Anyway, here are some quickly jotted down first impressions. I will probably change my mind about most of this over the next few days.

The design is certainly very pretty; the photography bold and colourful. Perhaps it’s a little over-designed – sometimes, the pretty-making interferes with the flow of information on the page; the text gets a little lost, your eyes aren’t quite sure where to look. But that could just be an early lack of familiarity with the magazine’s rhythm.

But certainly, I’d like to see it be more text-heavy. Currently, too often the copy gets relegated to a stray paragraph which is overwhelmed by the images – which doesn’t give me much confidence in reading something that seems like an afterthought. More text! A paragraph is not enough! But I think that might be me trying to hold back an unstoppable tide of contemporary magazine design, brandishing nothing more than an unread copy of the New York Review of Books. (Unread, of course, because it’s intimidatingly text-heavy.)

The “Start” section (subheaded “News and obsessions”) is probably the strongest area of the magazine, on first browsing. It’s filled with lots of entertaining and intriguing snippets on pleasingly eclectic topics; even when some don’t quite work (the “Inforporn” segment, while a nice idea, tries to cram too much data into one hard-to-read graphic), there’s always another one over the page that will capture your attention, from Jason Freeny artwork and gorgeous pictures of supercomputers to pieces on the papernet and 3D printing. I worry that the magazine’s printing schedule could make its attempts at online culture trendwatching unavoidably dated, but that’s a fairly insurmountable problem. Maybe that could be achieved with a small, photocopied last-minute insert instead.

The feature on the iPlayer in this section has some interesting content, but frustratingly misses the meat of the story – skipping over giving any specific details of several key years in its slow development, and only throwing in right at the end some muddled references to the central debate over what public service means in the digital age.

Less good is the “Play” section, which seems a little confused and perfunctory, unsure if it’s meant to be reviews, cultural commentary or featurettes; few of the pieces are given the space to breathe. It’s also gimmicky, to little effect. Getting actor Jamie Bamber to review the Skate 2 game comes off as awkward, pointless and PR-led; sending Alain de Botton to review JCB theme park Diggerland seems potentially lolworthy, until you read the bland copy, which could have been written by almost anybody.

The columnists are mostly good value. Russell Davies (also a contributing editor) is, naturally, interesting – his amusingly written defence of being distracted is both cute and thought-provoking, and sums up a sort of contrarian enthusiasm that feels both very Wired and very UK. Warren Ellis, of course, is great. He includes the line “…smearing yourself in soy bacon and allowing starving dogs to violate you while sucking an Obama-shaped ‘pleasure toy’…”, talks about the sheer horror of existence and then abruptly stands up for traditional print publishing structures. These are the kind of writers you want to build a magazine’s voice around.

Meanwhile, occasional geneticist and Northern Rock failure Matt Ridley takes an chutzpah-laden, nicely written but somewhat ill-advised foray into the world of economics. It’s an interesting perspective, I suppose, but you can’t help feel he’s not exactly on solid ground. And Baroness Susan Greenfield’s piece on the search for an explanation of consciousness starts well, but loses its way and descends into vague assertions halfway through. She’s a very odd choice for Wired – she’s not an especially good writer, and her long-standing, evidence-free technophobia sits awkwardly with the magazine’s apparent ethos.

The “Fetish” section – focusing on high-end consumer products – is far and away the worst part of the magazine. The photography is lovely; the text seems to have been copied and pasted from PR releases. It doesn’t help that the first issue largely focuses on absurdly expensive audiophile equipment, complete with all its pseudo-scientific technobabble. Sorry, but when someone’s selling £170 audio cables that come with a free CD which “demagnetises the cables, reducing interference”, I don’t expect Wired to just reprint it, prefaced with a limp “according to the company” – I expect them to actually try to find out if it’s true or (as you’d suspect) utter balls. They do this perfectly well with reviews of some expensive headphones in the more no-nonsense “Test” section at the back of the magazine, which has plenty of interesting content; this leaves “Fetish” just looking like the idiot brother.

Of course, I understand that this section is undoubtedly key to attracting advertisers and defining their demographic; I don’t expect them to be featuring Tesco Value crisps in there. But page after page of uncritically puffed-up shinies with price tags in the thousands of pounds strikes a really weird tone, both in the context of the economic climate and the rest of the magazine.

