Spencer TuckermanYou may have noticed this, but this year has been pretty stressful and difficult. I was hoping to spend the summer traveling. That didn’t happen. I was excited to have friends and family visit my first house. That didn’t happen either. But I think even the most difficult times have their bright spots, and it’s important for our collective sanity to point those out. This year was not a total wash. I survived. And there were even some cherries on top of the sundae.
Here are some of the things I fell in love with, or rediscovered, in 2020:
Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Turns out 10-year-olds are right. Don’t overthink it: The best ice cream is chocolate chip cookie dough. I have tasted around and I’m confident Ben & Jerry’s does it best. Their dough has the best consistency and it comes in huge chunks, not these pathetic Tic Tac-sized dough pieces some creameries try to foist on us. I’m always open to changing my mind, so please recommend a superior pint if you know one. (And don’t say something like, “Bobby’s Waffle Cones in Tempe, Arizona” because this journey is not taking me anywhere other than the nearest supermarket, thanks.)
Letterboxd
Let’s get candid: I don’t consider myself an organized person. I have to really make an effort to plan the week ahead, yet something about logging what’s already happened has always appealed to me. (Psychologists, weigh in here.) I can tell you all the beers I’ve ever tasted thanks to Untappd, and now I can give a pretty good approximation of every movie I’ve seen in my entire life thanks to Letterboxd. In a crazy year, a perfect archive of my movie watching habits has been my pacifier. If you’re a big movie person, follow me on Letterboxd.
Jimmy
Jimmy Nippert Tuckerman, the goldendoodle, was a loving, expensive, and needy addition to our family this year. He loves baths, shows affection by biting, and struggles with obedience. In September he managed to break his leg, adding an exciting new wrinkle to the already stressful and time-consuming experience that is raising a puppy!
Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso
“Apple’s streaming service made a Jason Sudeikis sitcom based on an NBC commercial” sounds like the opening to an op-ed criticizing the streaming content bubble, not the first sentence of my recommendation. Alas, Ted Lasso is really great. I don’t know that this would’ve cut through the noise so well in a “normal” year, but with life in turmoil there was just something exceedingly comforting about a heartwarming show that perfectly balanced humor, drama, and sentimentality.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
One of the year’s few winners, along with Uber Eats and Amazon, was Animal Crossing. The newest installment in the series was already hotly anticipated, and then the entire world sheltered in place a week before release. No video game is better engineered for global shutdown than New Horizons. As the world coped with a frightening new reality, I was planting trees, catching fish, and selling peaches and whatnot.
Ancestry.com
I’m a big history person, but I’ve never previously dug very deeply into my own family’s history. Turns out you can do some real damage with an Ancestry.com free trial. I have the Tuckerman name traced back to the 1700s. My great-great-great grandmother was born in Ireland in 1836. She died in Pennsylvania in 1913 and was a buried in a white dress because she hated black. Another Tuckerman ancestor fought in Gettysburg. I read about all of this from my couch while eating cookie dough ice cream.
HBO’s How To With John Wilson
Nathan Fielder has earned my undying trust, so I’ll always check out whatever he works on. His latest is How To With John Wilson, a show that feels a bit like the logical continuation of Nathan For You’s “Finding Frances.” It’s a show about New York City and human behavior. It channels the same kind of odd profundity that Nathan For You’s final episode mastered.
Bearcats Archives
One of the few things I was able to do for work in the early days of the pandemic was collect and organize all the old Bearcats games I could get my hands on. I like the Bearcats. I like history. But I also like collecting and assembling. The full archive may only be 1% complete, but I enjoyed building that first 1%. How good is this type of thing?
Kevin Stefanski
As elusive as the Cleveland Browns’ franchise quarterback has been, I might argue a good head coach has been even more so. I’ve been a Browns fan since 2004 and I’ve seen just one coach last with this franchise longer than two years. Yet, as of this writing, the Browns are 10-5—remarkable for a first-year head coach installing a new system and navigating a laundry list of missed games from star players stemming from the pandemic. Who knows where Stefanki’s tenure in Cleveland ultimately goes, but it’s starting to look like he might be The Guy, and it’s happening surprisingly quietly. At the end of 2020, I’m grateful for the guy who finally has the Browns in the playoff picture in December while almost making it look boring. (Also, check out how handsome he is.)
Baseball
Baseball was my first true love. I started tee ball when I was four years old and never looked back. In elementary school I’d have told you my only goal in life was to be a professional baseball player. Somewhere along the way, between LeBron James making history and Cleveland Browns Stockholm Syndrome taking hold, I had to finally admit that baseball was no longer my favorite sport. The stars aligned in 2020 to bring baseball back to me, and our relationship is slowly healing. Despite a shortened season and no fans in ballparks, I think I watched more baseball this year than I have since high school. It felt good—comforting, even—to know that the Indians awaited me at the end of each day during this uncertain summer.
Apple TV 4K
As an early-adopter of the original Apple TV, I feel kind of dumb for abandoning the platform for a few years. The Roku Ultra is nice, and maybe even a bit better in a few minor ways, but I finally bought back into the Apple TV ecosystem this year, and the 4K edition is great—classic “it just works” Apple stuff.
