So anyway.  I realized today that I had forgotten about listing my top five favorite albums of 2006.  It was a pretty weird year for music, but we ended up with some really good CDs in spite of it.  So here they are for your reading pleasure.

5. The Flaming Lips - At War with the Mystics:  Modern psychedelia at its best.  Not as memorable as their last two albums and maybe not quite as timeless, but still the most creative album that came out this year.
4. Editors - The Back Room:  More than just a band that's around to hold us over till the next Interpol album.  These guys are straight out of the Joy Division mold, as everyone's been saying, but they've got the chops and the passion to make it happen.  The more I hear The Back Room, the better it gets.  "Open Your Arms" is an amazing song that soars high.
3. The Decemberists - The Crane Wife:  These guys are a great band of musicians and Colin Meloy is a sly storyteller.  He's also got an amazing vocabulary.  The Crane Wife is another great installation in their already-impressive library. 
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones:  Different enough from Fever to Tell to be called a "departure" but rocks just as hard in all the right places.  When bands get as tense as these guys did, they're bound to come up with something this good.  The most emotional CD of 2006.
1. The Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers:  Jack White disappears (sort of) into this "supergroup" of indie darlings, and it all works out.  Rock and The Blues converge and the result is on par with the bes work of The Beatles, The Who, and more.  I'm not exaggerating.  Weighing in at ten tracks, it seems too short when it's over, but like most great albums, another song would just be filler.

Honorable mentions to The Strokes, Thom Yorke, Beck, and of course, Gnarls Barkley. 

Hey, I gotta run, this place is filling up with hipsters.  Smell ya later.

Aside of work, here's what's happening...  My birthday was about a week ago, but I didn't make a big deal out of it.  Having your birthday fall on a Monday can be a real bummer sometimes.  I went out to the Olive Garden at Solomon Pond with the family, though.  The waitress gave me a big cup full of Andes chocolate mints and we still have some in the fridge.  I don't wanna just plow through all of them, they're too good.  Mom's birthday was on Saturday.  We had brunch at the Beechwood in Worcester on Sunday, great stuff there. 

Fran and I saw Children of Men on Saturday night.  This was one of the movies that I was most looking forward to and I was pretty happy with it.  It's one of those "concept movies" that I really love to go out for.  The film is essentially what I thought V for Vendetta could have been had it been darker.  Children of Men takes place twenty years from now, and mankind has somehow ceased having children.  There's no explaination as to why it's happening, but the world has managed to fall into absolute chaos because of it.  While the rest of the world has been gone to war and terrorism runs rampant, Britain has become a full-on police state complete with internment camps and Orwellian touches that look frighteningly modern.  So imagine just how important one pregnant girl can become to a world that's lost all hope of a future.  There's some good twists and turns Clive Owen remains scruffy and brooding, like he's been doing in Sin City and Inside Man.  But that  certainly works here, because when you're one of the last men on earth you're probably going to have some issues.  Michael Caine and Julianne Moore give solid performances as well, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is outstanding.  But I think the strongest feature of this film is the cinematography.  There's some incredible scenes that are shot in one take.  The centerpiece of the picture is one of the most impressively orchestrated car chases I've ever seen, mostly because of the fact that it was shot inside the car.  The film's climax is also a long scene that seems to done in one take, but I found out that's not actually the case.  Still, it's great to watch. 

There's a lot to keep your eye out in this movie, so stay sharp.  If you're only paying attention to the dialogue and not to the stuff you're seeing in the background, you're going to be lost later.  I just find the film's ultimate irony is that in a world in which nobody can have kids, people manage to lose respect for human life completely by turning against one another.  One of the better movies of 2006.

That night I also watched The Baxter because I had it sitting around from Netflix for about a week.  It was written and directed by Michael Showalter of Stella, and also stars fellow Stella-mates Michael Ian Black and David Wain.  If you're a fan of the boys, you're going to at least want to check it out, but if you're also kind of emo or just a "nice guy" in general, you'll love it.  Michelle Williams is adorable as a love interest for Showalter's character, and the inclusions of Peter Dinklage, Paul Rudd, and American Psycho's Justin "Timothy Bryce" Theroux help round out the cast.  It's a great mix of silly and smart and it's worth checking out.

I'd love to talk about how great Top Chef and American Idol are, but I've already had plenty to say tonight.  Check you later.

That said, I hope everyone had a good New Year celebration.  I hung out at Anne and Shaun's with them, Greg, Gino, and Steph.  We all played Guitar Hero and card games.  It was great to hang out with some of my true homies after some craziness at work and such.  Speaking of work, I'll just say that it's been... interesting... the past couple of weeks.  It's not easy to get people into a buying mood when you start hitting the pavement in the last two weeks of the year.  It's tough, but I'm going to get the hang of it.

But it's good to have another weekend to enjoy now.  I have to admit that I'm actually happy that it's a regular weekend.  The past two weeks we've had three-day breaks and it's sort of messed me up.  Not to mention that a lot of people were on vacation last week, just making the office out to be pretty darn quiet.  We still manage to have fun, though.

Planned for the weekend: Create and upload the first episode of my re-launched video blogs.  Think of the show with ze frank only with less hair, a beard, and no viewers.  And on weekends.  Also in the works is a trip out for dinner tomorrow night, seeing as how my birthday is on Monday.  You didn't forget, did you?  DID YOU?