The full-length feature pieces – which, obviously, are the magazine’s meat and potatoes and possibly dessert as well – I haven’t had time to read properly yet, so I’ll leave those for another day. All I’ll say is that the one about the shipwreck looks great, the one about the shift workers who do nightmarishly important jobs looks equally fine, and holy mother of god the 90s-Wired-throwback neon orange on the futurology piece has done terrible, unnatural, violating things to my eyes.

Overall: while I’ve got my gripes, this looks like a solid first effort, and you have to expect that it will take a few issues to find its voice. Right now, it seems a little unsure what it wants to be; it swings between a more technophile GQ, and younger, hipper New Yorker, and a sort of Vice-for-people-who-aren’t-cocks. That will settle down, I’m sure. As it is, the good probably outweighs the ungood, I’ll be reading it in more depth over the next few days, and I’m already looking forward to the next issue. And did I mention that the texture of the cover is lovely?

(Disclaimer: I know and like Ben Hammersley, the Associate Editor of the magazine. But then, probably 87% of the people in the UK blogosphere who’ll write about the magazine’s launch know and like Ben Hammersley, so that’s not really here nor there nor anywhere.)

As is now becoming tragically traditional, here’s my pigeonhole-breaking list of the best Things In General from the past 12 months. As is also traditional, it’s late. If you’re a regular reader, and remember the 2007 and 2005 lists, you’ll know the project by now: every year, the cruel hegemony of categorisation unfairly forces stuff into neat boxes. Iron Man was “a film”. Boing Boing Gadgets was “a blog”. The moment someone did something impressive in a sport was “a sporting moment”. This blog rejects such reductivist notions, and instead celebrates the innate thinginess of things, allowing – say – Will Wright’s Spore to go head-to-head with Billie Piper for the title of Best Budget Italian Restaurant.

So, without further ado, here are the 21 best things of 2008:

21. WALL-E
Made me cry, twice, on both legs of a flight to and from New York. I wasn’t the only one who cried, either: witness this awesome, awesome story from MetaFilter, which could have made this list all by itself. And will also make you cry.

20. Mars Phoenix
“Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW!” was the most moving piece of writing of the year. What I said here pretty much covers it.

19. Hitler’s BNP membership gets leaked
The BNP membership list leaked raised many important questions of privacy, data protection, and how democratic institutions deal with the non-democratic. Most importantly, though, it provided a fitting final flourish for the previously moribund Downfall re-subtitling meme:

Excellent piece of work there by Chris (advisory: two of the jokes in there are mine). See also: LOLGriffin, which was the result of three of us fucking around on Twitter.

18. The Twat-O-Tron, from spEak You’re bRanes
OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE IMMIGRANTS ARE TOO SOFTLY SOFTLY BECAUSE MUSLIMS ARE RUNNING THE SHOW SIX WORDS: LOCK OUR KIDS AWAY TO SAVE THEM THIS IS VERY DISTURBING TO ME

17. Human Bacon

Best Family Car 2008.

16. Celebrities on Twitter
Stephen Fry, John Hodgman, Greg Grunberg, Shaq, Jonathan Ross (who is now acting as a internet detective to debunk fake celebrity twitterers). All good stuff. Andy Murray, less good stuff. Wil Wheaton: love you, man, but for pity’s stop the jokey imagined conversations with iTunes. Yeah, we get it, you have a very slightly eclectic music collection and randomly shuffling through it produces some unexpected juxtapositions. We know. This happens to everyone.

15. Portishead’s Third
2008 was a good year for the unexpected appearance of things we’ve been waiting a comically long time for. While I’m not too fussed about Spore or Chinese Democracy finally being released into the wild, Portishead’s return from their indefinite hiatus was one of my favourite mainstream releases this year. It trod a nicely-judged line between being something they’d clearly spent a lot of time thinking about, and giving the impression that they were just having fun. Most of all, it was just pleasingly weird: more than simply refusing to make a soundalike retread of their earlier material, they tried on different styles on virtually every track. From the Holy Fuckish edges of We Carry On to the bizarre ukulele spiritual misery barrel of Deep Water, to the thrillingly alienating comeback single Machine Gun – a track which shows us what the theme tune to The Terminator would sound like, if The Terminator was a film about an emotionless killer robot. Of course, just experimenting with new sounds isn’t enough; I believe Keane also tried a radical new sound in 2008 as well, and, you know, who cares? But Portishead pulled it off by making sure that their tracks were (to use the technical musicological term) really bloody good. (last.fm link | Spotify link)

14. Bonekickers
Ha. No, only joking. It was actually the worst television show ever made. But it was quite fun saying so.

