The inevitable"Year End Wrap-Up," sort of.

It's hard for me to do a "year end pop culture wrap-up/best of" thing, since I've felt so out of touch with a lot of pop culture since parenthood set in. I think I went to the movie theater maybe 4 times all year. My Netflix list is mostly filled with TV shows at the moment, and it tends to take me a good 3 or 4 weeks to get through a single disc. The best CD I bought all year actually came out in 2005 (Mike Doughty's "Haughty Melodic"). And while I enjoy the new Weird Al Yankovic CD, it dawned on me the other day that I've only ever heard one of the original versions of the five parody songs on the record. So did becoming a dad make me lame, or is it just a convenient excuse for my lameness? The world may never know (though I suspect the latter answer is closer to the truth).

So the following things rocked my tiny little sphere of existence in 2006, regardless of whether they actually came out the past year or not. Any glaring omissions you perceive are most likely attributable to the fact that I don't get out as much as I used to, which was never very often to begin with:

• The aforementioned "Haughty Melodic" by Mike Doughty
• V for Vendetta, which I actually liked better than the book.
• Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E.
• Doctor Who
• "Putting the Days to Bed" by the Long Winters
• Heroes
• An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, edited by Ivan Brunetti
• Jack's Big Music Show
• X-Men: The Last Stand
• Godzilla: Final Wars
• That Snakes on a Plane song by Cobra Starship
• Dan Zanes and Friends
• Arrested Development
• "Twin Cinema" by the New Pornographers
• Spellbound
• The theme song from Veronica Mars ("We Used to Be Friends" by the Dandy Warhols)
• Supergirl and the Legion of Super Heroes
• The Little White Mouse Omnibus
• Mad Hot Ballroom
• Justice League Unlimited
• Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (for about the 5th or 6th time)
• Darwyn Cooke's version of The Spirit
• Hell, just about anything by Darwyn Cooke (Overstock.com can't ship my copy of Absolute New Frontier fast enough!)
• The Marvel Adventures books (esp. Spider-Man and The Avengers)
• The magazine-sized collected editions of those books sold at Target
• Agents of Atlas
• Battlestar Galactica
• My father-in-law's homemade pizza
• The Comic Geek Speak podcast and forum
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
• Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
  

...and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure I've forgotten. A year is a long time to remember stuff, especially if you have an Etch-a-Sketch brain like mine and don't take a lot of notes. So this list is by no means comprehensive, but I guarantee it's accuracy; I really did enjoy these things. And I think that counts for something.