The Wire

• Watching football is a big waste of time. The average NFL game features only about 11 or 12 minutes of live gameplay content. The rest is replays, crowd shots, loitering, promos, and so on. But is this really a problem? When watching a game by myself, I can play with my daughter, read blogs, work (as I’m doing right now — Hi mom! — there’s 6:16 to go in Cowboys-Vikings!), etc. without really missing much, and lots of people Tivo games anyway. When watching games with friends, there’s plenty of breaks in the football we can use to discuss football. Who really loses in this arrangement? ELSEWHERE IN SPORTS: Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, and Other Pitching Stats based on one man’s Peanuts extrapolatin’. No, not this Charlie Brown.
• Regarding the strange and unreadable Esquire thing about Jay-Z… Oh man. Plenty of writers had problems with its content, while others focused on its baffling syntax. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I liked that “campefire flickers” line.) I’m not sure which part of this messy, messy article qualifies as a “Best” anything. It’s the most forced writing I’ve ever read — it reads like it was written by a suburban 15-year-old boy who always looks for chances to remind his teachers that Mos Def is poetry. Maybe it’s the article’s amazing music-writer-unifying properties, as the spectacle of rap writers rallying to shoot it down was inspiring.
• OK OK, time for a Happy News Contest… I’ll trot out this one: apologetic Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates via Facebook. How are you gonna top that?
• One more… What movies like Die Hard express about the ways people interact with architecture.

Two Rich Guys Arguing

Jimmy Kimmel lays into Jay Leno on Leno’s own show. Around 1:40, Kimmel dings Leno and Leno refuses to play along. You can see Kimmel’s eyes light up, as he realizes he gets to tee off on Leno for the next four minutes. Jay loses his audience, and all he can do is wait it out. I don’t watch any of these shows, so I don’t really have a dog well-trained competitor in this fight, but Leno is impossible to like at this point.

“Why would anybody ever wanna leave Baltimore? That’s what I’m askin’.”

The new trailer for Treme, the upcoming series by The Wire’s creators:

Heads up, friends: This post is part of ENGINE’s decade-closing blogsplosion. Click here to witness the rest of the damage. The aughties!

Everybody’s seen 100,000 or so 10 Best Movies of the Decade lists by now. But how many Top 10 Superhero Deaths lists have you seen?

While building yesterday’s monster list of the worst-of-the-decade lists, I came across plenty of oddball lists that contribute mightily to the art and science of original listmaking. Here are 10 of the best and uniquest*.

• 5 Life Lessons Learned from the Ladies of 00s Movies by Jezebel
• 10 Best Standalone TV Episodes by Pajiba
• 10 Biggest One-Hit Wonders by Billboard
• 22 Best Comedy Albums by the AV Club
• 35 Most Collectible Books by AbeBooks
• Best American Sports Writing by Deadspin
• Best T-shirt Designs by Abduzeedo
• Film’s 10 Best Music Moments by Cinema Blend
• Top 10 Birds by Search and Serendipity [Top 10 Birds!]
• Top 100 Sneakers by Complex

* - Sorry.

• In The Office According to The Office, son nerds out on some business theory, evaluating the American version of (and some of the British) The Office as a workplace thesis instead of as a work of TV comedy.
• 5% of fans expect customer service, but 100% deserve it: When polled, very few people admit the reason they interact with businesses via social media is to get service. But when asked how they would like companies to interact with them, a majority wished for service. Revealing! Your customers want great service, but they don’t want to have to go out of their way to seem like they want it.
• MONTAGE TIME: Titled “The Wire - 100 Greatest Quotes,” it’s not quite that, but it comes close. The source is too rich — I mean, you could make a fantastic video of just the 100 greatest Bunk quotes. This actually works as a decent trailer for the show and hits enough plot points to feel like a brief recap.

  Not child-friendly, due to cussiness:

  No “Got to. This is America, man”? No “How my hair look, Mike?” No Dookie or Namond? “They screw up, they get beaten. We screw up, we get a pension”? Kima’s version of “Goodnight, Moon?” This could go on forever. But I’d be lying if I said it was easy to only watch this video twice in a row!