13. Screenwipe on QVC
Disgruntled chronicler of our culture and television shouty man Charlie Brooker (who is right about everything) is increasingly attaining a status somewhere between spokesman and cult leader for sections of British geekdom (as evidenced by The Charlian, which is great but also a bit weird and stalky). I’m fairly sure that nobody is more horrified by this development than Brooker himself. Anyway, my favourite Brooker thing this year was the unexpected appearance of a much-loved Screenwipe feature on shopping channel QVC. Great. (Oh, and Dead Set was excellent too.)

12. The Times sub-editor who removed Giles Coren’s “a”
As entertaining as Giles Coren’s swearier-than-thou rant and the ensuing fallout was, one important point stood out: his original “wondering where to go for a nosh” joke was shite. As painful as it might be to end on an unstressed syllable – trust me, I know the agony of people pissing about with your prosody – the readers of the Times, the world of restaurant reviewing, and the annals of English literature as a whole didn’t really lose out on much when it was so rudely expunged.

11. Bacon cups
Bacon cups.

10. Wikihistory
One of my favourite bits of fiction of the year. Stop killing Hitler! “Bulletin 1147″ deserves to become a catchphrase.

9. Yelle
So, yes, naughty French electrochanteuse Yelle was far and away one of my most-played musical finds this year – especially Je Veux Te Voir (last.fm link | Spotify link), her awesomely pop diss track that goes into some anatomical detail about the deficiencies of a French rapper. What’s that you say? Je Veux Te Voir was originally released in 2006? Shut up. If it’s good enough for Keiron Gillen, it’s good enough for me. Also, she looks like a sexier version of Cassandra from Only Fools And Horses, so there*.

8. Seth Bingo and the Silent Girl
…and speaking of Keiron Gillen, the second run of his and Jamie McKelvie’s just-about-perfect music as magic comic Phonogram is only one issue old, but I already think that snobbish indie DJs Seth Bingo and the Silent Girl are some of my favourite new characters in just about any medium for a long while.

7. Sigur Ros at the Latitude Festival
Just lovely. Best Modern Asian Cuisine (North East region).

6. The Dark Knight
Forget Heath Ledger’s astonishing performance, or the general greatness of Messrs Bale, Oldman, Eckhart, and Gyllenhaal. My favourite part of Christopher Nolan’s complex, morally twitchy superhero-romp-as-crime-epic was the unexpectedly brutal resolution of Michael Caine’s story about chasing a jewel thief in Burma. It was the finest riff on the theme of the inevitable decay and corruption good intentions suffer, in a movie positively dripping with them. Also, the bit with the lorry flipping over was cool.

5. Dear Science, TV On The Radio
TV On The Radio never really stuck for me before this album. As is often the case with experimental rock, you want them to respect the scientific method, and only publish once the results of the experiment have been collected, analysed and peer-reviewed. But what everyone else says about this album is, basically, spot on – it’s just awesome. Key tracks: opener Halfway Home (last.fm | Spotify), the astonishingly lovely ballad Family Tree (last.fm | Spotify) and the dirty slow build of DLZ (last.fm | Spotify).

4. The McLaughlin Groove by Andrew W.K.
What I said here.

3. The new British coinage
Not only was the new UK coinage produced by a completely unexpected bit of innovative thinking from an institution as venerable as the Royal Mint – created from an open competition, by a young designer who’d never designed a coin before – but the end result was a really lovely bit of design.

2. Nate Silver, Sean Quinn, Sam Wang and the FiveThirtyEight v. Princeton Election Consortium bitch-fight

The US elections became an all-encompassing obsession for me, and much of the world, for months on end. When the dust settled, there were two clear winners: the tall hopey chap with the big ears who now runs the world, and Nate Silver.

