2007 was a good year for this 22 year old guy from Ohio. Below is a quick and poorly written recap of what I think it worth mentioning in regards to the common year starting on a Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century.
THE GOOD ~
- Sports.
- I’ll get this out of the way first, it was a terrific year for Cleveland Sports. How funny does that sound? The Cavs made it to The NBA Finals, the Tribe beat the Yankees only to loose to Boston in the ALCS (of which I attended Game 3), and the Browns had a double-digit winning record for the first time since 1994. Of course, the Cavs got swept, the Tribe couldn’t capitalize on a 3-1 game series lead, and the Browns saw no post-season action, but I see good things in the future.
- Film.
- In my opinion it was a mediocre year in film, but I enjoyed American Gangster, Superbad, 300, Ratatouille, Stardust, and ofcourse, The Simpsons Movie. Seriously, Stardust was incredible. I haven’t seen No Country for Old Men, Accross the Universe, or There Will Be Blood, but something tells me that if I had they would be on this list as well. There won’t be a television section in this post, but there were two lengthy multi-episode documentaries worth mentioning: The BBC’s Planet Earth was beautifully filmed and extremely interesting, and I also enjoyed PBS’ The War, a great WWII series by Ken Burns with an outstanding soundtrack.
- Print.
- I didn’t read as much as I wanted to, and some of the following are by no means 2007 releases, they are simply what I was into this past year: I enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s “Rant”, both Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” and “Big Sur“, and Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”. I also enjoyed countless hours of “MySQL/PHP Database Applications, 2nd Edition” by Brad Bulger, et al., among other readings.
- Video Games.
- The Wii is a ton of fun, but I haven’t yet found a game that has won my complete attention over the classic Super Mario Bros. game that can be downloaded and played for hours or days. Super Mario Galaxy was enjoyed for the short time I had with it. Other than that, I didn’t play too much console stuff this time around. Valve’s The Orange Box was an awesome deal for a classic Half-Life 2 with both expansions, Team Fortress 2, and Portal, an extremely fun and addicting play that takes steps like no other game. I thought Bioshock ripped it up in all ways possible, the story was awesome and the graphics and design were probably of the best I have ever seen. Say what you will about this next one, but Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion absolutely consumes me in every way. I love it throughly and 9 million other subscribers obviously agree. EA’s SimCity Societies also tore it up, even though its a step down from 1999’s SimCity 3000. I also spent a lot of time in 2007 with Age of Empires III, another excellent play. I have yet to play the expansions, and probably shouldn’t if I want to stay un-addicted and graduate college.
- The Web.
- Waffles.fm saved the world. Last.fm was cool for a little while. Gmail finally went public (though still Beta, how?) in February. Gary Vaynerchuk does a great job with his daily Wine Library TV video podcast. I know the show’s subject matter is snobby wine, but just watch an episode or two and you’ll see what I’m talking about, the man has talent and screen presence. VBS.TV by NYC’s own Vice Magazine is an awesome replacement for your normal television programming, with shows like El Dorado and Thumbs Up!. I love Thumbs Up! and can’t get enough of it, eagerly awaiting Monday’s weekly update. Zeitgeistmovie.com gave me a few nightmares and was also a good experience, check it out.
- Technology.
- The Blackberry Curve released mid-2007, and I picked one up late. It’s a very impressive product capable of doing much of the famed iPhone, for about $500 cheaper. It’s not the iPhone but I dig everything about it, and have no complaints. The open-source community saw much attention in 2007 with the success of Ubuntu, a user-friendly novice version of Linux. I purchased two cameras in 2007, a low-end DV handheld Panasonic PV-GS80 video cam and a Olympus FE-280 point-and-shoot still cam. Video quality is good, battery life is great, and the widescreens cool on the PV-GS80. The FE-280 takes decent pics, not much more to say other than it has good battery life and is super compact. The good thing about both of these cameras is the price, I picked up the still cam for under $180, and the DV cam was around $270 (early 2007), both are great products for the money. I also built a budget gaming PC, capable of running the latest games decently. The price was just under $600 from newegg.com and includes the following: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Windsor 2.2GHz, ASUS M2N-E AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 Mobo, Crucial Ballistix 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, WD 120GB SATA HDD, 256MB GeForce 8500GT 128-bit by Leadtek, and a DVD-RW drive by Asus. Again, far from top of the line, but an excellent machine for the price. Also, I discovered Netflix in early 2007, use it often, and think its incredible.
- Music.
- A good year for music in my opinion, heres what I was into: Beirut – The Flying Club Cup, Daft Punk – Alive 2007, Arcade Fire – Neon Bible, Radiohead – In Rainbows, Amon Tobin – Foley Room, Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, The White Stripes – Icky Thumb, Black Lips – Good Bad Not Evil, LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver. I also witnessed the live entertainment sensation that is Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band live in Cleveland, which was life changing. Also Beirut in Chicago at the Portage Theater was a blast, and !!! at the Grog Shop was an excellent show. I also went to my forth consecutive Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee, but you can read more about that below.
- Travel.
- I went to my fair share to some of America’s finest destinations in 2007. NYC with Jamie was a lot of fun, can’t wait to go back. Philadelphia is a beautiful place, with a heavy dose of history, I enjoyed that stop a lot. The trip out west to a town named Las Vegas was a good time, could have been better in certain spots I think, but still a great time with about 8 great friends. This also included my first ever plane experience, which was lovely. A few other stops include Chicago (3 times!) (read: Wrigley Field) and a great overnight trip to the Ohio Island of Put-in-Bay. I love traveling, and did a decent share of it in 2007, kinda.
