Sean's Best and Worst of 2020

I should preface this post by mentioning that this is primarily about pop culture items. I mean 2020 has been a pretty lousy year overall, so this is more of a fun look at the last 12 months.

Best Television Show: Better Call Saul

I watched a good amount of TV this year. I finally got caught up on This Is Us, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Watchman. The Good Place concluded in 2020, and I enjoyed The Queen's Gambit and Fargo as well as The Last Dance documentary. (Schitt's Creek and The Boys are still on my list of shows that I want to see.) Even with all of these great shows that I just mentioned, Better Call Saul tops my list. The writing and the acting are just so good. I mean, two of the storylines from the show's fifth season were about a guy not wanting to sell his land/home and another about a construction project by a German engineer and his team. While I know that I'm understating this, on paper, this doesn't seem very exciting. It really is captivating and thrilling though.

Best Movie: Knives Out

I didn't see many "grown up" movies, but I enjoyed two 2020 movies geared for kids in Onward and Soul. Even though the film came out late in 2019, my favorite movie of the year was Knives Out. What a fun and funny film. It's a murder mystery with a family of dislikable characters but it really is fun watching Daniel Craig try to figure things out as the lead detective. 

Worst Movie: Tully

This is another movie from a few years ago that I just saw in 2020. It's not a bad movie, and there are certainly parts that I liked, but it falls into the worst movie category only because I didn't see very many films in 2020. Like Charlize Theron and her family in the film, we also have three kids so part of this film really hits close to home. What bothered me the most is how useless the father (played by Ron Livingston) is, especially when there's a major reveal that I won't spoil here. 

Best Song: Blinding Lights by The Weeknd

My rule is that the best song must be featured in a blog post at some point during the year. While I really like Midnight Sky by Miley Cyrus (who once had the worst song of the year) and strongly considered it, Blinding Lights by The Weeknd is a banger. It's the jam. It's the cat's meow. Am I using these words correctly? We'll just go with this. It's a really good and catchy song. By the way, congrats to The Weeknd for getting best song of the year twice now even though Starboy doesn't seem quite as good as it was four years ago.

Worst Song: ily by Surf Mesa featuring Emilee

You know the chorus to Frankie Valli's 1967 hit "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You." It's a fantastic song with a memorable chorus. Well, how about playing just the chorus over and over and over again with some type of layering? I can listen and like the first 20-30 seconds of the song, but after that, I'm switching the channel. 

Best Book: The first three books of the Harry Potter series

I do pretty much all of my reading during my commute to work. Since I've been working from home since the pandemic started, I've read exactly zero books for myself. While I read some books in January and February, I can't remember what they were. Because of this, the best books I read in 2020 were the first three Harry Potter books to The Moose (my 9 year old son). It's been a nice bonding experience reading them to him.

I'll add that I just bought two books that I'm really excited to read: The Big Door Prize by M.O. Walsh and The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. I wouldn't be surprised if one of these books is on the 2021 best of blog post.

Best Sports Moment of 2020: Manuel Margot Catch

This was a tough call. As a Pittsburgh sports fan, the Penguins exited the hockey playoffs much earlier than expected (more on that below) and the Pirates were lousy. The Steelers started the season 11-0 but lost three consecutive games and looked terrible in the process before rebounding after being down by 17 points on Sunday. So while there were championships with fans and then championships without fans in 2020, this catch by Manuel Margot of the Tampa Bay Rays in game one of the American League Championship Series is the play of the year to me. So cool, and seeing this live, I really thought he might have fallen into an abyss. 

Worst Sports Moment: The Pittsburgh Penguins

While I didn't expect the Penguins to win the Stanley Cup, I did expect them to defeat the 12th-seeded Montreal Canadians in the first round playoff series. The playoffs generally only have 8 teams per conference. Montreal wouldn't have even been close to reaching the playoffs in a typical year. Such a terrible series. 

Best Blog Post: Songs of 2000 & 2020s Predictions

This was an odd year for Sean's Ramblings. As I looked through my posts from this year, I was a lot more "serious" than usual. Lots of "heavy" posts about the pandemic, the state of the country, and my family including a post about my dad passing away. So while I don't know if these were the "best" posts, my posts about the songs of 2000 and predictions for the 20s decade were the most fun and more in line with my "typical" blog posts. Don't mind me as I continue to put words in quotes!

Worst Blog Post: Kangaroos Wanted

I wrote an entire blog post about someone looking for kangaroos for a kids' birthday party.