Baseball stats geek Silver turned his analytical abilities on the polling data spewed out left, right and center during the long, long election. His website, fivethirtyeight.com, went from being an underground secret among political geeks to the ultimate oracle of polling truth, with a massive following, following his predictions for Super Tuesday. But the most interesting wrinkle of the whole election prognostication madness was his rivalry with Sam Wang,a Princeton neuroscientist who also moonlighted as a polling wonk, with a far simpler set of methods, on the Princeton Election Consortium website.

The argument began as a polite disagreement, and rapidly escalated into a subtle but unmistakable nerd-brawl. Silver dismissively said that the question Wang was trying to answer – “what would be the result if the election was held today?” – was a largely pointless question to ask; Wang countered that Silver’s methods were statistical smoke and mirrors, minor cosmetic corrections that were dwarfed by the potential errors in his assumptions. As Silver’s fame grew, to the point where he as a honoured guest on The Colbert Report, Wang’s tone changed from gentle chiding to outright snark.

Of course, this was a pony race that would have an unambiguous victor: who could most accurately predict the final result? As the world wandered, dazed and blinking, into the shiny dawn of November 5th, the media hailed Silver’s triumph: his predictions had outperformed many major pollsters, and were within hand-waving distance of the final result.

What they all missed, though, was that Wang’s simpler methods had beaten Silver’s by a clear length.

While Silver was close, he missed Obama’s final share of the popular vote by 0.6% and was out by 16.5 votes electoral college votes. Wang nailed Obama’s popular vote to within 0.1%, and only the fact that one district of Nebraska flipped blue (the first time in history a state ended up with a split result) stopped him getting the electoral college spot-on: he predicted 364, it turned out to be 365.

This isn’t to say that Silver was a charlatan, of course; he was genuinely dealing with a large number of what Donald Rumsfeld called known unknowns. Not only did he do well at establishing a clear and useful framework for discussing what kind of effect those unknowns might have, he did a fine job of making sure there were as few unknown unknowns as possible. A little hubris and over-confidence in his models was certainly a tad misleading, but as a corrective to the nonsense that was spread by many in the media and, more scandalously, some major polling organisations (five letters, rhymes with Dogby) it was vital. And on top of that, FiveThirtyEight also had Sean Quinn’s superb ground-level citizen journalism, one of the few attempts to report in-depth on the two campaigns’ Get Out The Vote machines, and the gaping gulf between them.

But yeah, Sam Wang still won.

1. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Thankyou, thankyou, precious TV writer’s strike. Overall Winner, Best Customer Service.

So, that’s it. I missed out loads of things, because I can’t remember them. What were they? Suggestions, reminders, arguments and general talkiness in the comments, please…

*Credit for Yelle description: Joe The Dough.

In brief, Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs in the world, and a longstanding voice arguing for openness, honesty and user engagement in the public sphere, at some point decided to delete all their old posts that had linked to or mentioned Violet Blue, a generally tedious sexblogger of whom they had previously been rather fond. As is the way with the internet, somebody eventually noticed, it came to the attention of both Violet Blue herself, and tech gossip blog Valleywag. Things spiralled from there - a huge blog that regularly rails against censorship and secrecy had been caught ‘censoring’ their own site, and despite frequent enquiries from other bloggers and the media, they weren’t saying why. Rex from Fimoculous compared it to the deletion of post which had linked to him, which he speculated was because the BB crew found out he’d written a post slightly critical of them. It made the front page of the LA Times website. A MetaFilter discussion began, and quickly achieved some sort of insane critical mass.

Eventually – too late, frankly, once the internet had been busy stewing for several days – Boing Boing issued a statement, which sort-of explained things, but sort-of didn’t explain others. Prior to this, they’d been busy deleting any comment that even hinted at the affair, starting a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with their readers. Regardless of how justified one may think their original actions may have been (currently, I don’t think we know enough to say one way or the other, but I incline towards the idea that it was unwise) Boing Boing’s reputation has undoubtedly been harmed by this, and their ability to be a clear voice in favour of openness and broad-brush free-speech has been degraded.

But in all the debate about it, I thought the most interesting issues it raised were often overlooked amidst dumb debates about the precise definitions of “censorship”, “free speech” and so on – most of which were irrelevant. Indeed, it was one specific repeated bit of point-missing that struck me in particular.