IKEA’s Sonos Speakers
Did you know Sonos, the awesome but notoriously expensive home speaker company, makes speakers for IKEA, the awesome and notoriously inexpensive home furnishing company? They’re $99 and they’re great. They tie into the Sonos ecosystem but the AirPlay 2 functionality means they also tie in nicely with Apple’s ecosystem. I have two of them linked to the aforementioned Apple TV and they work (and sound) way better than my old sound bar.
Potbelly’s Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
I spent the first couple months of quarantine with my parents, who happen to live close to a Potbelly Sandwich Shop. I have never necessarily been a big sandwich lover, but this year has warped all of us, so I found myself ordering Potbelly’s multiple times per week as an excuse to get out of the house during the day. Oatmeal chocolate chip is a premiere cookie and Potbelly’s somehow has ‘em figured out at scale. Just go ahead and order three with lunch so you have snacks for later.
Browns Uniforms
I love fancy uniforms in sports. It’s practically a holiday for me when new jerseys are being unveiled. But a few teams should be exempt from this cycle of uniform renewal, including my Cleveland Browns. In 2015 they wheeled out this disaster to perfectly coincide with the worst era in Browns history. I really did try to give these a fair shake, but it was a bad decision met with worse karma. In their first three seasons in these uniforms they compiled a record of 4-44. Before the start of the 2020 season the Browns ownership team did something we rarely see: They hit the undo button. The old uniforms are back, and maybe now we can all just accept they should never change.
Yard Work
I had an offer accepted on my first house the morning after the pandemic hit, while my wife was halfway across the country for a wedding. You know what’s good? Landmark life events intersecting with unprecedented global panic! Once things leveled out a bit and we closed on the house in April I got to experience some of the perks, such as yard work. Mowing the lawn rocks. Sweating in your yard is good.
Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100 for The Athletic
There’s something extra special about baseball history, and Cleveland native Joe Posnanski brilliantly captured that in his ranking of baseball’s 100 greatest players of all time. It’s a tremendous starting point for anyone looking to brush up on their baseball history, as Posnanski serves up digestible chunks on everything from the modern myth of Babe Ruth to the fallibility of Barry Bonds or the tragic erasure of Negro leagues hero Oscar Charleston.
Spoonbill
Put simply, Spoonbill is a Twitter plugin that spies on those you follow and notifies you when they’ve updated their name, bio, website, or location. Is it useful? Debatable. Is it entertaining? Absolutely. I’ve been watching you all update your work history and add different emojis to your bios for a couple months now. It’s fascinating for a social media nerd like myself.
Nintendo DS + Wii
Those who know me will attest to the fact that I’ve never been a gamer outside of Roller Coaster Tycoon or 15-year-old sports games for the GameCube. But 2020 has given me juuuust enough time at home to tip me over the edge a little bit. My brother sold me his old Nintendo DS Lite, which I promptly outfitted with something called a flash cart so I can play an essentially unlimited number of games. (Mario Kart DS is great!) Not satisfied to stop there, I also soft-modded the old family Wii, giving me the ability to circumvent the broken disc drive and run every game imaginable from an external hard drive. Friends, I’ve been going nuts on NCAA Football 2004 and Wii Sports.
Platform Beer Company’s Tart Fizz
The IPA wave is over and all the fellas are drinking sours now! While they taste great, I generally find them to be a bit hard to drink, even compared to the stomach-rattling hoppiness of IPAs. Luckily, Cleveland’s Platform Beer Company brews Tart Fizz, which is something of a session sour. I’ve been drinking all my trendy goodness without having to sip slowly. You can find them at Target, I think. (This is not an ad, but I wish it were.) For a similar beer in this vein, check out Dogfish Head’s Seaquench Ale.
Red Feather Kitchen
I am a grown man with the appetite of a small child. While I can (and do) appreciate fine French and Italian cuisine, it’s kinda just hard to beat a good burger. If you live in Cincinnati, check out Red Feather Kitchen in Oakley. The Red Feather Burger is my favorite, but I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything on the menu.
The Retro Future
I grew up on the Game Boy Color, and while I’m not part of the still-thriving enthusiast space, YouTube allows me to dip my toes in the water. Elliot at The Retro Future makes my favorite videos on old and quirky handheld game consoles and the repair and restoration of them. He’s becoming a must-watch creator for me, and I’m not entirely sure I can explain why.
FaceTime Happy Hour
To be clear, I’m talking about the “friends and family” edition of FaceTime happy hours, not the work version, which, we can all agree, never really caught on. But in a year with so much separation between us, it was surprisingly nice to look at someone else’s face on your computer screen while having a couple drinks at 5 p.m.
HBO’s Murder on Middle Beach
This is the latest addition to this list, and it’s a good one. Madison Hamburg is my age. He was 18 years old when his mother was murdered. Three years later he began creating a documentary with the goal of learning who his parents are and, by extension, why his mother was killed. Over the next seven years, the story goes to some wild places, but it’s an incredibly well-made piece of filmmaking. I’ve been trying to ween myself off true crime, but I’m happy I gave into this one. The shorter runtime (four hours) and the fact that it’s directed by a member of the victim’s family means it skirts many of the cliffhangers and salacious reveals that plague the genre. It’s extremely incisive but its perspective keeps it from feeling exploitative.