Clean & Green

You would think – given that BP dumped so much filthy petroleum sludge into the gulf this year that you could see it from orbit – that this would have been a banner year for the clean and green movement. Strangely enough though, after a little belly-aching and blamestorming, people seemed to go back to diddling on Facebook with their mobile devices and forgot the whole thing. Don’t blame us when those same cellphones and mobile devices destroy life on Earth as we know it though, we tried to warn you. We also tried to jumpstart your concern about that little oil spill incident, even though you’d think that knowledge of having chemicals in your shrimp that cause heart failure and rectal bleeding would be enough of a jumpstart on its own. But don’t worry, in spite of the abundance of oil and deadly chemicals in your seafood, we were here to remind you that there are still enough shortages for everyone. On a brighter note, one of the most brilliant ideas in ages got some attention this year, the idea of turning the nation’s highways into solar panels. A plan that could end on a real high note if we all drove on it with cars made of hemp.

Lifestyle & Culture

This year we asked some important questions, like Is Throwing Puppies In The River Bad? and Why Can’t University of Central Florida Students Read? We also provided some unsolicited advice for living, like how to enhance your procrastination skills, and how to be as happy, healthy, and wealthy as Paris Hilton. Or how to engage in impolite conversation, which usually involves explaining your infallible knowledge of the origin of the universe and where it’s headed. As part of our ongoing amateur anthropology studies of this kind, we also rounded up a remarkable collection of videos and pictures of people moving in the herd-like fashion that sheeple do. And although part of this lemming-like behavior made 2010 The Year Of Facebook, we still managed to locate seven people who still haven’t joined. Strangely, none of them were members of today’s self-proclaimed counterculture of gutter punks and crusties; it seems the herding tendency is so pervasive amongst humans that even the rebels these days wear a uniform .

Music

Luckily, your selective memory has protected you from things like this

Our biggest musical revelation of 2010 had nothing to do with 2010 at all. It was our discovery that the 80′s you remember never existed. While your brain remembers dancing to Depeche Mode and The Pixies, history will remember dancing to Rick Astley, Whitney Houston, Olivia Newton-John, and Survivor. This inspired us to dig deeper, and track the often-overlooked Moody Blues’ spiral down the infernal abyss of the 70′s to their tragic end in the 80′s. Meanwhile, back here in the 21st century, we took a look at why you can’t learn about rap on the internet. And just a few weeks later we got schooled by some nerdcore folks while pointing out that a Norton Antivirus viral would fizzle fo shizzle. We didn’t realize that the fellow that we poked fun at in one of the contest entry videos was Hairetsu, friend of the legendary YTcracker. Thankfully, they didn’t find us annoying enough to crash our servers or anything, they just dressed us down a bit in the comments, and peace was made. Seemingly unable to learn from mistakes, we were right back at it a few weeks later explaining why Tom Waits, Barbra Streisand, Billy Corrigan and others can’t sing. We’re pretty sure the only reason there’s been no retaliation is that none of them knows how to hack a web server.

Politics

We still haven’t selected the winner of our Best Politician of 2010 award, but Kim Jong may just wrest the award from Joe Lieberman’s cold, dead hands for his recent stunt in which he brought the world to the brink of nuclear war without actually appearing in public. Mostly we spent the latter part of the year talking about politics to explain why we don’t care about politics anymore. But at least we suggested some alternatives to the imaginary two-party system that rules the country. We were especially pleased that Arlen Specter referred to Washington’s political cannibalism in his farewell speech, because one of our suggestions for a new platform was the Donner Party. You know. For “when you’re hungry for change, but all hope is lost”. We also stated our support for the Palyn/Quail 2012 campaign, and created the Punk Rock Party, ’cause we went to your party, and your party sucked. Speaking of parties, we also rounded up candidates that made the Tea Party look like, er, a tea party, and explained why, in an era when politicians rant irrationally about the Terror Babies of Texas and immigrant neocon douchebags like Michelle Malkin support them, one of the only strategies left is to become a teabagging Dick Tuck and resort to “Facebook politics”, where we only like you so we can hate you. We rounded out the year pointing out that no matter how hard they nail “The Hammer” (Tom DeLay) , the wood in Washington is still rotten, and greedy Dickensian bastards like Ben Bernanke will still rule the roost. Ben likes Washington. It PRINTS MONEY, mwuah ha ha ha ha.

Pop Media

Pop media and politics became confusingly intertwined in The Death & Rebirth Of Political Meta-Satire As Quantum Comedy, largely thanks to the weird convergence of time traveling nazi Stephen Colbert and the dry drunk, relentless Nazi hunter Glenn Beck. You really have no idea how stupid a Glenn Beck fan is until they start commenting on your articles in which you make fun of him, thinking that they’re sending him an e-mail. You really, really have to look at that article and read the comments to understand the deleterious effects of tabloid news on the average American television viewer. On a tangentially related note, we get a lot of traffic from the search term “Osama Bin Laden Captured”, which is probably the same viewers trying to find out if they forgot to mention Bin Laden’s capture on the news. They’re probably disappointed when they find out that he was captured, but only on film in an offbeat, kitschy Bollywood movie. The word “offbeat” sums up much of our interest in pop media, which is why we dug up the decades-old drug-induced genius of the movie Skidoo for your amusement, as well as the not-decades-old surreal genius of the Japanese film Funky Forest. We also did our best to point out that “quality cinema” and “science fiction” are not mutually exlusive phrases, but acknowledged that they may require a little lubrication to help you overcome your resistance to using them together. And although we eased up a bit on our usual RIAA-and-MPAA-bashing copyfight obsession, we had to ask how it is that you can own a color. We just can’t see the logic. We can’t see the invisible chimp though, either.