Personal problems
There was a lot of very heated discussion about whether Boing Boing was a “personal site”, or whether it should be held to the standards you’d expect of (say) a newspaper. But surely this ignores one of the cornerstones of the new publishing world that BB helped usher in – that such distinctions are now so fuzzy as to be practically meaningless.

Certainly, Boing Boing is a personal site, in that it’s still editorially controlled by its founders, that the writers are the only people who decide what should be published, and so on. But it is also part of a for-profit company, and its contributors make (apparently) healthy incomes from it. Furthermore, it has a readership that many newspapers would be (are) envious of, is a major source of information for many people, and has very deliberately inserted itself into the public discourse on a number of important subjects – information openness being a major one of them. It is simultaneously personal, professional, private and public.

And it was really weird to see so many people (notably in the first thread at Making Light), who I imagine would normally would be quite happily suggesting that such distinctions are now increasingly irrelevant, spending so many words arguing over which category Boing Boing fits in.

Of course there’s a world of difference between one person’s LiveJournal with two subscribers and the New York Times, but anywhere you try to draw a line, you’ll find a myriad of edge cases that defy simple classification. Surely rather than starting with the assumption that there are many discrete categories of content publisher, and trying to retrospectively fit whatever you’re discussing into one of them, it’s better to start with the assumption that publishing is publishing is publishing – and to work out what best practice is across the entire field, and what needs to be assessed on a case by case basis.

At the very least, it should be pretty clear that if you want to spend a fair portion of your time decrying the state of the mainstream media and pointing out how much better blogs do reportage, analysis and comment (which I agree with to an significant extent), to then jump back to the position of “but it’s just a blog!” when people hold you to account over something will require – at the very least – some rather dainty footwork.

Xeni Jardin acknowledges this, and tacitly admits that it’s still an area of some confusion for the Boingers themselves, when she says:

This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times. Boing Boing began as a personal blog, and still is in some ways, even though Boing Boing is a bigger thing now… We realize that we’re now bigger and more complex, and we’d probably handle something like this differently now that we’ve grown… This hasn’t happened before.

It must be weird, realising that the widespread public perception of what you do is significantly different to your own view of it, and that it’s been changing right under your feet. But the BB team should have been able to see that these problems would confront them sooner or later – and it’s strange and disappointing to see them be so tone-deaf to the issue.

You don’t control the context
Which (sort of) leads on to my second, connected point. One of the major issues that confronts publishers or all sorts – personal, professional, whatever – is how to deal with challenges directed to them about what they’ve published. That questioning will often come from people who have little understanding of the context of the published pieces – the internet being a magnificent device for stripping work of its original context – and who were never the target audience for the work. The very fact of being linked to changes who you are and how you’re perceived. Something you wrote for your regular audience of four friends looks very different once it’s linked to from a major site with a degree of authority. A lighthearted pop-science story for a general audience looks shoddy as hell once the Bad Science crew get hold of it. That dark joke at the end of your TV column? People who’ve never read you before might think you’re actually advocating the assassination of a world leader.

In this world of shifting context, there’s a range of approaches you can take towards challenges to your content and editorial decisions: a “my house, my rules, if you don’t like it then start your own blog/zine/major newspaper conglomerate” approach; a formal, behind-closed doors procedure for assessing your own practices; or simply an ad-hoc, case-by-case, depends-what-mood-I’m-in attitude. All of these can be valid and justified in some circumstances. But it seems to me that there’s little doubt that – in a situation where you don’t fully control the context of your own work, and the expectations readers have when coming to your site can change dramatically without you ever realising it – transparency isn’t just an ethically appropriate approach, but (and I’m going to write this in bold) transparency is the option that scales best. From LiveJournal to major newspaper conglomerate, from personal comment to investigative reporting, you can apply the same basic principles, and they work – and it doesn’t matter if your audience and their expectations are suddenly completely different one day to the next.

Ironically, the best summation of this approach comes from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, under a year ago, on Making Light:

(1.) Get out there and say something, fast.

(2.) Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
…

(4.) Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You’ve screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every pair of eyes out there is a person who knows how to Google.
…

Teresa (who I have a lot of respect for) is currently the moderator/community manager for Boing Boing. If they’d followed her guidelines more closely, a lot of this could have been avoided.

