Well, as the year and the decade come to a close, it’s time to start rounding up all those lists of the best of the….oh wait. Ten years have passed, and we still haven’t decided on a name for the friggin’ decade? The oughts? The noughts? The O’s? Nothing seems to quite work. Which is perhaps appropriate, the decade began with a bunch of nothing; the Y2K bug was a big no show, the first election of the decade was a zero sum game, and the biggest stars of the decade were genuine nobodies. Calling the decade the “oughts” won’t happen, but might be fitting for a few reasons. It’s a word that no-one knows, for a decade that has no identity, and it has two silent letters in it. Probably the only hope for naming these ten years is for someone to nail the character of the decade the way that some people refer to the 70′s as the “Me Decade”. And never mind the name, how will the decade be remembered? If the 70′s were disco, leisure suits, The Joy of Sex and Ford Pintos, the 80′s yuppies, Reagan, and Electropop, the 90′s infohighways, grunge, and school shootings, how will we characterize 2000-2009? It’s never what you think it will be. The seventies were probably most influenced by Nixon and the oil embargoes, but we remember disco balls and polyester. I think we’ll be surprised that everyone will forget the whole Bush-driven annihilation of privacy rights and wars of aggression, the bank bailouts and corruption (I bet you already forgot all about Enron, didn’t you!), and remember Susan Boyle. What do you think? What should we call the decade? What will we remember about it? I mean, what will the Time Life Greatest Hists of the 80′s, 90′s, and _____ be called? If you need a refresher, Newsweek has provided the decade in seven minutes below:

And how did I miss this? Playboy’s Women of Enron???