- People.
- Barack Obama, Christopher Hitchens, Thom Yorke, Al Gore, and Romeo Crennel are a few people who caught my eye in 2007. I don’t really know what else to say, who am I to write a Best of People 2007 section anyway? And seriously Obama is the man.
THE BAD~
- Windows Vista sucked so hard it’s not even funny. It seems we’ve had XP for over a decade, and where the shiny sleek graphics were a decent effort, the overall performance of the entire OS was dogshit. Sure there are plenty of good things to come from it, but at this point, I’m going back to XP until a service pack or two changes a lot of things that need attention.
- This whole lame-ass Apple Movement is really getting to me. Never before has a trademark in the technology field actually equated to a fashion statement or status symbol. Apple makes some fantastic products, but lets get over this whole life style thing. Take off your black-framed glasses, put down your latte and realize that in 10 years people will be on VH1’s “Remember the 2000s” with washed up celebs saying things like, “what was up with Apple, you had to have an iPod to be cool back then, I had one”. They’re just products, good ones at that, just stop being pretentious about a computer. Oh and their marketing campaigns are bullshit and annoying, stop it Apple.
- I’m just gonna go ahead and lump the next things within one bullet point for the fact that I am getting tired or writing this list. What was up with tasers in 2007? I watched a handful of videos that made me rather angry. Of course people have been getting tased for a long time, and the abundance of cellphone cameras and flash-based video websites could simply make it seem more horrific. I’m also sick of web-based Social Networks, and it seemed 2007 was a big year for them as well. I like keeping up with friends, but theres so many of them it seems to be loosing its point. Facebook went to shit becoming overloaded with stupid cartoon pirate games and buy-me-a-drink crap that was cool for 3 minutes. To me, too many sites have the ability to have friend lists, comments, “about me” sections, and everything else. Social Networks are becoming the New Jersey of the Web 2.0 era.Cleveland was rated the poorest city in America in 2007, thats pretty lame/depressing. Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween was hilariously retarded. I enjoyed it for a moment before realizing instead of remaking it he was actually changing the whole point of the movie, trying to show the audience who Micheal Meyers really was. I know it was his interpretation of the film, but he did a shitty job of it, so thanks for nothing. The TV show Lost completely lost my interest in 2007, so I stopped watching. You can only answer questions with more questions for so long before I’ll give up on it. From what I hear it supposed to wrap up in get better in 2008, so I plan on catching up by illegally downloading and watching via bit torrent. A few more bad things: The VT shootings were pretty messed up. What was up with a bridge on the Mississippi River just collapsing? The writer’s strike was lame, but well-deserved and probably necessary. And the Amazon Kindle sucks, and is stupid.
THE UGLY~
- Bonnaroo 2007 sucked. Seriously what the F was Clutch doing on the lineup? And how could Tool and The White Stripe’s have brought in such a large amount of shitty people? It wasn’t Bonnaroo. The Flaming Lips set was lame enough for me to fall asleep, even Tool’s set was mediocre. Why didn’t they book The White Stripes set on the main stage? What the F was Wolfmother doing on the lineup? The Police sucked horribly, and didn’t even play their full time slot. Don’t get me wrong I saw some great sets, but it’s gonna take a hell of a lineup to get me to go back to what seems to be declining into a mainstream muscle-Tee tribal tattoo pop-rock fest. The Decemberists, Franz Ferdinand, Bob Weir (sigh), Kings of Leon, Regina Spektor, The Black Keys, North Mississippi Allstars, HOT CHIP, David Cross, and Galactic were a few good sets I caught.
- OINK.cd gets shut down. Seriously, this was such an ugly and sad day. Screw the RIAA, I won’t go into why I hate them, and it wasn’t even the RIAA that brought Oink down, but rather a UK equivalent. You cannot and will not stop online illegal filesharing of music. It will go on forever. Stop holding onto album sales to keep the industry afloat, the music world is going to have to change. New means of providing good content through innovative ways is a start. Criminalizing college kids and anyone else who uses the internet to expand their musical interest is a bad idea. More bands have made money off ME through means of illegally downloading music (thats how I find new artists) then had I not got into a band in the first place. I go to shows, I buy merchandise, I use word of mouth to create more fans for the band, they buy more, etc, hell I even buy a CD or a DVD here and there. Stop being such a jerk recording industry, people are starting to hate you, and you will fail.
- Gas Prices. 3 Dollars a gallon is fucking disgusting. What the hell is going on? I know I know its this persons fault and this parties fault and this countries fault. The bottom line is were paying 3 dollars a gallon for gas, and fucking accepting it. New affordable technology will emerge. Fuck big oil.
- I believe the Ohio Smoking Ban is crap, and don’t agree with it. I don’t smoke, and hate inhaling second hand smoke, but something about the fact that the state can tell a business owner what they can or can’t do with their business regarding a legal activity is something to think about.
- The war in Iraq is getting even uglier, and I’m happy to see the majority of the country turn against it. 2007 was a big year for people changing how they felt about the war, but its kind of too late. I hate to say the liberals told you so, but the GOP fucked this one up big time, and it won’t be soon forgotten.
I kind of ran out of steam towards the end of this list, and I’m sure theres loads im forgetting.
Till next time, Happy New Year.