Post slightly edited for clarity and coherence at 8.27am, July 2.

‘Lo Neil,
As a great fan of Doctor Who, I’ve been dancing around the room after hearing that Steven Moffat is taking over as Chief Writer and Executive Producer of the series in 2009. [...]

Anyway- my real question is whether or not we’ll finally see a Neil Gaiman DW episode? We’re all quietly hoping the idea came up during your dinner back in March in Bar Shu… I know you’re a very busy person, but it would be the perfect combination for so many fans!
Rachel

I think it’s great news — what Russell Davies did over the last few years was remarkable: as a writer and as a show-runner he brought Doctor Who back, sure-footed and smart and with a heart. [...]

I’m really excited about Steven Moffat taking over — always assuming that it’s not just a publicity stunt on his part to try and get “Blink” a Hugo, as a countermeasure to Mr Cornell’s car-crash-to-get-the-sympathy-vote.

And it was a terrific dinner: they do fantastic dry-fried green beans at Bar Shu (it doesn’t sound like it would be fantastic from the menu, but it is).

Yeah, I know, it’s not much, but such fragile insinuations and half-percieved hints are what fandom thrives upon, no? And you must admit, it would be rather wonderful. I mean, he’s already getting his hand in at writing in the Doctor’s dialogue style:

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

“To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…. More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there…”

Now, if they could just ply Warren Ellis with enough Red Bull and cigarettes that he agrees to do their bidding as well…

UPDATE: The first hints of a rumour have now been upgraded to a full category five rumour swirling just off the coast of certainty land, as somebody who actually knows about such things says that sources within the BBC confirm the existence of the rumour, and more importantly he actually asks Neil Gaiman, who trumps his previous non-denial by going all Urquhart and saying “You may very well think that, but I could not possibly comment.”

It’s unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to “good music” are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra’s image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are really fucking loud.

The New Yorker piece he’s spinning off from is also well worth a read. Alex Ross does seem to be widely acknowledged as basically the best thing ever, and I should probably set aside a significant portion of my life to read his book and his blog and everything. But I probably won’t get the time. Ah well.

The money quote:

“We’re always looking for ways to stand out from the rest of the pack in today’s crowded marketplace, and what better way than to combine hot tub debauchery and the complications of time travel,” said MGM exec vp production Cale Boyter…

This is almost certainly excellent news for humanity.

Iraq just offers more of the same: death after death after death after death, until each death becomes nothing more than a dull pulse on a soundtrack; the throb of a neighbour’s washing machine we learned to filter out months ago; the invisible ticking of a household clock. We’ll notice if it stops, but not before…

…Particularly striking is the figure regarding the total number of Iraqi dead – striking because it’s so huge, and so vague. It lies somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million.

Between 150,000 and a million. That leaves 850,000 people who may be dead or alive. We simply don’t know. They currently exist, or do not exist, within a cavernous margin of error. Our minds can’t process this degree of horror. No wonder we change the channel. No wonder nothing feels real.

Charlie Brooker is also good when he’s not being funny.

The moment anyone tells me they’re going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I’ve constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy’s iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.

Did I mention that Charlie Brooker is right about everything?

I’m in a position where a frankly horrifying number of my friends seem to think that skiing is somehow a socially acceptable pastime, rather than an activity morally equivalent to grave robbing or fucking your nephew’s pet hamster to death (which is what it is).

What’s even worse than their belief that a week-long bout of organised falling down a mountain somehow elevates them above lesser mortals is the six months of cretinous babble that leads up to every skiing holiday. People who I know are normally funny, charming, erudite individuals will turn, at the slightest provocation, into witless bores, drivelling on about entirely imaginary differences in snow quality, as though they were Olympic champions desperate to shave off that extra hundredth of a second from their personal best. Mass emails get sent round analysing every possible option in such military detail that you’d think they were setting off to explore an uncharted region of the Amazon, rather than popping over to France to be pampered for a week along with a few hundred other middle-class Brits in a resort devoted solely to ensuring that nothing unexpected or interesting could ever possibly happen to them. And never in this whole period does it occur to them that taking six months to prepare for an activity in which gravity does most of the work – both in pouring people down the hill, and pouring alcohol down their throats – is something that renders them largely unfit to be members of the human race, rather than something to be smug about.

