RALPHIES 2006. Ed Cook (here, here, and here) and Mark Goodacre have posted their annual best-of the-year Ralphie awards, so I suppose I may as well post mine as well.

MUSIC: Sorry, I didn't listen to any new music this year.

MOVIES: Didn't go to the cinema either, except to take my son to two or three children's blockbusters, all of which were forgettable. Of the pre-2006 movies I saw outside the cinema and for the first time this year, my favorite was the eerie Donnie Darko (a mentally disturbed teenager is led to save the universe by a spirit guide who takes the shape of a giant rabbit). I liked the quasi-shamanic wounded-healer theme that drives it. I saw the Director's Cut, which, from what I can tell, makes more sense than the original version. See also the helpful Wikipedia FAQ, which, however, contains many spoilers.

BOOKS: I managed to read a number of technical monographs, mostly to review them. All of them were good and some were excellent, but none really stands out as best of the year. But I'll just mention one of the excellent ones that is likely to be of some general interest to regular PaleoJudaica readers:

Philip Alexander, The Mystical Texts: Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and Related Manuscripts (Library of Second Temple Studies, 61, Companion to the Qumran Scrolls, 7; London and New York: T & T Clark International, 2006), pp. x + 171. £65. ISBN 0-567-04082-8.

Surveys the Dead Sea Scrolls that have mystical content and places them in the larger context of the mystical tradition in Judaism.

I read a fair number of novels this year, mostly science fiction. Again, many were good and some were excellent, but the best was unquestionably:

Charles Stross, Accelerando (London: Orbit, 2005 [but paperback 2006])

Traces a future history of the Singularity, starting from the second decade of this century. Bizarre enough to be plausible.

TELEVISION: British television had a number of very good new series this year. My favorite was Life on Mars. (A man in 2006 is trapped in his own comatose body after a car accident and subjected to the persistent and fully realistic hallucination that he has been transported to 1973 - or has he actually somehow been astrally projected there? - while his doctors at first think he's brain dead and then begin to resort to risky experimental measures to try to reawaken him before his weakening body gives out. To conclude in season two in 2007.) The 2006 season of Doctor Who, with David Tennant as the new Doctor, and Torchwood (a Doctor Who spinoff featuring Captain Jack Harkness as an alien hunter in Cardiff) come in neck and neck for a close second place. Spooks (the adventures of MI5 agents) deserves honorable mention as well. My favorite new children's series was ITV's Prehistoric Park (nature presenter Nigel Marven travels back in time to rescue extinct species from oblivion). My favorite television moment of 2006 was Nigel coaxing two baby T-Rexes through the Time Portal with a ham sandwich while, in the background, the fireball from the dinosaur-destroying meteorite blasts toward them at two hundred times the speed of sound.

UPDATE: More Ralphies from Chris Brady and Tyler Williams.