The object of the frenzy is usually some mildly amusing toy that the manufacturer has failed to make enough of. In 2007, for the second year in a row, this was the Nintendo Wii. The Wii was an innovation over previous game consoles much in the same way the iPhone was an innovation over previous phones. Instead of pushing the buttons on the controller to play the game, the user shook the controller like a maraca.

This innovation set the bullshit-buying public aflame, clawing and scratching each other for a spot in line at their local Best Buy, and paying grossly inflated prices on eBay.

These buyers typically had two or three older game systems sitting unused in the closet, which is where the every single Wii was destined to wind up in just a few years when the cycle would begin again.

Let's just leave this one out of the history books, OK? Along with ...

The Writers Go on Strike

The creative folks decided they couldn't take this shit sitting down. So they did what any outraged but ultimately powerless people do and walked around in the streets with witty picket signs. Signs probably a little wittier than typical picket signs, in fact.

Of course, taking any shit not sitting down often ends with a mess on the floor, and this time was no different. In response to a strike that had most of the movie going public at least a little nervous, Hollywood shrugged. Fans were outraged, unable to believe the hubris of Hollywood's "Who needs writers?" stance. Apparently, we were unaware that ...

The Movie Goers Side With Hollywood

... six of the seven most successful movies this year were sequels. The seventh in that lot, the shining beacon of creativity, was based on a line of toys. Can you blame Hollywood for deciding that writers are overrated when the pure spectacle of Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End and Transformers were the top three films at the box office? When the next four top earners were all either the third or fourth installments of a series?

The gap between critical and public opinion had never been wider. The year started with the break-out success of Wild Hogs, Norbit and Ghost Rider, all certified Rotten by over 50 percent of America's top critics, Norbit being described with words like "vile" and "cancerous" by most. Meanwhile, critically lauded movies like In the Valley of Elah and Zodiac went over like a wet fart in a sauna.

Combine these two trends and you might start to understand why Hollywood smugly scoffed at the writer's strike. Sure, we fumed over the image of a fat cat studio head thinking he can go it alone with shiny special effects and focus group testing, probably lighting a cigar with a burning baby kitten. But, if the movie going public would take a long look in the mirror, we'd see Wild Hogs and Norbit staring back at us.

Can we not just erase them from the annals of cinema history? Along with all records of ...

Spread some holiday cheer with this e-card from Cracked.com and IFC's The Whitest Kids U'Know.

Other than the danger of getting caught, the argument against steroids had always been that they make you more prone to injuries. This was the message behind the anti-steroid ads that ran throughout Bonds' record chase, in which a steroid user's arms turn into brittle plaster and fall off.

How it never dawned on them to just speed up footage of two grapes shriveling into raisins is beyond us. Maybe, ball jokes are too sophisticated for the people who write PSAs.

Either way, there was Bonds at age 42, knocking 28 home runs (more homers, in fewer at bats, than he hit when he was 24). This wasn't some muscle-bound power lifter squatting an automobile; this was a man picking up an automobile and running with it well into his 40s. The argument that they would shorten your career started to sound a little far fetched. Of course, Bonds was just one man, maybe he had just gotten lucky. But, then again ...

The Mitchell Report

It wasn't until this congressional report was released that we realized just how awesome steroids really were. It implicated players of all positions and skill levels. Power pitchers like Roger Clemens, placement pitchers like Andy Pettit, even short stop Miguel Tejada, who was noted for his durability. Mitchell's intended goal was to lift up the rock on the creepy crawly underworld of steroid abuse in pro baseball. It's unintended message: It doesn't matter if you're a power hitter, a pitcher or the kid who shags balls on the third-base line, steroids will make you better.

The Patriots

Watching the Patriots season unfold was like watching a bad action movie where the villain is so over-the-top evil that it starts to become distracting. Of course, in the movies, this is all to make the ending where he's impaled on the Washington Monument all the more satisfying. For the Patriots, that moment never came in '07.

Bill Belichick started the season like he always does, smugly addressing questions from the media like a Bond villain condescendingly dismissing his henchmen's concerns. Patriot's golden boy Tom Brady started the season by leaving his pregnant girlfriend for a Brazilian supermodel. Then the team got caught video taping opponents play calls, presumably using the super satellite on the secret death laser they have orbiting Earth.

It was around this time that the Patriots started beating the living shit out of every single opponent they faced. Belichick continued smugly dismissing questions about why he was still throwing for the end zone in the fourth quarter of a three touchdown game. An "if he dies, he dies" wouldn't have felt out of place in most of his press conferences.