Technology

To me, one of the coolest things about technology is when it makes possible the imagining of the impossible, which is why we took a fascinating look at how you can explore extra-dimensional objects with 3D software a few months ago. And why we pondered the bizarre mystery of the anti-gravity physicist and time traveler behind Anderson Multinational. Unfortunately though, in the day-to-day world of technology, the major concern is commerce, so we instead end up repeatedly asking dumb questions like did the iPad kill the Kindle? or will Facebook mail be a Gmail killer? We like to be a little more creative around here, so we often suggest service improvements, like “hey Google, stop finishing my sentences for me” and “hey Facebook, maybe we don’t want to ‘Like’ everything, so how about some alternatives?” One of our bigger concerns though is that because Google and Facebook are ruining the web, and turning it into a big pile of infostractions for graphtards and ways to make lists of lists of things we don’t need lists of, that ultimately Google will decide we’re superfluous . Remember. On the internet, no-one can hear you scream.

Vampire Weekend – White Sky
Amazon | iTunes

Spoon – The Mystery Zone
Amazon | iTunes

Joanna Newsom – Good Intentions Paving Company
Amazon | iTunes

Liars – Scarecrows on a Killer Slant
Amazon | iTunes

Janelle Monae featuring Big Boi -Tightrope
Amazon| iTunes

Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill
Amazon | iTunes

Robyn – Dancing on My Own
Amazon | iTunes

LCD Soundsystem – I Can Change
Amazon | iTunes

Sky Ferreira – One
Amazon| iTunes

Bat For Lashes and Beck -Let’s Get Lost
Amazon (Full Album)| iTunes

Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Amazon | iTunes

Twin Sister – All Around and Away We Go
Amazon | iTunes

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Round and Round
Amazon | iTunes

Caribou – Odessa
Amazon | iTunes

Rihanna – Only Girl (in the World)
Amazon | iTunes

Kanye West featuring Pusha T – Runaway
Amazon | iTunes

A Better Apocalypse Through Technology

Having grown up with entertainment like Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001, Blade Runner, and the movie Brazil, I find a lot of entertainment in doom and gloom scenarios, and live in a constant state of technological ennui. That’s why I’m always eager to point out how too much information is making us crazy, and how the personal computer will bring the end of the world, with a little help from you and the Internet. Oh, and did I mention? Your robot sucks.

If You’re So Hip Why Aren’t You Rich?

If you were REALLY hip, you’d outsource yourself

In spite of everybody I know being a sex god and social media guru or brand expert that’s completely aware of the impending demise of their ironic hipsterism, they still seem to be pretty clueless, masochistic consumers who are always too busy to just hang out, or at least trying to look that way so they can stay employed. That’s why we offer tools and solutions like how to disarm your enemies with psychobabble, and advice on how to outsource your life, because when smart bosses know the most productive employees are crazy and underpaid, who wants a job?

That Elephant In The Room Is A Fat White American

As you can see, a “dreadneck” is nearly indistinguishable from a “redneck”

Unlike most pop culture/pop media sources, we have no idea why you care about how rich and famous people live (though we love the Famous & Fugly), which is why we like to get to the meat of the matter – which in this case means white meat – and why we did an extended series on the “real” white American, exploring things like the zen of being redneck and how there’s more to being a hillbilly than marrying your sister. We also tried to bring a little pride to white trash culture by giving it a more respectable name. And don’t forget that other white minority, Albinos.

How I Went From A Starry-Eyed Obama Supporter To A Teabagging Dick Tuck

If you’ve followed my articles about politics, you’ve watched me go from a liberal lifestyle, fiscally conservative, otherwise split ticket, starry-eyed Obama supporter to a Teabagging Dick Tuck in just over a year, as I learned about agency capture via Washington’s revolving doors, explored the joys of fictitious capital, and pondered not only where your tax dollars go, but showed you what a trillion dollars looks like. I also pointed out that if America were a hundred people splitting a hundred dollars, one guy is being a real prick about things. In the end, I’ve learned what more intelligent people knew along, which is that most people are too stupid to vote, and we may as well just watch them start the Red vs Blue Civil War. It’ll be good for a laugh. We Americans take politics way too seriously anyway. So as a concerned citizen of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brazen, I will from now on only ask the important questions, like Is That A Bomb In Your Underpants, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

Up The Creek Without An iPaddle

Sometimes it’s easy to predict the failure of a major product rollout, like we did when we suggested someone notify Kin’s next of kin. But back in January, we awaited the as-yet-unnamed and mysterious new Apple product with breathless anticipation, pointing out that “iSlate” would be the perfect name, because it wasLate. So would Steve Jobs wear an iPatch to introduce one of these innovative iProducts? Well, it quickly became apparent that Apple is the new Evil Empire, and that the iPad was a marketing platform, not a cool computing tool. Which led us to ask What Do Kate Moss And An iPad Have In Common? And while the tech blogs tore the iPad to pieces, we came up with creative new uses for it, and suggested a list of iPad alternatives.

I’m With The Brand

I have no desire to be a music critic, so when I touch on music, it’s usually to share an obscure artist, talk about marketing, or rant incessantly about what litigious morons they are in the film & music industry. In the obscure artist department, we explained how Aussie punk rock bagpiper Cam McAzie gives new meaning to “down under” when he dons his kilt and combat boots, and took a look into Hungarian Hip Hop and American Hick Hop. We also exposed you to the Relentless Terror of Loituma’s Ievan Polkka. And regarding marketing, we took a look at the sad spectre of middle-aged white men from Ohio making a comeback, and realized it’s truly over when Iggy Pop Licenses “Lust For Life” to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.