February 2005 Dear POOPster, POOP’s  here. The Eighteenth Annual POmpous and OPinionated List, that is. It’s time to try to make some sense out of this past year, a year in which three defining moments seemed to defy any and all semblance of logic. Bush was elected president. The Red Sox won the World Series. And Bush was elected president. It was a year that introduced new nouns to the lexicon, like iPod (appearing on three lists) and Jesusland (mentioned or implied all over the place). And Bush was elected president. Obviously, anything can happen and pretty much did. But…

Dear POOPster: You’ve got POOP in your hands. The Nineteenth Annual POmpous and OPinionated List, that is. It’s hard to believe but when this whole POOPthing first started in 1987, we had a conservative Republican president surrounded by scandalous goings-on and Antonin Scalia from New Jersey had just been confirmed to a lifetime membership as one of The Supremes. It is indeed comforting to know that as America undergoes such sweeping change, POOP lumbers on. And lumber it has as 30 POOPsters have managed to get their lists past the National Security Agency and onto these pages (and onto the…

February 2007 Greetings Fellow POOPsters: POOP Happens. And we have reached a milestone, indeed. As POOP attains adulthood in its twentieth year, I think back to when the POOP package consisted of a pile of 7 or 8 lists crudely stapled together. That was a long time ago–before the spiral notebook editions, the stitched bindings, the plastic covers and digiPOOP. After two decades we have shown that as the world transforms itself, as crises continue to challenge us, as leaders change, as wars come and go and sometimes come and stay, that no matter what-we can count on death, taxes,…

February 2008 Dear Comrades-In-POOP: Let there be POOP. And there was. And it was good. At age 21, POOP enters adulthood. After two decades of blather and bile, POOP seems to have taken on a life of its own. We’ve developed quite the tight community of music lovers who each year, with a little cajoling, faithfully bundle their favorites into cute little lists. It’s all very sweet. I feel like a proud papa (to quote one list). This year a record 36 fans, fanatics and people with some serious record collecting issues have bundled. If you’ve been here before, feel…