I am, of course, fully aware that any subject can come across as tedious and annoying when you’re the only person in a group who isn’t interested in it and everyone else is talking about it. Furthermore, I’m aware that this argument has, in fact, been made at length about football, something which I’ll happily talk about for hours on end, and which takes up an even larger amount of the year than skiing preparation does. But as a riposte, I’d like to point out that I’m right and other people are wrong.

So yeah. Skiing is shit, and I wish it would stop turning people I like into half-wits. Global warming, with all its glorious melting, can’t happen soon enough.

Now, normally that would be a bad thing; plagiarism, after all, is a pernicious and dishonourable practice that needs to be stamped upon heartily. But the plagiarism, in this case, has given us some of the most giddily wonderful, utterly un-erotic dialogue ever squeezed between the warm, heaving covers of a soft-core potboiler.

The scene: a Native American called Shadow Bear has just boffed a young pioneer lady, Shiona Bramlett. Then, er, they see some ferrets:

“They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail,” Shiona said. “While alone in my father’s study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father’s books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said that their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.” …

“What I have observed of them, myself, is that these tiny animals breed in early spring when the males roam the night in search of females,” Shadow Bear said, watching as the last of the ferrets bounded off and disappeared amid the bushes away from where they had first been spotted. “Mothers typically give birth to three kits in early summer and raise their young alone in abandoned prairie dog burrows.” …

“I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight,” Shiona said, shivering at the thought, for to her one animal was as cute and precious as the next. It was a shame that any had to die to sustain the other.

It’s fantastic stuff. It’s Atlanta Nights meets Bulwer-Lytton meets David Attenborough. You should head over to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, who uncovered the plagiarism and who detail, in gleefully exhaustive fashion, every painful, jarring, sub-Dan Brown passage. Outstanding.

After a hiatus last year, when I forgot to do it, here’s the 2007 instalment of this blog’s ongoing project to fight the crude pigeon-holing tendencies shown by other end-of-year lists. No longer shall Neon Bible be relegated to the “best albums” parade, just because it was, in fact, an album. If Gordon Ramsay’s refurbished gastropub in Limehouse wants to compete for Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, rather than best restaurant, then it is free to do so. We not not bracket, compartmentalise, or divide. We celebrate unity through diversity.

So, here you go – here are the 19 best things of 2007:

19. The Arcade Fire at Glastonbury
Was it such a borderline epiphanic experience in spite of the drug-addled hippy with a poor sense of personal space who kept on trying to walk through my back during the entire set – or was it, in part at least, because of him? No. It was nothing to do with him. But thankyou anyway, kind sir.

18. Tony Blair fucked off
And for a precious, golden few days, it seemed like good sense, quiet competence and a dignified sense of principle might be restored to our government. Of course, not so much. But it was nice while it lasted. A clear winner of Vegetarian Restaurant of the Year.

17. The finger-tapping, eye-staring thing that The Rock does in Southland Tales to indicate that he’s going mad which is a bit like someone doing a Stan Laurel impersonation except they’ve never actually seen footage of Stan Laurel and have in fact just read about him on Wikipedia
Majestic.

16. Southland Tales
Astounding.

15. Impending sense of doom
It was a great year for the looming feeling that everything was about to go horribly, horribly wrong. Also on the up in 2007: despairing impotence in the face of the inevitability of decay.

14. Spooks
Just keeps getting better and better. Although, to be fair, it tailed off a little at the end, the season-long story arc thing mostly worked beautifully. Also, they got rid of Ros, the sour-faced harridan. Hurrah! R&B Single of 2007.

13. In A Nutshell by Pelle Carlberg
Narrowly beating out Jens Lekman’s Night Falls Over Kortedala as the best indie-pop album released in 2007 by a Swedish male solo artist featuring excellent, wryly humorous lyrics and an intuitive grasp of blissfully catchy melodies – and this despite the fact that Lekman’s name is amusingly close to that of out-of-favour Arsenal shot-stopper Jens Lehman. This mainly because In A Nutshell has awesome tracks like ‘I Love You, You Imbecile’, ‘Clever Girls Like Clever Boys Much More Than Clever Boys Like Clever Girls’, and a ballad about stalking Mike Joyce from The Smiths called ‘I Touched You At The Soundcheck’.

