I think this will be a tradition to do on Christmas day. No write-ups this year, because I lost my write-ups, and I didn't like them much anyway. I will note, to everyone's relief, that the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell song just barely missed the cut.

Ten Best Songs of 2009

10. Animal Collective - My Girls
9. K'Naan - Take a Minute
8. jj - Things Will Never Be the Same Again
7. DJ Quik and Kurupt - Nine Times Outta Ten
6. Yo La Tengo - Gentle Hour
5. The xx - Stars
4. Run Toto Run - Sleepyhead
3. Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me
2. Phoenix - 1901
1. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Hysteric

When I was making this list, I sort of realized how much all my favourite music just sounds like Coldplay.

I hope everyone is doing well this December. Today it's Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a good day. Maybe a merry day, but maybe just a nice quiet secular day. When someone wishes me merry Christmas it sounds insensitive, and when someone wishes me happy holidays it sounds kind of awkward. I should just realize that people are just trying to wish that I have a good time this winter. Have a good time this winter, everyone.

I remember learning the story of Jacob and Esau, to be honest like two months ago, the way Esau was going to get a birthright and a blessing, but Jacob and his mother were much craftier, and they snuck in and took them both for Jacob. And Esau the older brother stays a hunter, but Jacob the younger brother becomes Israel, becomes the new patriarch because he won the birthright and the blessing.

And I think at the time, all I felt was that it was wrong, that my people and everyone else's people had descended from not just a trickster, but a hustler. From a man who could have just given his brother some food, but instead he would have let him starve, held the food hostage until he got something valuable. I hated the way Esau went outside and worked all day, but Jacob was the only one who got rewarded. I hated the way their mother had a favourite. Jacob was sort of like an underdog because he was the youngest, but he had so much entitlement; he just lucked into God's favour while his brother was out there earning it.

There's a Wiretap show online about Jacob and Esau, and when I saw it, I hoped it would answer my question, what was so great about Jacob. And it answered the question, but it did so much more. It wove together the lives of Jacob and Esau, as children and adults, with their mother and without her. It turned everything into a story about shame, about guilt, about jealousy and forgiveness. It says everything that needs to be said about how it works to have a brother.

If you are curious about the Bible, or if you have a brother, or if you are my brother, and if are willing to spend half an hour listening to a short story, then go to this Wiretap archive, Season 6, and look for the Jacob and Esau show. It was pretty magical.

Google suggestions are my Jaywalking.

In every movie I watch, Philip Seymour Hoffman is my proxy for me. He's just got a voice -- an educated, uncomfortable egghead voice -- and I know he's going to be the closest thing in the movie to me. A guy who groans a lot, who follows sports because he likes the statistics. A guy who doesn't go to strip clubs. A guy who doesn't get it but still he gets it.

But then they put him in the room with any woman, or with any guy who's got street smarts, and he's just an idiot. Not uncomfortable, like he's a smart guy who's out of his element, but actually stupid, like he's an idiot. Like all of a sudden, this character who's a literature professor can't understand how subtext works.

And I'll take credit, because I can stammer when I sit with girls and I can get squeaky when I sit with the tough guys, but I still know how to ask for directions. I still how know to sit in a waiting room, how to give someone space when they're upset. I can still function in public.

The movie I'm watching now, he teaches high school poetry, because he's an egghead, and that's fine, that might end up being me someday. But in the movie, he's obsessed with his student, his high school student, because he's sad and lonely, because that's supposed to be what eggheads are like. And naturally, sometimes when you get sad and lonely, you turn to pedophilia. That's supposed to be how it works when someone is an egghead.

And then he goes out and spends some time with Barry Pepper, and Barry Pepper tells him how the waitress has great tits, because of course that's what you do when you have street smarts, you slick back your hair and evaluate women's tits. And Philip Seymour Hoffman, instead of just telling the guy Come on, instead of asking How's your wife doing, his answer is that he completely stumbles over a monologue about My Friend. You see, My Friend, who's also a high school teacher, is seriously falling for a sixteen-year-old girl, who is, like, well technically, she's one of My Friend's students, I guess at his high school. And My Friend is so embarrassed about this, and the girl thinks he's old and gross, but My Friend just can't stop thinking about her, and well, you know, maybe it could turn into a serious thing.

And it's kind of depressing but it's mostly just insulting, like, because Philip Seymour Hoffman is still my Brendan proxy in every movie, because in general he's today's definition of what a nerd is like. And I'm pretty sure most real nerds don't act like that, but I know there are people going That sounds just like that librarian, that college professor, that one guy I know who reads New York Times, who's always just kind of awkward, kind of surprised to see me. I bet he tells the most humiliating, transparent lies when he meets his cool friends.

And you could put me in any group and I'd still be one of the nerds in the group, like, even in a group of nerds. But just being awkward doesn't mean I can't speak the vernacular, doesn't mean I can't shoot the fat with you, doesn't mean I'm not in control of my own hands and mouth. Somehow Spike Lee thinks there's something seriously broken about guys like me, that we can't handle ourselves like grown-ups. Which is stupid, because in his way, Spike Lee is also an egghead. Probably everyone involved in a Philip Seymour Hoffman movie is some kind of egghead, but they still make the egghead the one character who doesn't have any dignity.

So if Philip Seymour Hoffman is the best Brendan they can find to put in a movie, then it seems like a guy like me should have no business leaving his house in the morning. Like for whatever reason, someone out there is trying really hard to tell me that I don't know how a conversation works.

This is a pretty great Brendan Shanahan story. (Via Puck Daddy.)

Tis not enough your counsel still be true --
Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.

(Alexander Pope has a message for all you straight shooters.)

Dear everyone I meet at work,

When you write out your email address, please include all the letters and symbols, and put them in the correct order. Do not abbreviate your email address. Do not make typoes.

Thank you for your time,

-Brendan

What I want is a site that says how to get rid of expired eggs.
What Google offers me is fifty sites about whether I should eat expired eggs.