flashboy dot org

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.