2:32 into Intergalactic by The Beastie Boys

0:12 into Monkey Wrench by the Foo Fighters
(suggested by @marshallstaxx)

1:21 into Novocaine For The Soul by Eels
(suggested by @qwghlm)

0:28 into Show Girl by The Auteurs
(suggested by @shanerichmond)

1:29 into Can’t Hardly Wait by The Replacements
(suggested by @shanerichmond)

4:42 into Invalid Litter Dept. by At The Drive In
(suggested by @outsidecontext)

2:09 into Summer In The City by The Lovin’ Spoonful
(can’t remember who suggested this, might have been someone in the office)

2:30 into All The Madmen by David Bowie
(suggested by @Dan_Griffiths)

0:57 into Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) by Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel

There must of course be hundreds, thousands more (a few suggestions couldn’t be used because they weren’t on Spotify; a personal favourite, the pause at around 2:57 in Animal Lover by Suede, couldn’t be used because it’s actually too short to pin down to a specific second.) So – what are your suggestions? Drop them, with Spotify links if possible, in the comments…

An Italian scientist who predicted a serious earthquake in central Italy but was dismissed as a scaremonger said: “The authorities have these deaths on their conscience.”

Seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani had warned “a big one” was on the way and even toured the region in a van with loudspeakers warning people, as late as last week.

But he was reported to the police by authorities for “needlessly spreading panic” and also dismissed by L’Aquila’s mayor and other civic officials.

All very Roy Scheider facing off against complacent local bureaucrats in Jaws. It was being tweeted all over the place and burning up the social news sites for most of today. A great, rabble-rousing story about an underdog hero whose warnings were ignored. Every story referred to Giuliani as a seismologist and a scientist.

Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica released the following press release this morning (this is a Google Translated version of the cached press release; their website, with the original, is currently down for some reason.)

Referring to press reports about the earthquake that struck last night, the Abruzzo region, the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica states:

1. Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica’s mission and purpose of the study of phenomena that occur in space and in the universe and not from earthquakes or other phenomena related to geophysics;

2nd Mr. Gioacchino Giampaolo Giuliani is a non-graduate technical assistant at the Institute of Space Physics Interplanetario of Turin, which is one of the twenty INAF structures;

3rd Mr. Giuliani is working as technical assistant at the National Laboratory of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) for the Gran Sasso of IFSI-INAF, within the framework of cooperation in your multipartner LVD (Large Volume Detector) for the detection of neutrinos produced by gravitational stellar collapse;

4th the activities of Mr. Giuliani compared the alleged possibility of forecasting earthquakes are not a search INAF, but are conducted by Giuliani himself for personal purposes outside of the service for the institute.

It would appear Gioacchino Giuliani is not a seismologist; he does not even, it seems, have any academic science qualifications at all. He is a lab assistant at an astrophysics institute, and he does earthquake prediction as a hobby, using the notoriously vague and unproven radon method – his prediction was actually that an earthquake would hit a town fifty miles away a week earlier (the sort of details you need to actually be right about if you’re going to start evacuating places).

This story came, as far as I can tell, not from some tabloid, but from Reuters, who were the ones who inaccurately spread the description of him as a “seismologist”; even now, in their newly updated, toned-down story, published many hours after the INAF released their statement, they still call Giuliani a “scientist”, and inaccurately say that he works at the National Insitute of Physics (not Astrophysics, which would give you more of a clue that he’s maybe not a specialist). Reuters are a trusted voice; when they write a story, it spreads around the world. This is, quite frankly, shoddy work on their part.

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.

I’m actually about to buy another pair of shoes online right now, in case anybody should think about absolving me of my hypocrisy.

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.

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.“

It’s been going around.

So, I have consulted the oracle (I remember at NotCon four years ago, listening to Richard Jones explaining Audioscrobbler. “Ha,” I mocked, completely missing the point, “so it notes down what you listen to, and after a while, it’s able to tell you what music you like. What’s the point of that?” Quite a lot of point, it turns out.) and had a think, and here’s my seven:

1. Ready For The Floor by Hot Chip. It’s been a while now since Made In The Dark dropped (oooh, I said an album “dropped”! Like a proper music blogger!) and the verdict is pretty much that it’s not as good as The Warning, but it’s rather fine nonetheless. One Pure Thought, Bendable Poseable and this one are the songs that get repeated play. This one especially, because it’s excellent.

