Oh, my. Given the complaint, one naturally must conclude that this poor family underwent a terrible hardship:

“The emotional distress suffered by the plaintiffs is so severe that no reasonable person could be expected to endure it, and the emotional distress has resulted in physical symptomatology of emotional distress,” the suit claims.

The plaintiffs say they “have incurred and wil continue to incur expenses for hospital care, medical care and attention, medications, other materials and supplies.”

Medical malpractice? Defective product? Environmental contamination? Stalking and harassment? Nope: free porn.

Robert Bourne, Denise Roy, and their minor daughters, Elise Roy and Danielle Bourne, say Verizon, their cable provider, failed to stop “unauthorized transmissions” of the Playboy Channel despite being notified multiple times between March and August 2008.

There are obvious comments to make here: couldn’t they just turn the TV off or change the channel? They don’t seem to be claiming that Verizon gave them only the Playboy Channel. I suppose this could just be another example of litigious American society, yet another “frivolous” lawsuit to be held up as evidence that we need “tort reform” in this country.

But: hospital and medical care? Who in the family had to seek medical attention after seeing the Playboy Channel? Which member of the household has such a fragile constitution and such a terrified perspective on sexuality that the mere availability of naked women brought on physical distress?

It was a good year on Unlikely Words, no thanks to me. Looking back over my posts for the year, it’s clear I started slacking off even before I had two good excuses. I guess my New Year’s resolution is to be a less crappy blogger.

Here are some things you might have missed:

• I used the power of my blog to make fun of my wife, which is always a good time.
• I made candied kumquats, a delicious gingery beverage, and sausages.
• I lost a talented friend.
• I had one medium-interesting thought about the presidential campaign.
• I thought a bit about Rhode Island politics and policy.
• I wrote a post with the tags bush, parenting, and torture.
• I mocked a really stupid editorial in the Providence Journal about the electoral college.
• I proposed some five-star albums from the 1990s.
• And I shared some of the remarkable memorabilia from when I was born.

Many thanks are due to AC for not only keeping this blog running single-handedly, but for really taking things up a notch, traffic-wise.

Happy New Year, everyone.

It was a good year on Unlikely Words. In case you missed some or all of it, I went through the year and pulled out a few links to my favorite posts. Favorite is loose here and applies to something either I wrote or really enjoyed on the internets. What did you like this year?

In no real order…

A horse statue was vandalized in Saratoga Springs, Billy Ripken and Ken Griffey reminded me of how I spent the second half of the eighties and one summer after Sophomore year of college and Guns n’ Roses released an album leading to me telling 2 stories of my younger days.

I documented 12 cities that banned plastic bags, as well as the the 2008 Election and was PSYCHED this got linked by Kottke and Wonkette. Bill Simmons listed his favorite sports journalism and I found links to almost all of them as tons and tons of musicians told John McCain “Don’t Play My Song! and I compiled a list. I was hoping this would catch on, but, alas…

A seafood truck crashed in Worcester. Someone rented a refrigerated truck and the lobsters were sold all over town. Until they were discovered, seized and…dumped back into Boston Harbor, which seems like it could only happen in Worcester, the Paris of the Eighties.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks was my favorite book this year, Mad Men Season 1 my favorite TV show, and Eastern Promises my favorite movie. However, my favorite movie to talk about was the utterly horrible Unknown. It’s not unwatchable, though.

“Dodgers touch Colon for run in fourth” was my favorite headline of the year, while seeing Sir Ben Kingsley as Ian MacKaye was my favorite video. The Barack Brains T Shirt (Bad Brains logo/Barack) tied the Cry Celtic Green T-Shirt for garment of the year. And I got an iPhone.

A hawk attacked a girl at Fenway Park and I introduced the world to cold cut flavored jelly beans, which surprisingly elicited a prompt reaction from the inventor of Jelly Belly (see the comments). I continued hating sharks while Pat Matheny continued to hate Kenny G’s “Lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing.”

Eliot Spitzer banged a prostitute and I was there to flow chart it. I also created a recipe to make Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream at home, watched my street flood, enjoyed this article about getting stuck in an elevator, and found out BJ Upton’s BJ stands for Bossman Junior, which is just awesome.

And finally, my favorite picture of the year:

Happy New Year everyone, thanks for reading and see you next year.

Fog Creek Software’s new offices are so awesome, it almost makes me want to go back into the software industry. Aaaand move to New York. Aaaand be a much better programmer than I am so Joel Spolsky would hire me.

It took me forever to watch Lost Season 4, but I’m glad I eventually got to it. Slow at the beginning of the season and then ending with the second excellent season finale in a row, Season 4 was worth it. Obviously, like everything else these days it would be better to watch all at once.

CNN says that people have too many programs saved on their TiVos

With infinite media, you have infinite choices, and therefore you have infinite opportunity costs,” he says. “Your satisfaction index of the thing you actually choose can never be equivalent to the infinite opportunity costs, so we’re in this position of being behind the cognitive eight-ball all the time.

I don’t even have a TiVo and this happens to me. We have to watch Dexter, True Blood, Californication, Weeds, we’re behind on 30 Rock and the Office and Friday Night Lights and I’ve just last night finished Generation Kill. Lost Season 4 ended last week for me. And those are just the shows with which we’re relatively caught up. What about BSG or The War or The IT Crowd?

I think this is like the RSS post Matt put up a couple days ago about getting rid of feeds he’s not interested in (read: doesn’t have time for) anymore. It hurts. Is RSS Bankruptcy a good option? Should people declare TiVo bankruptcy and burn the whole fucking place down?

What I really want to know is who will spearhead the TiVoZero movement, Merlin Mann is too busy tackling email.

To my co-blogger, knowing his love of data.

What do you say about a movie that’s about America’s use of torture? Rendition was good, though there weren’t really any surprises. The performances were good, and if you can take the subject matter, you ought to watch this.

This insanely long oral history took HOURS to read, but I did it anyway!

It is just what it sounds like.