Journalism 2010 (My 'Send to Kindle' bookmarklet is getting a workout)

Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism - Conor Friedersdorf - Entertainment - The Atlantic

Shaolin Soccer (From a collection of the best sports photographs of 2010)

Top 100 Sports Pictures of 2010 >> TotallyCoolPix

Nobody told them it'd be easy, or for that matter it'd be so hard. (But it's the living and the learning that makes it all worthwhile.)

Why indie rock continues to ignore the Drive-By Truckers, and what it's missing | Music Essay | Independent Weekly:

Drive-By Truckers, via IndyWeek.

What's most frustrating about indie rock's general omission of the Truckers is that their career has been more full—and, really, closer to flawless—than almost any other band in the world during the last decade. They've built their own mythology, branding themselves with consistent artwork that gives their Southern scenes visual support. What's more, The Secret to a Happy Ending paints a Behind the Music-like portrait of a complex band of best friends, husbands and wives, full of tension and perseverance. It's a rewarding story, behooving a band that's told perfect tales for the last dozen years. Within the Truckers' deep discography, there's birth and death, cancer and killings, love and lust, wisdom and wit.

"Working This Job" is one my favorite songs from last year.


Drive-By Truckers - "Working This Job" (Music Video) from Tarwater Pictures on Vimeo.

2010: The Year We Make Contact ... WITH SHARKS!

BBC News - Shark attacks rose in 2010 to highest in decade:

Sharks launched 79 unprovoked attacks on humans in 2010, the highest number in a decade, US researchers have found.

One wonders how they determined if the sharks felt provoked. 

NC foreclosures soared 41 percent in 2010

NC foreclosures soared 41 percent in 2010 :: WRAL.com:

Raleigh, N.C. — Foreclosures in North Carolina soared 41 percent in 2010 to more than 40,000, according to new data from foreclosure tracking firm RealtyTrac.

And more on the way for 2011. Not as bad as CA, FL, NV, IL & MI though. Kind of surprising how fast houses are still being built in my neck of Fuquay, all things considered.

The Social Network is unfriended in ARMOND WHITE's annual reassessment of the year's top films.

The Social Network is unfriended, Annette Bening is the best mother and Todd Solondz's dark satire trumps a king's stutter in ARMOND WHITE's annual reassessment of the year's top films.: 

Image via IFC.com

Jonah Hex > True Grit
Jimmy Hayward's neo-Western written by unsung geniuses Neveldine-Tayloris more stirring than even the Coen Brothers' very-good remake.

I didn't see Jonah Hex. (Who besides White did?)  Still, I can say with some confidence it is not better than True Grit. I'll Netflix Hex one day and post a retraction if I'm wrong. (But don't hold your breath.)

2010 in Film. - Ghost in the Machine

2010 in Film. - Ghost in the Machine:  It's the movie list I've been waiting for. This is what will drive my Catch-up-on-what-I-missed queue building and sorting for the forseeable future.  (And I've actually seen four of them already, so I must be getting my cinema groove back on.)

New Years Eve at Clay's Corner * Brasstown, North Carolina * Opossum Capital of the World (Just featured on CBS Sunday Morning.)

New Years Eve at Clay's Corner * Brasstown, North Carolina * Opossum Capital of the World:

Possum in a cage. Ready to drop.

We bring the possum to start the event and then the blessing and then we bring out the queens of the last ten years and show them off...and the church singing of songs and then the drop.

Some towns drop fleas, others possums. The town that drops possums also incorporates, unexpectedly for NC, a drag show.

2010 moments of pure crazy (Part 2!) -- "Inexplicably, no prosecution ensues."

2010 moments of pure crazy (Part 2!) - This Modern World - Salon.com

This Modern World via Salon

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Too Much Crazy for Xmas. Devoured it in a sitting; keeping it out for guests to enjoy.

