{"id":1648,"date":"2009-01-28T11:24:44","date_gmt":"2009-01-28T18:24:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1648"},"modified":"2009-01-28T11:24:44","modified_gmt":"2009-01-28T18:24:44","slug":"end_of_the_year_meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/28\/end_of_the_year_meme\/","title":{"rendered":"End of the Year Meme"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s kind of a silly thing to be thinking about now that we’re nearly a full month into 2009, but with the untimely passing of Shadow<\/a>, the Bennion Family Border Collie, as well as various other distractions during my holiday break, I never got around to doing my customary year-end wrap-up entries. I really dislike loose ends, so if you’ll bear with me for being so horribly untimely, I’d like to do some catch-up work now.<\/p>\n

First up is a meme I first did<\/a> back in December of 2007. Brian<\/a> and Ilya<\/a> are treating this like an annual tradition, so I guess I will now as well.<\/p>\n

The instructions on this one are simple: repost the first sentence of the first blog entry in each of the previous year’s 12 months. I guess the idea is to try and see if there’s any kind of pattern or recurring obsessions or something. So, without further ado:<\/p>\n


\nJanuary:<\/b> “How is it possible that Dick Clark, some 40 years older, debilitated by a stroke, and struggling mightily to make himself intelligible when he speaks, still has more zest and personality in his presentation than that human piece of melba toast Ryan Seacrest?”<\/p>\n

February:<\/b> “Enough.”<\/p>\n

March:<\/b> “Psst… heard about that ‘Cart Whisperer’ video that everybody’s been talking about over on YouTube?”<\/p>\n

April:<\/b> “The short version: The fifth Highlander<\/i> feature film, recently released directly to DVD, wasn’t as bad as I expected.”<\/p>\n

(For the record, I follow this sentence with “It was worse.” I can’t take even the slightest chance that anyone reading this might think I actually liked Highlander: The Suck<\/i>, er, Source<\/i> to any<\/i> degree. I still shudder at the mention of its title…)<\/p>\n

May:<\/b> “Via SF Signal, here’s an interesting link to a PDF that lists the books, movies, TV shows, and music stocked on board the International Space Station for the crew’s off-duty entertainment.”<\/p>\n

June:<\/b> “Some of you may have noticed something missing from your lives the last couple of days… namely this entire blog! ”<\/p>\n

July:<\/b> “…so, in lieu of a proper entry, here’s a silly Internet quiz!”<\/p>\n

(The entry’s title was the lead-in for this sentence, so I guess the complete thing ought to read “It’s turning out to be another busy week, so, in lieu of a proper entry, here’s a silly Internet quiz!”)<\/p>\n

August:<\/b> “A couple years ago, I took note of a new housing development in Bend, Oregon, that was to be modeled after the bucolic Shire of Tolkien’s (and Peter Jackson’s) Lord of the Rings<\/i>.”<\/p>\n

September:<\/b> “One of the best-known voices in the world has fallen silent. ”<\/p>\n

October:<\/b> “Hello?”<\/p>\n

November:<\/b> “I read last week in a couple of different places that JVC, the last electronics manufacturer still making VHS-format videocassette recorders, has stopped production of standalone VCR units.”<\/p>\n

December:<\/b> “For many years, it’s been something of a parlor game among the nerdy classes to speculate on what would happen if one of the starships Enterprise<\/i> from the Star Trek<\/i> franchise faced off in battle against an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars<\/i>. ”<\/p>\n

And there you have it: griping about the younger generation’s bland media personalities, a work tie-in, Highlander<\/i>, space exploration, silly quizzes and memes, The Lord of the Rings<\/i>, a celebrity obituary, a eulogy for obsolete media, and finally, Star Trek<\/i> and Star Wars<\/i>. Just another year of the same old crap, it looks like. Good to know there’s still some<\/i> consistency in this shaky old world, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

I’ll be back later with more of 2008 in review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s kind of a silly thing to be thinking about now that we’re nearly a full month into 2009, but with the untimely passing of Shadow, the Bennion Family Border Collie, as well as various other distractions during my holiday break, I never got around to doing my customary year-end wrap-up entries. I really dislike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memes-and-quizzes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}