2009 Top 10 Countdown, #9: “Titus Andronicus” by Titus Andronicus

2009 Top 10 Countdown, #10: “I Feel Weird” by Steel Train

Every year, I reset the play count in iTunes so that I can track what I listen to the most that year. Over the next 10 days, I’ll hopefully be able to put up a video or an MP3 or something of the top 10 songs that I listened to in 2009.

At number 10, it was “I Feel Weird” by Steel Train.

Blizzard Entertainment’s annual holiday card

Not sure how many people are curious about this, but every year, the staff artists cook up a new holiday card design, some of which have previously surfaced as wallpapers on Blizzard’s Web site.

(Note: Most of these folks, to my knowledge, are not the Community Managers familiar to visitors to the World of Warcraft message forums, but rather are the folks who interact with the press and so on. In the dog years since I’ve been there, the roles have become more specialized as the company has exploded in size.)

The Coverville Hall Of Fame

I love Coverville. It’s a podcast that shouldn’t work — a half hour or more of cover songs each show — but does, partially because host Brian Ibbott has excellent taste. (Like all radio/podcast hosts, he’s got a band he seems a little obsessed with, but in his case, it’s the Polyphonic Spree, which is actually a good band, so that’s OK.)

Every year, he has some of his best shows of the year, his Coverville 100 countdown shows. But since they aren’t necessarily made up of songs released that year, the best stuff tends to accumulate and repeat.

In the interests of not having every future countdown closely resemble all the others, Ibbott has created a “Hall of Fame” and pulled a bunch of songs out of contention. Songs like Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah,” Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and Jonathan Coulton’s cover of “Baby Got Back” were (deservedly) going to gobble up a bunch of the top slots this year otherwise.

The upshot of all of this is that, whether you’re an established Coverville listener or a complete newbie, the Coverville Hall of Fame 2009 show is easily one of his best ever, and well worth the download for everyone. (Note that one or two songs have racy language in them.)

(And if you like the William Shatner/Ben Folds cover of Pulp’s “Common People,” check out both the original version of the song and William Shatner’s “Has Been” album which is, no kidding, flat-out amazing.)

Dragon’s Lair on the iPhone

Yes, it’s true.

I have a vague suspicion that, once it can be played without blowing 50 cents for each time I get smacked by in the face by that spinning club trap, it’ll lose a lot of its charm and mystique. But at least I could finally finish the damn thing.

(For you zygotes too young to know what I’m talking about, it’s this classic arcade video game.)