One reason I’m looking forward to the end of 2010 is because it will mean the end of the depraved and senseless orgy of “Best of 2010″ lists. Which is why we thought it was time to wrap things up neatly with the best Best of 2010 list. Which is ironic, because we’re always bitching about how stupid lists like this are. So how is it that we can lay claim to the best list? Well, arguably the best collection of 2010 lists otherwise is over at Fimoculous, so by including their list in our list, we supersede their “bestness”. See how that works? Unless they create some kind of “best of” Hasselhoffian recursion by including our list in theirs, we’ve kind of cinched it. But in reality, this is part two of the best of Dissociated Press (part one was back in July), which will by default include at least our best of the year, covering topics like Clean & Green, Lifestyle & Culture, Music, Politics, Pop Media, and Technology. Which is mostly a good way to dig deeper into our site if you haven’t before. We’ve been serving up fresh linkage and unsolicited commentary since June 2008, and even if you don’t enjoy it, a year end review serves two purposes for us; it lets us review content so that our information-damaged brains don’t repeat material next year, and it provides excellent filler content on a day when we really have nothing of interest to say. On a side note, we’re not joking about the “information damaged brains”; there’s only one of we, and it’s me. Something we hope to rectify in the coming year, so I can stop talking like I’m the freakin’ Queen of England or something. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts for some of the best of 2010. It’s been a fun year, with all the oil and information spills and fascism and whatnot. With any luck, things’ll be even oilier, leakier, and more oppressive in 2011!

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.