Sure, it could be argued that the Pats have been able to make their record-breaking undefeated run without cheating, and that this somehow proves something. But it could also be argued that Patriots' ridiculous win margin, and their supporters' "everybody does it" defense of their play stealing, are probably the two most compelling reasons why, after 2007, when a little league coach tells his team that "cheaters never win" he will be greeted by a bunch of tiny high-pitched coughs off, "Bullshit!"

Good work 2007, you've given us something else to be ashamed of. Along with ...

Based on our tendency to get worked up about useless bullshit, some bullshit manufacturers made the mistake of assuming that people would, in fact, line up for anything as long as it had been marketed properly and put into some kind of attractive box. Several years and billions of dollars were spent on several new products without the inventors ever stopping to ask whether they actually offered any kind of benefit to the consumer.

HD DVD vs. Blu-ray

After selling DVD players to every household on Earth that wasn't made of grass, the electronics industry needed something new to sell. They pointed out to the movie-buying public that regular DVDs didn't look so good when watched on a gigantic television the size of a wall. To make movies look good on that Blade Runner building-sized TV, you needed a high-definition DVD player!

Of course, the industry had not yet convinced the public that they needed the gigantic televisions in the first place, since most people already figured out that having a gigantic television simply meant you had to sit further away from it. So it actually occupied the same field of vision as a regular TV you were sitting closer to, only the big TV cost thousands of dollars more and now you had to shout across the room to be heard by your family.

Just to make sure consumers had as little reason to upgrade as possible, they were offered two competing formats (HD DVD vs. Blu-ray), one of which was sure to be extinct in two years rendering both the device and all the films you purchased for it useless. It was a game of consumer electronics Russian Roulette, where clicking on the wrong chamber would make several hundred dollars fly out of your pocket and burst into flames.

In a nation with 100 million TV households, only 700,000 of each kind of player had been sold, if you don't count the ones that PlayStation 3 buyers were forced to take whether they wanted them or not. Speaking of which ...

PS3

Sony sold a ridiculous 120 million of their previous game machine, the PlayStation 2 (if laid end to end they would reach from New York to L.A. ... going the long way around Earth). From this, Sony decided that the gadget-buying public simply liked to take home cardboard boxes that said "PlayStation" on them, regardless of what was actually inside.

So they released the PlayStation 3, a machine that cost five times as much as their old system was selling for, offered basically no advantage over the competing systems and had no games worth playing. Their rationalization was that it could play Blu-ray movies, which look great on the 128-inch TVs all of you own.

The consumers lined up for the PS3 around Christmas of '06, but by 2007 we had woken up and realized the babe at the bar was a $600 transvestite. Consumers let PS3s sit in huge, dusty stacks on the showroom floor for the rest of the year.

At least they had that choice, unlike those who bought ...

Windows Vista

No producer of goods in the history of man has sold so much while caring so little. The combined love and craftsmanship in the every copy of Windows Vista sold in 2007 would roughly equal that put into one toddler's Play-Doh snake. Here was a program with several features, such as a warning box that pops up every five minutes or so to ask you if you're sure you want to do what you're doing, so shamelessly broken that they seemed to have been added on a drunken dare.

Nearly everyone hated Vista, in the way that nearly everyone hates being stabbed. It didn't matter. About 100 million copies of Windows Vista were sold in 2007, because 90 percent of the PCs for sale were already infected with it. Want a new computer? Want to be able to buy software for it? Well, then you don't have a choice.

Vista is one of those things the future will laugh at us for, in the same way we laugh about old hospitals using leeches. What will seem even more ridiculous and quaint ...

Also, it's important to note that Norris is as passionate about a Huckabee presidency as he is about the new Bowflex Home Gym. Now, that's integrity that you can't buy ... without money.

The YouTube Debates

To give YouTubers (people like "leave Britney Alone!!!!" Chris Crocker, the Numa Numa guy and cartoons of a dancing bear) a chance to feel involved in the presidential race, CNN unveiled the YouTube debates. It was a series of questions chosen from YouTube videos that each presidential candidate would have to answer, no matter how ridiculous or irrelevant.

The broadcast received high ratings, however, it was mostly from audiences who thought the videos wouldn't be screened and that the candidates would be forced to "answer" 50 videos of people painting their penises to look like Uncle Sam and flopping them around to the tune of "What is Love."

Instead, we got a series of uninteresting questions picked by the moderator, and that one asked by a cartoon snowman was about as entertaining as things got. Critics complained, the candidates complained, the YouTubers complained. Thus, 2007 wound up being the year we found out the Internet wasn't going to be the savior of democracy ... no matter what the supporters of Ron "still polling in single digits" Paul tell you.

As sad as that realization was, it still isn't quite as sad as ...

