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 loose ends, so if you’ll bear with me for being so horribly untimely, I’d like to do some catch-up work now.

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

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:

January: “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?”

February: “Enough.”

March: “Psst… heard about that ‘Cart Whisperer’ video that everybody’s been talking about over on YouTube?”

April: “The short version: The fifth Highlander feature film, recently released directly to DVD, wasn’t as bad as I expected.”

(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, er, Source to any degree. I still shudder at the mention of its title…)

May: “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.”

June: “Some of you may have noticed something missing from your lives the last couple of days… namely this entire blog! ”

July: “…so, in lieu of a proper entry, here’s a silly Internet quiz!”

(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!”)

August: “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.”

September: “One of the best-known voices in the world has fallen silent. ”

October: “Hello?”

November: “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.”

December: “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 from the Star Trek franchise faced off in battle against an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars. ”

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

I’ll be back later with more of 2008 in review.