Best, Worst, Silliest: It’s the Season of the List

‘Tis the season to collectively turn our heads and take a parting glance at the waning annus. As we gear up to greet the spanking new year, we pause to reflect on the wacky year that was--a year in which Monica joined the ranks of Madonna, Charo and Cher as single-moniker uber-celeb; a year when the cherubic face of Leonardo graced countless magazine covers; a year in which a Spanish-speaking spokes-Chihuahua bemused some and incensed others.

Magazine editors like to make lists. And luckily for them, the December issue is a no-brainer. As we prance from URL to URL on the Internet, we greet a multimedia blitz of canceled TV shows and prurient newsprint chronicled in the cyber-pages of e-zines and Web presences galore.

Hardly anyone bothers to buy Life magazine anymore, but now is a good time to take a quick and free peek at Life’s Year in Pictures issue (https://www.pathfinder.com/Life/yip/1998/). Of all the striking images, the victim’s eye-view of the back of the pickup truck that dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death in Texas may be the most harrowing.

Nearby, at https://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/year.review/images98/index.html, CNN graciously provides the top 10 videos of 1998, in case you were foolishly away from your telly during the titillating scandal coverage. Missed the Clinton apology? Stream it on down at 56K or 28K.

You can also test your cerebellum’s data processing acuity by playing a trio of CNN games, such as who said what in ‘98? (Who said, “Viagra is a great drug”?) In other shock wave games, players must match headlines with pictures and identify prominent voices.

As far as the year in arts is concerned, Salon magazine (which started out as an arts journal but made big splashes in ’98 as a political entity) is also reviewing the year.

At https://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/tv/mill/1998/12/21mill.html, Salon’s top-notch Joyce Millman gives us the lowdown on the worst and best (or is that least-worst?) TV shows of the year. According to Millman, “NYPD Blue” was the zenith of TV and the short-lived “Fantasy Island” was the dregs.

Elsewhere at Salon (https://www.salonmagazine.com/special/1998/12/bookawards/), the editors rave about their favorite reads of ’98. Top of their lists? Lorrie Moore’s ever clever “Birds of America” and Simon Winchester’s “The Professor and the Madman.” Swell links take you to book reviews and excerpts.

As per tradition, People magazine (https://www.people.com) does what it does best: list names. Its Web special “intrigue 98” offers its alphabetized list of the 25 most intriguing people, with A for “The American People” at the apex (“We just wouldn’t behave, gleefully confounding prognosticators at the polls, the box office and the brokerage”) and W for WW II soldier at the nethermost (well, by way of Hanks and Spielberg, that is).

Other online People lists include breakthrough personalities (wrestler Steve Austin) and tributes (Linda McCartney, Frank Sinatra and Akira Kurosawa, to name three). And for the dyed-in-the-wool People-peruser, the Pop Quiz offers such vexing stumpers as “Which male heartthrob did not sue Playgirl magazine?”

Entertainment Weekly Online (https://cgi.pathfinder.com/ew/features/981225/yearend/index.html) offers its lists of superlatives, with Leo garnering Best Entertainer. And more fun than its “best” lists (“Saving Private Ryan,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”) are its “year’s worst” lists (https://cgi.pathfinder.com/ew/features/981225/bestandworst/index.html). Worst in multimedia went to the online virgin hoaxers who planned a cyber-cast “first time.”

And sure, Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) lists the year’s bestsellers, author favorites and most honored books, but the humor zine, the Onion, spoofs such year-end list mania at https://www.theonion.com/onion3420/infograph_3420.html). Its top-selling books of 1998 sends up the world of publishing with such titles as “My Wife and I Sure Do See Things Slightly Differently” by Paul Reiser and “The Tiny Little Impulse Buy Near the Cash Register Book.”

Oh. And by the way, it was Elizabeth Dole who sang the praises of Viagra.