Dean Lasky committing purjury on the witness stand, thrust into the midst of law suit wherein a former student accuses a CU professor of sexual harassment.

In a bold departure from the original 'SbtB:TCY', 'Saved' will be filmed in the more modern single-camera format seen on such critically acclaimed sitcoms as 'Arrested Development' and '30 Rock'. The show will air on the TBS cable network and is slated to launch this fall.


Former 'Saved' Star Grimes To Star In 'Melrose Place' Spin-Off/Sequel Series
June 30, 2015

Hollywood, CA - Shenae Grimes, star most recently of the failed 'Saved by the Bell: The College Years' revamp/sequel 'Saved', has been tapped to star in a remake/sequel version of the 1990s primetime melodrama 'Melrose Place'. The new series will simply be called 'MP'.

Grimes will play Theresa 'Risa' Macavoy, a single young woman from Springfield, Illinois, who moves to the Los Angeles area to pursue her dream of becoming a Hollywood star. A stranger in an even stranger land, Risa moves in with her sister's college roommate Dominique, an aspiring dancer, in an apartment complex full of equally complex thirty-somethings. But will Risa conquer Los Angeles before Los Angeles (and its sexy inhabitants) conquers her?

Original 'Melrose Place' cast member Andew Shue returns as Billy Campbell, now a ragged, eccentric, agoraphobic MP superintendent, bent on discovering the identity of former roommate Alison's killer.

'Melrose Place', which ran for seven seasons between 1992-1999, was created by Darren Star and produced by Aaron Spelling and aired on the FOX network. The new series will be developed by J J Abrams, who recently launched the wildly successful Showtime series 'Deliberate Mindfuck'. 'MP' will debut next fall on Monday nights on NBC. It is slated to join a Monday lineup that includes the network's flagship gameshow "Just Guess A Number", "Law and Order: Mailroom Justice", and the updated "Airwolf".

Related links:

• 'Mindfuck' answers! Learn the truth behind the dragon, why Sharon's copy of 'Catcher in the Rye' keeps changing colors, and why the last three episodes have been nothing but color test patterns...
• Courtney Thorne-Smith on what's in store for season fourteen of 'According to Jim'
• Variety Interview: Andrew Shue on soccer, his sister, and coping with success...and non-stop paparazzi attention! (1993)
• 'Saved by the Bell' star Diamond found dead in Tahiti

#7 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#7 - Global Climate Change



Because the very definition of hatred is summer mornings that are so hot, we get to work early at the job we hate because the office has air conditioning whereas our bedrooms don't.

That after days in January when the temperature hit 65 one day and 8 another.

How about you get on fixing that, Al Gore.

#8 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#8 - David Archuleta


Put it down. Put. The hand. Down.

As "American Idol" has mutated gradually from ubiquitous annoyance to irresistible guilty pleasure to seriously compelling entertainment and, most recently, to vaudevillian self-parody so recklessly devoted to its own ratings that one's own addiction to it stems almost totally from the basest biological impulses of curiosity, it has maintained one consistent ingredient: the laughably eccentric contestant who continues to beep loudly on the popcultural radar long after disappearing from the show.

William Hung didn't even make the competition but is still one the show's most famous products. Sanjaya was the beneficiary of a pseudo-masochistic portion of the viewership who just had to find out how large a crater he could ultimately make in the landscape of legitimacy that "American Idol" in particular and pop music in general has striven so long to build up. Kevin Covais stayed around after he proved to be a one trick pony (and the trick itself amounted to little more than the ability to bake brownies for you grandma while being off-puttingly pre-pubescent) just long enough for you to be able to get all your friends around a TV to prove you weren't wrong about his striking resemblance to Disney's "Chicken Little" character.

Of these, Sanjaya was the first who stayed around way after the joke he would ultimately become ceased being funny.

But, not to be outdone, the 2008 season -equally littered with "oh my god, seriously?" contestants like the unimaginably grating and transparently bad self-concsious Janis Joplin impersonator Amanda Overmyer, the shockingly lifeless Kristy Lee Cook, and the awkwardly closeted and overly-scarf-wearing Michael Johns, as it was with truly compelling finds like the world's most appealling Mormon Brooke White, the bizarrely likable stoner and deliberate Simon-antagonist Jason Castro, and the most aw-shucks rocker who should have been the lead singer of a really good band (unfortunately, his favorite all-time band is Our Lady Peace...) but now will probably be the lead singer of a shitty band, like Our Lady Peace, which is a shame because he has a kickass voice, David Cook - made damn sure its Sanjaya/Kevin Covais of the year stayed on the show to its very last breath (and nearly won).

Archuleta is the reason people who don't watch "American Idol" hate "American Idol". He was the whole package: overly demanding and possibly abusive stagedad, Osmondy Mormonishness, a Josh Grobinesque technically jaw-dropping voice with a not a hint of authenticity or life experience to back it up; he sang great pop songs like he was a machine designed to sing great pop songs, machinishly.

Archuleta (and his operating lever or hand or whatever that was that wouldn't stop mechanically moving up and down beside him as he obeyed his programming or sang or whatever you wanted to call it) became a punchline to the sane and a source of adoration to the insane (American girls, roughly aged 14) by midseason, and we all held our breath each week to see if he'd finally be gone.

"Idol" turned out to be the winner, though, as, in order to see him leave, we ultimately (and illogically) had to stick with the show not just to the end, but to its literal last word, since both finalists were named David, we had to wait for America's most offensively inoffensive man, Ryan Seacrest, to say "Cook" rather than "Archuleta" to ensure our long, national nightmare had come to an end.

Luckily, Cook's terrible debut album way outsold Archuleta's terrible debut album, just in time for Robert Pattison to swoop in and erase him from tweeny memory once and for all (we hope).

