End-of-the-year wrap-up best-of hyphenation-palooza!

Best Film I Saw in 2003: Da Return of Da King. Oh god, just thinking about it makes me wanna see it again. Peter Jackson is a pimp. Samwise is King Pimp. Shelob is a spiderpimp. The Wachowskis should be strapped down in some sort of Clockwork Orange torture room and forced to watch this until they can only gibber "We won't fuck up a third act ever again".

Best Album I Didn't Steal in 2003: Elephant, by the White Stripes. This band makes you wish you were some sort of Detroit-area indiepop hipster so you could honestly say You Heard Them First. This album made my skaterpunk 13-year-old brother want to learn to play Delta blues and ask me questions about Robert Johnson. Meg and Jack should get some kind of newly-invented Nobel Prize for that alone.

Best Live Act of 2003: Tough category, seeing as how I actually went to more than one show this year. They were all consistently excellent. I'd favor The White Stripes, but unfortunately A) They had a shitty opening act that I was forced to sit through due to the lack of reserved seats, and B) We had to sit for like 87 years in between acts watching old cartoons that got progressively more irritating. The Stripes had to put on an amazing show to make up for it, and they did. But I keep coming back to the Zwan show at the Warfield in May. Hearing something like the 14 minute epic "Jesus I/Mary Star of the Sea" performed in reverse order with bleeding-fingertip solos by the rejuventated Billy Corgan and getting to witness the thundering genius of Jimmy Chamberlain was made even more thrilling to me since I now realize in retrospect that I'll never get to see them again. A damned shame.

Best Interweb Time-Waster that I only recently discovered in 2003: I'd say this Blogger business, but I mustn't bite the hand that feeds me. So I'm going to go with Internet Wayback Machine. Nothing like perusing those lost websites of yore. Like this one here.

Best TV Show of 2003: This is the year Six Feet Under finally supplanted Sopranos for me. Sopranos was merely amazing, but SFU was transcendant. All I have to say is: What did poor Lisa ever do to anybody?

You thought I was going to say Rich Girls, huh? Just wait, the second season will be my pick for 2004, when I understand...

(SPOILER)

...Jamie and Ally go shopping.

Most Important News Story of 2003: Where were you when you first heard the news about the World's Drunkest Man?

Return of the King will OWN you

I've seen it twice already. Oh dear Buddha, this thing is amazing. There's about a million fucking orcs, 50 foot tall war elephants with LAWNMOWERS (no shit) between their tusks, the best flaming-body-jumping-off-a-cliff suicide EVER, a big honkin' volcano, D-Day with swords and horses, an army of ghost mercenaries, leggy blondes, catapults firing severed heads, hot beacon-lighting action (Seriously. People were cheering at beacon fires being lit. Does Peter Jackson know how to work a crowd or what?), an orc general that looks like Sloth from The Goonies, a hobbit that looks like Mikey from The Goonies, the most pants-shittingly humongous spider ever made, Mordor gets nuked, all the hobbits end up naked and lying in a pile. Okay, I fibbed a little on that last one, BUT NOT BY MUCH.

I don't even know how to rate this thing. I went for that whole 4-star scale before, but this one breaks it completely. I give it, like, 8 stars. You may not even need to watch any movies ever after this. Well, except the Extended Edition next year, if you are so inclined.

Saddam Hussein captured, world peace declared. Film at 11.

Click here to send me your own captions.

"Open wide and say 'Great Satan'." - Me

"Aha! So that's where you've been hiding the WMD's!" - Me

"Osama? You in there?" - Me

"You are one of the worst tyrants of the century. You have used your people as playthings and murdered untold numbers of your own citizens. Also, you need a Tic-tac." - Me

"Guess where this tongue-depresser was before you came in?" - Me

The Mix CD of Mystery

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Triumph

Sure, the Dell Guy and Jared from Subway are bullet-riddled fish in the proverbial barrel; that doesn't mean they don't NEED to be capped on. Go buy Triumph's new CD+DVD "Come Poop With Me". "I Keed" and "Together in Pooping" are the best laughs I've had since hearing Arnold float a tax hike.

Inflation OR "That's how they getcha!"

Found this nice little inflation calculator today. Among other things, I found that the $9.50 movie ticket I bought last night would have cost me $3.13 in 1977, the year I was sent to this planet. But over on this site it says that the average ticket price in 1977 was $2.23. So what this all means is ... I don't know. Ticket prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation? Ugh, math hard.

Until I hear otherwise, I'll just assume I'm being hideously gouged at the box office and everywhere else for that matter. Except for Lord of the Rings. Hot damn, I'd pay $20 to go see that. Can you believe somebody spent $9.50 to see 2 Fast 2 Furious? You know what really bugs me?

(Is immediately sent cease-and-desist order from Andy Rooney, even before this post is published)

Oh, nevermind.

The Lord of the Underpants: Extra-Stretched Edition

As inspired by this discussion on Fark.com, may I present the Fellowship of the Underpants!

Aragorn: You have my sword...
Legolas: ...and you have my bow...
Gimli: ...and my underpants.
----
Galadriel: Even the smallest underpants can change the course of the future.
----
Gandalf: It reads: The underpants of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak friend and enter.
Merry: What d'you suppose that means?
Gandalf: Oh, it's quite simple. If you are a friend, you speak the password, and the underpants will open.
----
Gandalf: Underpants? It was underpants that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill before this is over. The underpants of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.
----
Gandalf: There is only one Lord of the Ring, only one who can bend it to his will. And he does not share underpants.
----
Boromir: And what would a Ranger know of this matter?
Legolas: This is no mere ranger! He is Aragorn, son of Arathorn. You owe him your underpants.
----
Butterbur: Gandalf...Gandalf...Oh yea I remember elderly chap, big gray underpants, pointed hat. Not seen him for six months.
----
Gimli: I will be dead before I see the Ring in the underpants of an elf!
----
Gandalf: All we have to decide is what to do with the underpants that is given to us.

Gentlemen, BEHOLD!

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned From Watching Kill Bill is finished. Jake and I had a blast making it, and I hope your viewing of it is similarly blast-worthy. I envision it playing at some college campus midnight movies some day, with over-enthusiastic coeds standing in line dressed in off-white tees and blue shorts, waving around plastic swords and screaming warcries, whilst some poor "Watching Kill Bill-virgin" has to dress as the oleander bush.

Incidentally, I'd like to thank Rachel for letting me hack up her bushes, the good folks at Grace Bakery for the delicious bread, my neighbors for not calling the cops, and Jake for all the hard work editing it (believe it or not, we spent hours filming this).

But enough of my yakking. Click here to view it, or right click to save it to disk. BEWARE: This sucker's big, like 28 megabytes or so. Don't do it unless you've got a connection worthy of the SHEER POWER.