Apparently the cops that got tasers in 2007 had been having this same fantasy. Video after video surfaced of them being used on motorists who were too slow with the license and registration. In one particularly disturbing video, Canadian Mounties, the unintentional comic relief of the international law enforcement community, killed a traveler with multiple taser shots.

The Canadian Mountie airport incident highlighted the underlying problem: Tasers were regarded as safe; however, they were given to pretty much anyone who asked for one, including airport security, campus police, mall security guards and a bunch of other professions famous for unwarranted power trips. Of course, their eagerness to try out the new and exciting technology was matched only by their not knowing a goddamned thing about what it did to people, giving us a recipe for a horrible travesty of justice. And a hilarious Internet meme thanks to one particularly spastic young man in Florida ...

"Don't Tase Me Bro!"

The perfect example of the taser's two-demographic appeal, the "Don't Tase Me Bro" guy was a champion of both human rights activists and people who enjoy watching douchey people get hurt. Like a perfect storm of Internet fame, he was himself a liberal conspiracy theorist acting in a manner that even Ghandi would have deemed worthy of a beating. Luckily, the campus police at the event didn't have to resort to using fists and just repeatedly electrocuted him instead.

He would later explain to the TODAY show that he had gone to the John Kerry forum to deliver his message that Kerry had been cheated out of the presidency in '04. Why he chose to scream the message at the only person who probably agreed with him was never explained. Whatever his intent, it was soon lost amidst a stew of garbled pleas for mercy and bro-speak. The video spawned countless "Don't Tase Me Bro" T-shirts, remixes and pop-culture allusions.

Use of the phrase "Don't Tase Me Bro" set an online record by going from clever to lame in under 20 minutes. Seeing all of the attention he was getting, human rights organizations rushed to his defense. Unfortunately for them, the most high profile tasering of the year happened to a guy that most people would have lined up around the block to punch in the face.

Kind of like how we wish we could punch 2007 in the face. If for no other reason than ...

The truth is, child, we needed it. Our lives were busy and chaotic and stressful. We had not lived up to our childhood dreams and it made our days a little more bearable when we were able to look upon the celebrities and see that they, too, were as human as we were. Maybe a little less.

Lindsay Lohan

On Jan 18, Lohan checked herself into a treatment facility as a "proactive" step in her words, to get on top of her substance abuse before it became a real problem. We applauded her for her brave decision and hoped others struggling with these issues would do the same.

Grey's Anatomy star Isaiah Washington

A week later, actor Isaiah Washington used an anti-gay slur against a co-star and decided he had to enter rehab to treat his addiction to using anti-gay slurs. We applaud his decision even more than Lohan's, as there are millions of Internet users who suffer from this affliction and never receive treatment.

Britney Spears

On Feb 16, Britney Spears entered rehab in Antigua. After one day, she was cured.

Britney Spears

Four days later, Spears was an addict again and re-entered rehab in Malibu, Calif.

Lindsay Lohan

In May, Lohan lost control of her Mercedes, and it turned out she was drunk and had cocaine in her car. For the second time in 2007, she made the brave decision to enter rehab to get on top of her substance abuse before it became a real problem.

Brigitte Nielsen

In July, perhaps after seeing the instant publicity drug and alcohol treatment was generating for the patients, reality freak show attraction Brigitte Nielsen entered rehab and notified the press. The lesson for the world was that as far as addictions go, fame makes crack look like pretzels.

Daniel Baldwin

Later in July, Baldwin brother Daniel took it to the next level when he entered rehab and had the press follow him inside. This would appear to be the first time a celebrity's rehab attracted more viewers than any role he had played as an actor.

Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Lohan checked back into rehab on July 24, the third time she made that brave decision in 2007.

Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse, who was only famous for not wanting to go to rehab followed suit in August ...

David Hasselhoff

And, finally, David Hasselhoff got "too-hammered-to-work-a-hamburger" drunk and was filmed by his daughter. The resulting video was so poignant that it wound up being the most compelling piece of video Hasselhoff starred in since Knight Rider. He entered rehab in October.

There are countless others, but we hesitate to drop to the Richie Sambora tier of celebrity addiction as we have already gone on too long.

All of this, all the Perez Hilton and TMZ rehab updates, all the copies of all the recycled Hollywood movies, all the stats from the cheating athletes, all the bullshit demand for bullshit gadgets ... all these trends made it seem like humanity itself was on that hotel room floor, eating the proverbial scattered hamburger while our descendants watched through their video camera of time and begged us to stop.

Let's take it all, everything on this list, and pile it into a huge time capsule. We'll seal it up, strap it to a rocket, etch "2007" on the outside and fire the fucker into the sun.

Now, onto 2008.

If you liked this article, check out our (much shorter, we promise) rundown of The 5 Most Kick-Ass Apocalyptic Prophecies .