#9 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#9 - The Fact That Apparently Everyone Except The Staff At Seattle Grace Hospital Lost Their Jobs

This in light of the fact that "Grey's Anatomy", a show so insistent that everybody pay attention to it that we practically know every cringe-worthy detail despite never having been able to sit through a full episode, apparently jumped several sharks this year, with far-fetched plot lines ranging from the episode where the chick from "Knocked Up" sleeps with some dude she killed by accident or something, the one where Patrick Dempsey is still on the show, and the one where Rene Zellwegger impersonator Ellen Pompeo is presented to the American audience as an attractive, talented, compelling, and non-personality-devoid actress.


The secret to surviving the recession is, apparently, to sleep with everybody you work with and pout. A lot.

But, nope: ratings, the economy, and logic be damned, "Grey's Anatomy" soldiers on and gets a somehow-even-more-awful spinoff while Eli Stone and Pushing Daisies go the way of a good a show on FOX.

We now officially feel bad for having ever wanted "Grey's Anatomy" to succeed simply because it had the grace and good taste to employ our long-absent hero, Patrick Dempsey. But there's no denying reality: an eternity spent as "that guy from 'Can't Buy Me Love'" is an immeasurably better fate than the mantle "the star of 'Grey's Anatomy'" or any single possibly conceivable nickname beginning with "Mc" and ending with an adjective.

#10 - The Top 10 Things We Hated About 2008

#10 - Katy Perry

As a society, we don't ask very much of our summer songs - those songs that litter bars, malls, tv talk shows, and restaurants so insistently and incessantly that you always know the chorus to them, even if you've never listened to them voluntarily.

We don't ask they be smart, and we don't even ask they be especially good. Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" definitely meets these two criteria.

But what we do ask is that they be tolerable and that the acts that yield them be likable. It is here that "I Kissed A Girl" and Katy Perry, respectively, fail.

Perry's grating celebration of drunken recreational lesbianism, widely considered the best track on an album joyously torn limb from limb by critics (and thus adored by American teenagers), is only outmatched in sheer numbingly dull worthlessness by the women herself, who is so lacking in both presence or talent, one could literally walk in to an empty football arena, hook up an iPod to a giant soundsystem, put "I Kissed A Girl" on repeat, slap some mascara and a pair of black tights on a pint of vanilla icecream, and bill the affair as a Katy Perry concert.

God willing, now that her requisite TV appearances, both leading up to and on New Year's Eve, have come and gone, her certainly final performance of "I Kissed A Girl" at the upcoming Grammys (for which she has doubtlessly been nominated for armloads of awards) is the last we ever hear of her, her cherry chapstick, and her apparent early-onset sexual boredom.

The Daily Hated Metamorphosizes

Dear esteemed readers,

We are thrilled to announce that we are changing our approach to TDH for 2009. We will still post every day, or at least on those days that we feel like it. However, we will no longer be adding daily to our numerical list of scorn-worthy annoyances. Don't worry: the list will continue to grow over time, and those posts will still make frequent appearances. Our staff just decided it needed to go in a new creative direction, and that decision took four and half hours, two boxes of Munchkins, 6 PowerPoint presentations, and $1800 in consulting fees, so you know it's definitely a good one.

In the meantime, here is a picture of a baby bunny:


Yours hatefully,
John and Lilit

161) Year-End Dead Celebrity Retrospectives

With a couple notable exceptions (like this one, or this one) in the cases of people whose presence on our stupid planet actually made it a better place to be, and whose absence from said planet makes it a little lamer, TDH takes a strong anti-over-eulogizing-dead-celebrities stance.


In a stunning, edgy move that rocked the entertainment industry, TDH has named former Carol Burnett Show regular Harvey Korman (above left) as its #1 celebrity death of 2008

Sure, it's sad when the promising young actor, who in some way embodies the spirit of his generation, dies in his twenties of an accidental drug overdose. It also happens at least once every ten years.

It's also sad when a once-legendary musician tied to an iconic era in American history dies. Or when an old person dies. Or when a mildly-famous middle-aged comedian you'd never think would suddenly die suddenly dies, leading every person in America to think, "Really? ___ ____? Huh. I'd never have thought I'd hear the news of ___ ____ suddenly dying...". But these things happen all the time.

Fine - death is sad. We get it. Spend a day being sad about how so and so, who you never met and who may well have been a complete asshole in real life for all you know, died. But (and we're specifically but not exclusively looking at you, People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly) the roundup of dead celebrity eulogies -often written by other celebrities who, like you, really liked the dead celebrity in question's work- in every publication and/or entertainment blog's obligatory, unnecessary, and thoroughly self-congratulatory Year in Review edition (Oooh...Owen Gleiberman ranked "Dark Knight" the number 2 movie of the year, and Lisa Shwarzbaum ranked it number 3! They are so edgy! Ooooooo...Chris Willman hated that album everybody else loved! Ooooohhhh! The Jonas Brothers? The 8th best album of '08?? What a daring choice!) takes pop "journalism" from a place that is somewhat creepy, voyeuristic, and so overstated that it by nature not only trivializes the life of the celebrity in question but the very phenomenon of death itself, to a place of such ill-placed co-opted nostalgic supersaturation that it makes death annoying.

So here's what we suggest. Next year, instead of just listing the most famous recently-dead people you can think of, take your self-congratulatory proclamations of your ability to recognize, and thus rank in numerical order, how important, profound, and meaningful "Wall-E" was in relation to overly self-important superhero movies and the obligatory obscure indy-or-foreign movie that nobody heard of or saw and was similar to, but better than, the big-studio movie people had heard of or saw and apply that same principle to dead famous people. Put your money where your mouth is.

Let's have a "Top Celebrity Deaths of YYYY" list.

Y'know...just to see what the reaction is.