Because the best time to make a list of your favorite albums of the year is less than three hours after you’ve had two teeth yanked from your lower jaw, with the dentist breaking one in the process and having to poke around in the hole to tweeze out all the root fragments—right?

10.  Mission of Burma, The Obliterati, 2006
It has its flaws, like the too-sludgy sound throughout and the fact that they let their drummer, Peter Prescott, write a few of the songs when they shouldn’t.  But I’ve been missing guitar breaks for a while, . . .

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I came across this machine when I was at a Mall in Roseville, Minnesota. In case you can’t tell, those are iPods and iPod accessories in the vending machine for when you have that hankering that a diet coke just won’t quench…

I’m having trouble typing this because my fingers are just that cold today at work. Yes, it’s Minneapolis, and yes, it’s about 13 degrees outside, but that doesn’t mean that other workplaces downtown have not managed, somehow, to heat their offices above absolute zero.

My office was a sad place already, before the freeze. Due to the demise of one of our magazines over a year ago, there are only four of us left, clustered into one lit corner of an entire floor of office space. Past the bathrooms, empty cubicles sit in the dark — long-ago gutted of any . . .

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Sometimes people who design buildings, furniture, cars etc. are surprised by some of the unforeseen design flaws. We, for instance, recently had to purchase a new metal bed-frame because the free one that came with the new bed we bought made this sporadic clicking noise all throughout the night. I don’t know what put me more on edge, the clicking noise — or waiting for the next cadre of clicks to start-up.

Still, I understand that sometimes someone overlooks things when creating something. And that makes sense. But perhaps the least forgivable design flaw that I’ve seen or heard about . . .

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