The 2010 (Navel-Gazing, TL:DR-bait) Cryptonaut-in-Exile Year In Review

As the clock runs down on 2010, please bear with me as I take a moment to look back on my life as a blogger this past year. 2010 is the year that will forever (in my mind) be The Year Triptych Cryptic Faded Away. During TC's death throes, I started cryptonaut-in-exile to give myself a place to land when TC finally folded. For this new blog, I decided to focus on roughly three main areas: my life as a transplanted New Englander making a home in the South, promoting secularism and progressivism, and the usual mix pop/geek culture with an emphasis on Doctor Who and Kim Stanley Robinson. Of course, atheist blogs are a dime a dozen, and I'm not exactly the second coming of Atrios, so I decided I needed to make liberal use of the "Fuquay Lens," to provide regional perspective and carve out a niche for myself. My town has a funny name. If nothing else, I figured I'd be one of the few people saying "Fuquay" a lot.

Without wanting to pander, I do want to understand which posts -- to the extent it can be measured with blogger's native tools -- have resonated, so I can continue to explore those areas of widest interest. With an eye to that, here are my most viewed posts since blogger introduced tracking sometime back in July:

1. NC Man Curses Out, Spits On Muslim Woman In Wal-Mart
2. Louisiana man's deer stand camera captures mysterious "human-like" figure
3. Heath Shuler told to grab a clipboard and take a knee
4. The Parson's Gambit
5. Ashkirii the Mother-man?
6. Winona Ryder tried to warn the world about drunken, anti-Semitic, homophobe Mel Gibson 15 years ago.
7. I should have seen it coming. (Bush Plagiarism Edition)
8. RIP Aaron Shannon, Jr.
9. O Come All Ye Faithful And Keep Your Hands Where I Can See Them
10. Western Harnett teacher charged with having sex with student

Number one on the list was, for several weeks after posting, far and away the most read post, almost doubling the numbers of the second most read; however, the Louisiana mystery figure has been drawing google searchers more consistently since posting and looks like it may take the top spot soon. The relative popularity of the Shuler post surprised me; I must have got caught up in the slipstream of backlash against Shuler's doomed attempt to oust Nancy Pelosi from her leadership position. A couple of the most popular were just link teases for Achewood comics. (I'm trying not to take it personally that rants I pounded the keyboard furiously over, then had to edit and rewrite (to remove excessive profanity) before submitting get blown out by "hey, look, this guy drew something funny" posts. So it goes.) Well, I'm not sure what lessons to learn from these except that most of my top ten posts were in line with my three stated areas of focus; so, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing and see how it goes.

Trends are interesting. Here's a peek at how this site's audience has grown since tracking started. Don't mistake this for an indication of wide popularity. The numbers even at the apex are small enough that they'd be rounded off by the blogging big boys if they were to do this same exercise. While the actual numbers may be small potatoes, the trend at least tells a pretty good story.

cryptonaut-in-exile pageview trend 2010

Where do the visitors come from? My traffic started out being largely driven by google search results, with the occasional boost from stumbleupon, current, and reddit -- the NC racist guy post got big bumps from reddit and current users in particular. I used to segregate my FriendFeed and facebook activity a bit more than I do these days, but eventually decided to stop being so shy about being atheist, so I shared the blog fully with FriendFeed and started pushing the odd post to facebook. (Yes, family members, I have a foul mouth. It's not that my parents didn't raise me right, I'm just incorrigible.) Once I opened up a bit, those two sources brought a few more eyeballs to the blog, although I'm sure I alienated some old elementary school friends along the way by also not being shy about communicating how morally bankrupt and cowardly the evidence indicates you have to be to vote Republican these days. (By "these days," I mean, "since Eisenhower.")

While I've made the blog my primary outlet for public expression on the web, I'm still active on FriendFeed and slightly active on twitter. I don't actually care much for twitter, frankly, but it plays the nicest with my phone, and there are a few tweeters out there who make the experience enjoyable.

I've tried posterous, looked at tumblr, I think I've also got Amplify and possibly some other accounts languishing out there. I've stuck with blogger though, partly out of laziness, partly because it's where TC started and I haven't had a compelling reason to change. Also, as part of google, I don't anticipate it will go away anytime soon. I'm not as sold on the relative permanence of the other platforms. I'm also accustomed to blogger's UI; I can share a link, put an image in, pull a quote, make my comment, and move on, usually in just a few seconds.