2. Kim & Jessie by M83. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. Some French electronic bloke seems to have decided to make a record by playing every single noise made during the eighties all at once. It’s ridiculously overblown and it’s subtle and it’s weird and it’s pop all at the same time, it’s synth-rock and it’s shoegazey and, yes, there’s a bit where it sounds kind of like Air but then most of it doesn’t really sound like Air, even when they went a bit odd, and the whole thing confuses me and cheers me up. It’s not an aberration, either – large sections of the album sound like Tears For Fears covering Bat For Lashes. Or the other way round. Bat For Fears? Tears For Lashes? One of those is the plot of Batman Begins, the other describes the emotional complexity of a Sub/Dom relationship. Anyway, yes. Funny people, the French.

3. Time To Pretend by MGMT. I’m just going to quote Graham Linehan on this one:

I’ve been loving this song for a while now, but this video has turned MGMT into my new favourite band. As Spinal Tap said, there’s a thin line between clever and stupid, and this video hoovers that line right up. It’s so daringly, hilariously pretentious that it just leaps out of our world and immediately enters them into the orbiting hall of lunatic rock fame. Think Bowie walking along the beach dressed as a Pierrot clown (My Dad, from the armchair: “Oh, for God’s sake�), or even The Jacksons as space giants, and you get the idea.

On the downside, the useless spunkrags won’t allow embedding of the video in question, so you’ve got to actually click the bloody link to see their stupid video.

4. Party Hard by Andrew W.K. Because sometimes, you need to party. And when you do, hard should be the manner in which you do it. Thus was it written.

5. Something Somewhere by Sparky’s Magic Piano. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that it’s a real pleasure when friends of yours do something that’s actually really rather good, so you can be genuinely enthusiastic without the burden of being polite and twisting your face into a hideous rictus grin as your force yourself to burble “yeah, I totally liked it, nice job, I’d pay for that even if I wasn’t your mate oh is that the time must be off bye”. The entire album by my close personal showbiz chums Sparky’s is well worth a listen, but this track is the one that sounds exactly like Spring pulling itself together and deciding to become Summer. Especially good is the way it starts out a bit discordant, then becomes a lot more cordant.

Sparky’s Magic Piano – Something Somewhere

Click the little button to play. Oh, also, they’ve got a gig this Saturday at The Miller, near London Bridge. If you’re in the area, come along…

6. America Will Punch You by ShiSho. Okay, so I just discovered this today, via Joe (who got it from MartinSFP on Twitter.) What’s to say? Two little girls chirpily describing all the things America will punch, in the homemade lo-fi style. There’s clearly some evil music marketing genius at work behind this, deciding to go for broke on the recent trend for yelpy underage punka, but it matters little – stuff like this is basically the reason why humans come with ears fitted as standard,

7. You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve by Johnny Boy. It’s, like, four years old now, and I completely missed it when it came out, and it’s basically the only wise thing Johnny Boy have done in their career… but I will fight anybody who tries to deny that it’s one of the great pop songs of the 2000s. Gorgeously sung tinkly Spector consumer-apocalypse melodrama that becomes an irresistible chant of euphoric cynicism. Oh, and it nicks the “Boom. Boom-boom. Snap” intro of Be My Baby. Perfect.

Just missing out: The Age Of The Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets, because it’s sort of a bit wintery.

So there you go. This meme should probably be killed right now before it becomes an epidemic (as Chicken Yoghurt so wisely did), but I can’t resist at least tormenting qwghlm and division6 with it. So there.

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.

All of which is merely a bit of context-setting build up so that hopefully, when I tell you to download this mp3 of Andrew W.K. singing a 47-second long song based on the transcript of a political debate show because it is BASICALLY GREAT, you won’t think I’m completely mad.

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.

Also well worth reading: A great Wilson/Factory MetaFilter thread from 2002, filled with fascinating reminiscences from People Who Were There.