When Ben asked us to guest blog several things came to mind. First, are Neil and I really one person? Is this some kind of Fight Club thing where one of us has created an alter-ego? When Neil took Camp by storm as a 17-year old I repeatedly saw him doing or saying things I would do, except better than I would have said or done them. Does this make Neil Johnston my Tyler Durden? People sure call me “Neil” enough, so maybe I shouldn’t let those slide anymore... Though, I cannot say for sure without listening to “Where Is My Mind” by the Pixies, having an epic solo fight scene, and watching the destruction of financial buildings. Only one of those things is taking place right now. I’ll leave up to you to decide which one that is.
The second thing that came to mind was after Ben’s suggestion of a top-ten list: Beez is the list guy! Our friend, Beez, has the depth and breadth of knowledge to relate characters from across genres and Marvel galaxies. He is an aspiring fiction writer where I surely am not. The third thing was the pressure of coming up with a well-researched top-ten list that would live up to the journalistic integrity of Things Ben Likes. Not much needs to be said about this, because readers of this blog know exactly what that means.
Lists are all over the internet. Some of them are well thought out, researched, and clever and some are stupid. To start, I consulted the interweb and found some advice for creating a top-ten list. Yeah, no. We’re not doing that. I’ve already been a subject of a guest blog and all I had to do was chop up some sweet potato fries much less do actual research. When we started coming up with ideas we considered a novel concept (read cop-out): “Neil, why don’t we make a list of top-ten lists we would like to have other people write and just write our frivolous anecdotal comments that we would like to see in each list?” Thus our list of lists was born! Hopefully some of you readers out there feel inspired and can finish one of these lists.
Sports Movies
We both love sports movies. The test of a good sports movie is that the sport is just the backdrop, and everything else around it works well together: music score, acting, dialogue, scenery, etc. But let’s face it, for every Miracle out there, there’s also a Garbage Picking Field Goal Kicking Philadelphia Phenomenon. So that being said, we’d like someone to rank our favorite sports movies.
A Cappella/Acoustic Covers of Songs
One of the things that we enjoy that makes people question our relationship is our love of the NBC show The Sing Off. It’s a pretty interesting twist on the reality show singing competition craze and you really do get to see some talented groups perform. The show has had many memorable performances and has sparked our interest in other A Cappella groups such as Straight No Chaser, Ben Folds College All Stars and Rockapella to name a few. There are also a number of talented people on this really cool website called YouTube that perform acoustic covers of popular music that sometimes turn out better than the original source material. That being said, someone please make a list of our Top 10 favorite a cappella performances or acoustic covers.
Reasons Why ESPN is annoying
Jon Stewart has made it pretty well known that when 24 hour news networks are on for...well...24 hours, they run out of things to say and it all becomes garbage (we’re paraphrasing of course). We believe the same can be said of ESPN. When a purely sports network is on all day all the time, SportsCenter in particular can be a bit repetitive and annoying. A few of our pet peeves with ESPN are beating a dead horse with another dead horse (see, Tebowmania, Linsanity, etc). Their unrelenting allegiance to football above all other sports - this could be one of the greatest ends to a hockey season ever, and yet Robert Griffin III’s pro day is more likely to get a minute of air time than an overtime win. So that’s 2 good ones, you guys roll with the rest.
Pittsburgh Words
We consider ourselves to have the best duo of yinzer accents of one person from Pittsburgh and one from Wilmington, Dela-who? Unless it’s St. Patrick’s Day at Molly Brannigan’s... Between us, WDVE, Greg and Donny, and Pittsburgh Dad you can get all of the best parts of the Yinzer accent. Yinz, jaggoff, dahn-tahn, nebbie, and slippy are definitely on this list, but getting the next 5 would take a lot of effort. Someone get on that.
Koko’s Favorite Things
Koko is Neil’s cat. She is very cute, but kinda lazy except when she wants food. We know she likes to sleep in front of the fire, trap mice but not kill them, and watch cars go by out the window. But let’s be honest we don’t have the time or the energy to see what 10 things Koko loves most of all. It would be a pretty fun day for someone if you wanted to come observe her for the day though.
Spices besides Salt and Pepper
A long standing argument between Neil and PJ. We will not say what our respective top spice is, but if someone were to generate a list of the 10 best spices (other than Salt and Pepper) it might help settle this debate once and for all.
SNL Bits (of our generation)
Saturday Night Live is constantly going through ups and downs in terms of its quality but in the past few years it seems to have hit its stride (a good Justin Timberlake skit helps). Say what you want about “What Up With That?” but that always cracks us up. The Digital Shorts are always great, as are anything where the host mocks him/herself or really anything with Kristen Wiig. And even though we try and watch every week, it’d just be easier if someone else went through and found the really good ones.
Pop Music Guilty Pleasures (basically every Ke$ha song)
The title really says it all, but no one likes to admit it when they like a song played on Star 104, but there are some catchy tunes out there. But that would mean having to sit through hours of people like this get to the songs and neither of us want to do that.
Neil - Books
PJ - Albums
Neil likes to read more than listen to music and PJ is the opposite (see we’re NOT the same person). So for the last two Top 10 Lists we’d like to see, it would be great if someone could catalog our tastes in books and music albums respectively and then make a list of them. That way we know what to go back and re-read and what to always have a copy of in the car.