I've moved away from just posting links because, as part of importing my posts from TC, I deleted scores of old posts because they were nothing but dead links. By pulling in a bit of the content though, at least there's some inkling as to what I thought was interesting and worth sharing about the link in the first place even after the link dies. You'll also notice I tend not to quote more than a paragraph or two, or in the case of webcomics, to tease a few panels or a detail from a single panel cartoon; I do that because I want to support the content creator by, hopefully, driving people to the original link, not showing the whole thing on my site. This is an issue I have with many blogs and sites like the Daily What -- which I enjoy, but guiltily because I never click through anything they link. Why bother? They've shared it all. I'm not exactly with comfortable with the fact that they are getting the eyes (and, I imagine, the ad revenue that goes along with pageviews) that should belong to the content creator. (Steps off soapbox. I'd guess I'm something like 90 percent links and quotes, 10 percent original material, so this is a bit like a remora calling leeches freeloaders.)

One goal I have going forward is to step up the production of original fiction content. I'd also like to attend the FFRF conference in 2011 to network with other secularists and visit some old friends in Madison, WI. Otherwise, it's not likely much will change around here.

Thank you for hanging with me this year. I hope to see more of you in the year to come. And, hey, leave a comment when something here ticks you off or makes you say, "frak yeah!" It makes my day. I'm not doing this professionally, it's a hobby;  the only payment I receive is in links back or comments. (Full disclosure: I am experimenting with allowing ads in my RSS feed. Haven't seen a penny yet as a result of doing that, nor do I realistically expect to; I don't think I've ever clicked on an ad myself.)  Anytime you use the sharing options at the bottom of a post, that's also much appreciated. One thing a I got a kick out of this year was seeing the young lady who was the subject of a post here after winning a local election share that post on her facebook wall along with the real media coverage.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year to you all.

The Global Language Monitor | Top Phrases of 2010 (Something's missing.)

The Global Language Monitor | Top Phrases of 2010:

AUSTIN, Texas November 27, 2010 (Updated) – The Global Language Monitor has announced that Spillcam is the Top Word, Anger and Rage the Top Phrase and Chinese Leader Hu Jintao the Top Name of 2010 in its annual global survey of the English language. Spillcam was followed by Vuvuzela, the Narrative, Refudiate [of course], and Guido. Deficit, Snowmageddon [even in NC!], 3-D, Shellacking [no surprise] and Simplexity rounded out the Top 10.

I find it hard to belive some variation of "touch my junk" didn't make the list. I haven't heard that phrase used so much since ... well, let's just say we've been hearing it a lot this year.

The Best Movies of 2010 - Flickchart

The Best Movies of 2010 - Flickchart: I haven't seen them all yet, not even Inception (#1), but Scott Pilgrim just came from Netflix and I did enjoy Kick-Ass and True Grit. I'd put the latter ahead of the former, but that's just me. My 2010 Flickchart looks a little rough, needs some more ranking work ... and where did that Sherlock Holmes (2010) I certainly didn't see (and never heard of) come from? (Quick IMDB search for plot details doesn't ring any bells?  Maybe this was a SyFy movie I shut off part way through? It certainly looks like garbage. Pretty sure I didn't rank this myself, so deleting it from the list, hoping it doesn't take the 2009 version with it in database confusion ...)

Ranking the Doctor Who Xmas Specials

Finally saw this year's special and can put in a best to worst list with the others:

I know the singing was to save lives, but couldn't he have found another way?

