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Following on from the amusing sight of Twitter’s resident celebrities turning into detectives, verifying or debunking other supposed celebrity accounts by going straight to the source, I was mucking around last night and ended up making this t-shirt design. It proudly proclaims that you have been authenticated as the genuine article by the most prolific and successful fake-hunter of them all – Wossy himself.

Unlike previous designs, this time, I’ve actually bothered to make the t-shirt available from CafePress, on the off chance that it’ll please someone who really likes obscure t-shirt slogans that reference minor internet in-jokes whose topicality has a lifespan of about four days.

Geekier alternatives that I considered were “Jonathan Ross is my OpenID provider” and (thanks to Chris) “Jonathan Ross signs my PGP key”.

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.
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