We narrowly avoided this being the single worst playlist I've ever put together, just by how crazy pop music had become in 1999. Maybe Y2K had us losing more of a grip than we thought; whatever the reason, it was a year that a lot of the lamest songs of all time were released.

*tornado siren in distance* *clears throat into mic, takes reading glasses out of sweat-soaked khakis*

For a long time I've wanted to send out a playlist of my very favorite songs, unrestricted by any theme except that of self-indulgence. It will help lay some ground-work for the point-of-view I can never fully remove from a project of curation such as this, and I can't think of a better time than now.

I'm the last person you'd expect to be eulogizing a robot, but the rover's story has made me reflect. It was art and science combined: photography and engineering, architecture and electronics, choreography and computing.

Let me bring you back to 1989: the number, another summer, sound of a funky drummer. Ten years after "Rapper's Delight," hip hop was in full-roaring-force ramping up to the Golden Age of the 1990's, and one of the biggest works of art that year was Spike Lee's incendiary Do the Right Thing.

A surprising amount of iconic albums came out in 1979, and it's hard to say anything about them that they couldn't absolutely say for themselves. It was the year of London Calling and The Wall and Unknown Pleasures—yep, everyone's favorite t-shirt design is now forty years old. In fact, Hot Topic's entire aesthetic might be traced back to 1979.

Today I'm here with another Earwyrms Essential, and this time it's the Snow Playlist, the one you put on if you're ever stuck having to walk home in a flurry.

This year was a fulcrum point in American turmoil, and it feels like all 21st century malaise can somehow be traced back to 1969. If the early part of the century saw the spreading of existentialism and nihilism, the events of 1969 nailed them into our collective consciousness.

While some things invariably have stayed the same—"Auld Lang Syne" is still the greatest song ever bestowed upon us by the muses, be they alien or otherwise—a lot of things will have to change if we're going to shape the utopia we've all loftily agreed to achieve by the end of December.

I'm over the moon seeing how many of us participated in the Year in Review playlist last week. It's my favorite part of the year, and it always becomes the soundtrack to the last few weeks of December for me.

This is something I do every year where I ask my friends to add their Top 10 Favorite Songs of the Year to a collaborative playlist so we all have something to listen to as we drive home on our holiday breaks.

To kick off this month of Top 10 Countdowns, I wanted to share the ten best movies of the year. They're more my favorites than the objective best, which is true of all lists, but of this one especially because I didn't get time to see many movies during the tumult of the year.

I now have an audience for whom I can lay down the final ranking of the Best Christmas Songs, so we can settle the debate that's been keeping us up at night for years, and we can finally stop sacrificing our children at the altar of the War on Christmas.

I love listening to other people's music recommendations, often much more than my own, which is one reason it's so crazy that I do this every week when in reality it hits almost everything that spikes my anxiety, i.e. talking, or demanding people's time, or pretending I have authority over anything at all.

What I love about country, when it's good, is that it's not afraid to be vulnerable, to be heartbroken, to be sobbing drunk on the bathroom floor every once in a while.

The piano is our hand-drawn map to the musical scale, at least here in the West. It's our graphic representation of the aural world, and it's the size of a small sedan. All the notes that float around our ears, the different frequencies of our thrumming atmosphere, it lassos them each and lays them flat.

You don't have to be in a relationship to use it, but I will warn you that some of the songs are a little precious because, as you know, I tend to be a little precious. If you're willing to drown yourself in the L-word every once in a while, this will be perfect for you.

This week's playlist isn't really a playlist, it's more of an album showcase. It's my favorite Halloween album ever made. It's called Dead Man's Bones, by a band called Dead Man's Bones.

Boris Pickett, mad scientist and host of the Monster Mash: The beginning, I would say, is clearest to me—I was working in the lab late one night when my eyes beheld an eerie sight.

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The desire to party had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.