12. Feel The Beat And Do It Anyway by Sparky’s Magic Piano
Excellent collection of twee electro-pop songs that capture a sweet-spot somewhere on the path from St. Etienne to Belle & Sebastian. More importantly, they’re my mates, and it’s always nice when you can honestly tell your friends that you really enjoyed something they’ve done, rather than just frantically nodding in a polite manner.

11. The fact that there weren’t actually any major elections taking place in America in 2007
Christ, it’s going to be a long ten months.

10. The ending of Life On Mars
Well, and all the rest of series two of Life On Mars, frankly. But the finale, with its heartwarming “everybody commit suicide to escape to a nostalgic fantasy world because modern life is unbearable” message, was fantastic stuff.

9. The films I haven’t seen yet
It was a rubbish year for movies, with virtually all the big summer films sucking harder than the Dyson R&D department, but then it got really good at then end. Except it didn’t if a) most of those movies won’t come out in the UK for another month, and b) I didn’t even manage to see the ones that have come out. Of the top twenty best reviewed films of 2007 on Metacritic, I’ve seen precisely one. Which was The Bourne Ultimatum.

8. The Bourne Ultimatum
Which was pretty damn good, I’ll admit. Although I more eagerly await the director’s cut, in which Paddy Considine’s mild-mannered Guardian journalist doesn’t get shot, but instead snaps when confronted with the injustice and cruelty of the world and goes on a Dead Man’s Shoes-style rampage of bloody vengeance. Best Fusion Cuisine Newcomer of the Year.

7. Charlie Brooker’s Ten Biggest Cocks and She-Cocks in Advertising

6. Shit terrorists
2007 gave us admirable new levels of terroristic incompetence, as a bunch of muppets tried to drive burning cars into annoying buildings, in the misguided belief that a) this would have some sort of destructive power, and b) anybody would give a shit if Tiger Tiger and Glasgow Airport burned to the ground. Skipping over the pleasing fact that our brave jihadis have clearly been watching too many films where modes of transport blow up for no apparent reason every time they have a slight prang (the helicopter in Cliffhanger being a personal favourite of mine), the rubbish attacks brought much joy. For one thing, they gave us a new breed of hero – the pissed-off Glaswegian baggage handler on his fag break. And for another, I got to do another one of my updated Terror Alert Scales:

5. Endless torrential rain sheeting down from apocalyptically dark skies
I wouldn’t normally say this was one of the best things about 2007, but seeing as it was the only fucking thing there was all year, the rules state that I have to let it in.

4. Hats
Hats were still good in 2007, as they previously were in 2006 and 2005 (and before) as well. Despite the regrettable rise in ubiquity of the twat in a hat – as every style-magazine reading cock and trend-worshipping fleshstain draped a pork-pie or trilby at a rakish angle off their empty, simpering heads – hats remained excellent in the past year. Fedoras offered refuge from the tidal ebb of transient vogue (and from the rain).

3. Blink
Not the book where Malcolm Gladwell talks about, oh, I dunno, stuff, but the episode of Doctor Who about the terrifying statues that only move when you’re not looking, which was considered by pretty much everybody who watched it to be the single best thing that’s ever happened on British television, and that includes the bit on Blue Peter where the elephant made a woopsie on the studio floor. Penned by shining god-like being Stephen Moffat, who looks odds-on to make it three Hugos in a row. Screw you, Battlestar Galactica.

2. Mesalamine
An excellent drug, which makes sick people feel better. Specifically, me. A clear winner of Travel Agent of the Year.

1. ‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A.
The highlight of M.I.A’s corking album Kala, in which a former art-college student from London with a Tamil Tiger-linked father and a squeaky voice took the burden of the world’s oppressed upon her shoulders and encouraged them to rise up in self-empowerment and, you know, crime. Here, she steals equally from The Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’ and Wreckx-N-Effect’s ‘Rump Shaker’ to produce the most unutterably summery, shimmering piece of pop to ever have gunshot sound effects in the place of a chorus. “All I wanna do is-” BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! “-and-” CLINK! KER-CHING! “-take your money.” The feel morally conflicted hit of the summer.

The 2005 list can be found here. Please feel free to point out any things that I missed off the list, or missed out on in 2007, in the comments.