Worst of the Best of 2020 Lists

Best Albums 2020
End-of-year music lists are certainly common enough, but it’s hard to fathom what provoked the inclusion of such a list in Guns and Eggroll magazine. Moreover, the list is clearly tailored to enthusiasts of both military-grade assault rifles and Chinese takeout. Worst-case scenario, this is an obscure list of not very good music. Best-case, where else are you going to hear about Moo Shu Shotgun’s album Duck Blind Duck Sauce?

Best Books With Stains 2020
It’s astounding the abuses our books take. From Dorito smudges to crime-scene-calibre blood splatters, this list certainly features a diversity of bookish blemishes. Some of the images are intriguing (a coffee stain that’s a remarkable likeness of Geena Davis in her prime), and you might be drawn in by some of the accompanying origin stories (Jelly! A Jehovah’s Witness! Kangaroos!). But don’t let down your guard; once you read what the stain consists of in that copy of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and how it got there and how many people were involved and what the police did and what they found there and, even worse, over there, you may never borrow a book from the public library again.

Top Muffins 2020
They all contain raisins.

Best 2020 Movies Featuring Cats That Isn’t Cats
This is really just a list of every movie in 2020 that included a scene with a cat, seemingly made for the sole purpose of excluding Cats, the box-office bomb that was wall-to-wall cats but ruined by horrible CGI and Taylor Swift. Seems like a lot of work for such a small joke, but so is this entry you’re reading. (Year of the Cat!) If you are interested in movies with cats in them, however, this list is for you, although the only movie featuring a cat that matters is Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).

Best Guys Named Ray Coated in Honey 2020
You see one guy named Ray coated in honey, you’ve seen them all, right? You’d think so, but dipping into this “bee-st” of list reveals the vast parade of humanity in its many gooey guises. Whether standing stoic and sticky in a Petco parking lot (which is just begging for complications, if you ask me) or being hauled forcibly out of dentist’s chair by increasingly gummy security, these Rays of sunshine are committed to one thing: being smothered in massive amounts of bee vomit. You would think there would be a kind of beauty in all that glistening sweetness, but you would be wrong. These are guys named Ray, and they tend to be a hairy lot. Hair and honey; talk about “Winnie the Ewwwwww…”

Top 10 Monoliths 2020
Not that there isn’t something fascinating about monoliths that appear mysteriously in the Utah desert and then disappear, only to reappear in Romania. Are they messages from alien life forms, performance art, marketing ploy, just another aspect of 2020 to fret about? Intriguing stuff! The problem is that, monolith-wise, that’s about it. Those are the big two. [Update: This just in!] The rest of this list is made up of wannabe monoliths or, at best, monolith lite: a slab of drywall stuck in a sandbox, a ladder painted silver in a field and what is clearly a billboard from the 1950s advertising Ol’ Coot Chewing Tobacco (“If Yer Donkey’s Hee-Hawin’, Ya Better Git Chawin’!”).

10 Best Brets 2020
After former WWE wrestler Bret “Hitman” Hart, Poison frontman Bret Michaels, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and author/über-wank Bret Easton Ellis, the remaining top six Brets in this list are all Bret Brooklangton, an Arizona taxidermist who paid $1.7 million to read his list during a commercial break on Fox News’ “Jesus Is My Pit Crew Chief.” It was all for a girl, of course. It didn’t work. Such a Bret…

Best Schools Without COVID Cases 2020
At least it’s a short list.