OPINION: Some of my personal ‘bests’

•Best month of the year: October

•Best tomato ever eaten: a huge “brandy boy” grown by Mark Beardsley last year (made four sandwiches)

•Best corn ever eaten: speckled ambrosia corn grown by Barry Adams this year (sweet and tender enough to eat raw)

•Best ugly face: open mouth, take index finger and push upper lip toward nose while pulling lower lip toward chin, smile

•Best personal sports moment: writing a 1 on my scorecard at the age of 13

•Best pro sports memory: Sid Bream sliding across home plate in 1992, followed by mass tomahawk chop in downtown Athens

•Best sporting event attended with my father: driving to Auburn in 2006 to watch an improbable blowout Bulldog win over the fifth-ranked Tigers.

•Best sports blooper moment: shanked a tee shot dangerously close to spectators’ heads in front of Masters champion Tommy Aaron at UGA golf camp

•Best or favorite athlete I’ve ever seen in person: Jarvis Hayes

•Best movie: The Hustler, starring Paul Newman, George C. Scott and Jackie Gleason

•Best television drama: The Wire, The Sopranos, Madmen

•Best television comedy: The Office, Seinfeld

•Best bands I like that I bet you’d hate: Fugazi, Idaho, Mogwai

•Best Beatles song: In my life

•Best Led Zeppelin song: No quarter

•Best friend: Jana

•Best moments in my life: 8:28 p.m., May 28, 2005; 4:00 p.m., Sept. 2, 2009, both at St. Mary’s Hospital

•Best time running three miles: 26:37 (not recently)

•Best endurance feat: used to swim over a mile regularly at the Y (no longer)

•Best food everyone else likes but me: croutons, Chex Mix, watermelons, cantaloupe

•Best foods I like but many don’t: pickled jalepenos, pork skins, painfully hot chicken wings

•Best meal: back straps of venison cooked by my friend Alex

•Best picture I ever drew: something in the second grade (I never advanced beyond that artistically)

•Best insomnia horror story: spent sleepless night in sleep clinic worried about how much lack of sleep would cost me — answer: $700

•Best home horror story: battled with four-foot black snake in kitchen

•Best recurring nightmare story: it’s always dental. I’m chewing gum, can’t get the gum out of my mouth, teeth crumbling

•Best candy: pralines

•Best dessert: my mother’s chocolate cake (icing like fudge)

•Best barbecue: Williams

•Best stew: Zeb’s

•Best seafood: crab legs

•Best side: back (moving away)

•Best book: Crime and Punishment

•Best magazines: The New Yorker, The New Republic, Newsweek, The Atlantic

•Best sleep: when it’s time to get up

•Best part of waking up: coffee in my cup (Eight O’Clock brand)

•Best fast food breakfast: Egg McMuffin

•Best idea: always middle of the night, forgotten by morning

•Best injury: flipped out of bed in 1999 reaching for alarm, landed on arm, broke it

•Best shirt: the one least wrinkled

•Best pants blooper: ripped apart in terrible spot when photographing father/daughter dance in Jefferson

•Best feeling: making daughter or son laugh

•Best time of day: going home

Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County Journal