#193 - mid-year hype.

is it really that time of year again? you bet your sweet ass it is...it's time for my mid-year top five list of albums, accompanied by some sort of snack-drink list! for the past two years (2009, 2010), i've paired my top five albums with five snack-drink pairings that i'd planned on writing about but never got around to. this year, since i'm feeling slightly nostalgic, i'm changing it up a bit & pairing the top albums with the top five posts of all time on eat!drink!snack! isn't change exciting?

has it been a good year for music so far? it's been aight i suppose. while the list of bands who've put out albums is impressive, the quality of those albums is much less so. over the last six months, we've had lackluster new efforts from a bunch of bands i expected more from--the decemberists, arctic monkeys, tv on the radio, the strokes, art brut, deerhoof, destroyer, okkervil river & the beastie boys.

even with all these letdowns, there have been a bunch of good albums released thus far. the dodos, pains of being pure at heart, yuck, man man, bon iver, the kills & radiohead have all put out albums that are worthy of being in my top five. in the end though, there were just too many albums to cram into a top five, so i sort of leaned toward my current faves.

as a predictor, last year only one of the songs from my mid-year albums list ended up on my end of year "top ten songs" list. in the previous year, four of my favorite mid-year albums had songs on the 2009 end-of-year list. how will this year's mid-year albums fare? more importantly, how drastically will my mood change by the end of december? you'll just have to stay tuned for another six months to find out!...or you can skip the next six months of amazing blog posts & check back here in january if you want to be a jerk about it. but for now, here are the top five...

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#192 - tv will rot your brain.

did you know that ten out of ten doctors say that network television programming will rot your brain? it's true! if you watch one too many episodes of so you think you can dance, desperate housewives, bob's burgers & we fixed your house unfortunate individual all in the same week, the organic matter that is your brain will LITERALLY begin to decompose & ooze out of our your cranial orifices like chicken juice escaping from the bottom of a non-HEFTY garbage bag, rendering you a nasty individual. your friends will begin asking questions, leading with "what the hell's leaking out of your ear?" & all you'll be able to do is mumble incoherently because of your rapid, tv-induced brain decomposition.

that's why i take cablenol...

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keeping up with the joneses.

um, have you been paying attention to the activities of folks with the last name "jones?" why not? what's wrong with you? i'm pretty sure that keeping up with them is supposed to be the american dream. have you given up on the american dream, comrade? well, it appears that you have, so here's a jones update. PAY ATTENTION, jones. the government is watching you to make sure you're still on board with the whole american dream concept, so you'll want to know this stuff:

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the fifty states project #4: IN.

have you ever seen the state seal of indiana? it's f'n crazypants! from what i can tell, it depicts a bison fleeing from an axe-wielding maniac. i'm SO jealous. growing up in NH, all we had on our seal was a picture of the richmond, some warship from the revolutionary war. LAME. here in new york, the seal depicts liberty, justice & a river. LAME. bison + axe-wielding maniac = AWESOMESAUCE. with a state seal like that, it must be the best state in the union, right? well...not exactly. i visited the northwest corner of the state just south of chicago a few years back & even though i only saw that one corner of the state, i'm pretty sure it's not the best state in the union. it's got a lot going for it though. i mean, to the untrained eye, indiana is nothing more than sports & corn, but a closer look reveals that it's actually a land with a rich history full of famous events & people & whatnot. you know johnny appleseed? dude wasn't born in indiana, but he totally died a sudden death one day in fort wayne, IN. history!

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#190 - overthinking snacks.

i listen to a LOT of podcasts. we're talking at least four-five hours worth of them on an average day. most of that listening's done whilst riding the subway & i haven't read a book in at least a year because the time that i used to spend reading books has been usurped by these podcasts. is not reading books good for my health? hell if i know but if it isn't i have dan savage & ira glass & kurt andersen & the moth to blame...& of course, as i mentioned a while back, the folks at npr.

one of my favorite podcasts is the overthinking it podcast, whose tagline is "subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve." overthinking it has been putting out a weekly, hilariously "intelligent," hour-or-so length podcast hosted by a rotating cast of "overthinkers" every week since february of 2008 & they just put out their 147th episode this past sunday. each episode begins with the panel of overthinkers answering a "question of the week" & from there they tackle a few different pop culture topics & meander into the minutiae of those topics, touching on countless other subjects along the way. sometimes they meander so much that they don't even get to the promised show topic. those shows are the best.

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