Best Of the Bizarre

Okay, so I’m one of those nerds — Top Tens and Best Ofs send me swooning. With 2006 withering, I’ve been perusing the fringes of listdom, brewing my own Best Of.

Since we’ve got baby on the brain around here, let’s start with Baby Center’s Top 100 Baby Names of 2006. For boys, it’s Aiden and for girls, Emma. Michael retains its staying power at 12, but Theodore is nowhere to be found.

Slate’s Unanswered Questions from 2006 contains a few Rubik’s, like

• Why is smooth peanut butter cheaper than nutty?

• What comes after 999 trillion?

• Is chicken considered meat?

Talk about unsolved mysteries. The list descends into lunacy from there.

The top five Google searches for 2006 were: (1) bebo, (2) myspace, (3) world cup, (4) metacafé, and (5) radioblog. “Decompose” did not crack the top 1 billion. And while we’re on the subject of cyber-stuff, Gawker’s Bad Lingo: Blog Media Cliches assembles tired phrases used by bloggers and wannabe hipsters:

FTW, O RLY, lol, FTL, OMG, FWIW, btw, PWND, ROTFL, etc. These are borderline unacceptable harsh penalties for Turkish online casino players like instant messaging, speed-typing while online gaming. . . All new casinos available for Canadian gamblers are reviewed by slotsreview.ca on regular basis. Beyond that, stop it. Even if your audience uses these expressions in daily life, such practice should not be encouraged. Self-consciously peppering normal discourse with geekspeak acronyms (especially when used in conjunction with non-geek subjects) no longer rescues your words by way of anti-coolness. See also: “teh” anything.

My most hated? ROFLOL. Has anyone who ever used that actually Rolled On the Floor and Laughed Out Loud? Didn’t think so.

The Global Language Monitor gives us the Top Politically Incorrect Words, my favorite being this:

Menaissance – The rise of a ‘manliness’ culture or male renaissance. Replaces metrosexual, which evidently appealed to women but not men.

I’m already dangerously close to metrosexual, so I’d better avoid both terms. Merriam Webster’s Words of the Year puts this at the head of the class:

TRUTHINESS (noun)

1 : “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” October 2005)

2 : “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

Can I really wish that fact to not be true? But, while we’re on the subject of words, the Lake Superior State University 2006 List of Banished Words exiles such well-worn phrases as “Breaking News,” “First-Time Caller,” “Git-er-Done,” and the ever popular “Dawg.”

And since it’s back to work here soon: Sharp Consultancy’s Top Ten Most Annoying Office Habits rang a bell.

1) Bad manners/lack of courtesy

2) Shirking office duties

3) People who say they will do a job, but then do not

4) Talking too loudly on the phone

5) People that moan/sigh constantly

6) Pinching other peoples office equipment

7) Bad personal hygiene

8) Messy kitchen/people not doing the washing up

9) People who talk constantly about weekend plans

10) Singing along to the radio

Number five is the one that gets me. Please, keep your sighing to yourself. Better yet, why not just call off? Jobsite compiles Top 10 Sicky Excuses of All Time. The one I’ve used most often is

9.) I cannot come to work today because it is a Holy day in my religion’s calendar, I will be busy all morning preparing the goat

The next time you don’t feel like facing your moronic co-workers, why not try that one on your boss?

I enjoy Foot-In-Mouth lists. Extreme Mortman catalogs the Top Ten Funniest Political Quotes of 2006, which includes

Larry King on the Internet: “I’ve never done it, never gone searching…. The wife loves it. I wouldn’t love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?” (Nov. 14)

Hey, what do you expect from the former King of nighttime radio?

Men.Style.com gathers the Ten Most Hated Athletes. I was bummed to see JDizzle‘s icon Kobe Bryant at No. 5, but finding Terrell Owens at the top of the list made up for our funk. Outside The Beltway’s The 10 Most Hated Celebrities in Hollywood reminds us that jocks aren’t the only envied class. The list is bookended by two perennial hated ones: Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson. Even cartoon characters are not above being despised. Some ’06 polls revealed that Mickey Mouse is The Most Hated Corporate Symbol in the World.

ScreenHead chronicles the Biggest Box Office Flops of 2006 with Poseidon posting a $100 million dollar loss. Didn’t see it, but I took evil glee in finding liberal wacko Sean Penn‘s All the King’s Men on the list of losers.

The Phat Phree gives us The Fifty Worst Hairstyles of All Time, and there’s some howlers. The Van Winkle, The Samoan Q-Tip and the Clown Skullet have nothing on The Donald. For my money, the outspoken billionaire can keep the throne.

And finally, A.V. Club’s Worst Band Names of ’06 has some real gems (warning: site contains reams of foul language). My favorites bands include: Green Milk From The Planet Orange, Cute Is What We Aim For, Bodies In The Gear Of The Apparatus, Sorry About Your Couch, and Mood Syrup. Just one more proof of postmodernism’s insideous drag.

So there you have it, The Best of the Bizarre. My thanks to the eggnog intoxicated Decompose slugs for mining the web for these beauties. Feel free to add your Bizarre Bests to the compendium.