Best Musical: Hamilton

Have you heard about this show? It's about the guy on the $10 bill and was created by Lin-Manuel Miranda who was in one Brooklyn Nine Nine episode and one How I Met Your Mother episode. I never saw this live and for the most part avoided the music because I first wanted to hear and see it on stage. Well, I still haven't seen the show live, but I watched the film version of the show which was actually three performances of the show from June 2016. It lived up to the hype!

Best Podcast: Ya Jagoff!, Owls Americast, The Tony Kornheiser Show, and The Poscast

I don't listen to podcasts as much as I did when I was commuting to work, but I rarely miss episodes of these podcasts. I like listening to John and Rachael to hear about all the cool things going on in Pittsburgh on Ya Jagoff! Owls Americast is my connection with Sheffield Wednesday. The Tony Kornheiser Show gives me a sense of big sports stories (with some really good guests) along with various rants of Tony's life. And The Poscast is based around baseball but always makes me laugh. All of these podcasts gave me some normalcy in definitely abnormal times.

Best Blog: Josh's World

This might be the third or fourth time Josh's World has won this. I like Josh's take on things. Nothing against Josh, but I also need to expand the number of blogs I read. I tend to read the same sites, and there are fewer and fewer individual blogs each year.  

Please feel free to share some of your own best of and worst of 2020 in the comments section below.

If you're curious, you can see how some of my best of and worst of picks from the past few years hold up, please click here.

Franco Harris In Vegas?

You may have heard that Disney Plus released the musical Hamilton on its streaming service over the holiday weekend. I clearly don't understand the hype. Why a full musical about Richard "Rip" Hamilton and not mention anything about his time with the Detroit Pistons? I guess the focus was on his time in Washington.

Anyway, all of the Hamilton talk got me thinking about the last time I saw live theater. It was the incredible musical Come From Away in December at The Kennedy Center. This musical is based on 9/11 and the days immediately after, but from Gander, Newfoundland in Canada, a town of less than 10,000 who hosted approximately 7,000 people from international flights after the American airspace was closed. Once theater is back, I highly recommend seeing it.

Instead of turning off my phone during the performance, I switched it to vibrate. Near the end of the show, my phone started buzzing like crazy. I knew there wasn't much time left, so I avoided looking at my phone. In a completely dark theater, the light from my phone would have definitely distracted the people sitting near me. 

When the show ended, I exited as quickly as possible worrying that there was some type of emergency. Fortunately, everything was okay. My nephew tried to FaceTime me twice, and there was quite a text exchange from some friends. I won't use their real names here but here are the highlights.

M: This is *not* Franco Harris sitting right next to me, right? I've been trying to figure out for a full 5 minutes.

D: Yeah, the only immaculate thing that guy has done is somebody's taxes.

M: He's wearing a Wisconsin hat, which would militate against. But an "SI" jacket trends toward maybe? The Penn State game is on and he's not paying attention, so that probably seals the deal?

B:  The fries look good. Where are you?

M: At a place called Crack Shack in Las Vegas on the Strip. Quite good.In my defense, my wife was sitting right next to "Franco" and had to look at pics of real Franco for several minutes before declaring they were not a match.

D: You're at a place in Vegas called the Crack Shack? Those jokes can just write themselves. 

There were a lot more texts in this discussion, but nothing really relevant to "Franco Harris"

Go Steelers!

Hotter Ticket: Hamilton or Paw Patrol Live?

Earlier this week, there was a big announcement that Hamilton is coming to Washington's Kennedy Center during the 2017-2018 season. You may know Hamilton as the popular musical that just received a record 16 Tony nominations and is on its way to becoming one of the most successful musicals of all time. In addition, the show's creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. According to The Washington Post, "if you want a guaranteed shot at securing tickets for “Hamilton,” you’ll have to buy an expensive season subscription — for both the 2016-2017 and the 2017-2018 seasons."

Meanwhile, Paw Patrol, a Nickelodeon cartoon that is huge among my 5 year-old's preschool class, is beginning a live tour. You may know Paw Patrol if you have a child in the 3-6 range. To my knowledge, the show's creator did not win a "genius grant," but has probably done very well thanks to merchandise sales. Anyway, my friend forwarded me presale information for Paw Patrol Live at The Theater at Madison Square Garden from March 23-26, 2017.

So you read this correctly. You can buy tickets now (May 2016) to see Hamilton in DC sometime in 2017 or 2018. You can also buy tickets now (May 2016) to see Paw Patrol Live in New York in 10+ months. Both of these dates seem like a really long time from now.

Completely unrelated to these shows, I have no idea what I'm having for dinner tonight.