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?