1. "The End of Time I, II" (2009) -- Problematic, but moving. Was very hard to see Tennant go. Was even harder to sit through the nonsensical resurrection of the Master. Haven't watched it in a while? Go read a synopsis and try to convince yourself the story was any good. You might persuade yourself it was good enough, but you won't be convinced. (That this is the best of the specials, confirms what we already knew: the specials aren't actually very special. Well, maybe just special enough. It's still an oasis of Doctor Who in the long gap between new episodes.)
2. "The Next Doctor" (2008) -- A better stand alone episode than "The End of Time," but I placed it just behind out of deference to Tennant's last go. The giant Cyberking stomping around London was ace. David Morrissey nearly stole the show as Jackson Lake, no mean feat, and in so doing, I thought, helped bring out the best in Tennant. The moment where the Doctor realizes what's going on was played with subtle brilliance. I'll always love Tom Baker, Peter Davison, and John Pertwee, the Doctors of my youth, and Matt Smith is also quite good, but Tennant is clearly the most talented actor to play the role; even though he was given a bit too much (enough to choke a horse) melodrama to sell by Davies & company, he never seemed to let it interfere with his performance. 
3. "The Runaway Bride" (2006) -- There's a bit of a drop-off in quality here, "The Next Doctor" was much better, but Catherine Tate was like a splash of cold water to the face after the long good-bye to Rose. This one shook things up and had a manic energy I appreciate a little more in retrospect. It helps that Ms. Tate later got a season to flesh Donna out. Had she been a one-off, I might've been less kind.
4. "A Christmas Carol" (2010) -- Just finished this and, after reading a reaction immediately before sitting down to it that was along the lines of "best Xmas special EVAR!" had high hopes, which were largely dashed. It wasn't horrible. But that's Pond and Rory's honeymoon? Remind me why I like them again? Also not fond of the casual flaunting of the rule against having the Doctor flit around the timeline once embedded; what's to stop him now from jumping forward or backward as needed to get a code he needs in a given moment? Nothing except the writers pretending going forward that he didn't do it this time. The episode had its moments (shark!) but it felt like a missed opportunity to do something ... well, clever ... with the idea of the Doctor getting to be the Ghost of Christmas Past. 
5. "Voyage of the Damned" (2007) -- I'm putting this one ahead of "The Christmas Invasion" because I pumped up Tennant's finale, which was, as I said above, a bit of a mess actually, and am taking it out on Tennant's debut. "Voyage" didn't get reviewed very well, so I didn't expect much going in. Frankly, I watched it twice, but it didn't do much for me and I barely remember it. I thought Kylie Minogue turning into sparkle dust, or whatever happened, was unbearably silly, and I didn't think much of Ms. Minogue as a companion throughout anyways. Just meh.
6. "The Christmas Invasion" (2005) -- Yes, Tennant's debut, so significant, but it was largely irritating that he was barely in it. And Rose's mum drove me nuts here. She actually made Rose unlikeable for an episode. I thought Eccleston was brilliant through his season and wasn't sure what to make of Tennant coming in. Had high hopes for the future, but was mostly frustrated by this one.

#Fuquay Snowmaggedon December 2010

I think I outdid even last winter's effort with this new snow wall/kiddie sled run. I have the back pain to substantiate the claim.

The missus and kiddos in the snow fort with sled at the ready.

Blogger's not taking the video upload. If you know me on facebook, you can see it there though.

(Update: this smaller video made it.)

Cultural Learnings' Top 10 TV Series of 2010

My Top 10 TV Series of 2010 | Cultural Learnings:

I did a Top 15 shows as part of The A.V. Club’s Top 25 Shows of 2010 list – which is really fantastic, and features my writeups on United States of Tara and Cougar Town – earlier this month, so I technically thought about what my Top 10 was, but looking back on it I didn’t like it. Knowing that the list was going to be aggregated, I think I steered clear of series I knew didn’t have a chance, or at the very least ranked them lower than I might have otherwise, and the result was a list that wasn’t wrong so much as it was unrepresentative of a broader view of the year in television.

Sherlock didn't make the top series, but it did have a top 10 episode.

Image via Reviews from Baker St.

Festivus Traditions: The Airing of Grievances. "I've got a lot of problems with you people! And now, you're going to hear about it."

This is where, in the spirit of intolerance and ingratitude, I vent the things people have done to disappoint me this year.

1. You were the car dealerships practicing bait and switch. Luring me into your dealership with prices you have no intention of honoring, pretending you know nothing about the promotion I'm referring to until I make you bring it up on your computer and show it to you. Then, you suddenly remember something about residuals or non-negotiable fees.
2. You didn't vote this year or, worse, voted for a homophobic, two-faced, sub-moron bent on ruining the national economy and destroying what limited ability the government has to function as a force for justice and the protection of our civil liberties.
3. You tail-gated me when I couldn't get in the right lane, then zipped past me once I finally could, then cut in front of me without using your turn signal, and then ... you slowed down! You drive like [expletive deleted]. It doesn't impress me that you've got an anti-Obama bumper sticker on your trunk either. No, I'm not thrilled with the execution of the "hopey-changey stuff" I was promised but your guy was still the worse option and can you please make your former VP candidate / half-Governor / caribou-slaying snowbilly grifter go away!
4. Then there's all y'all that were awarded a Glasgow kiss this past year. 

Feels good to have gotten all that stuff off my chest. I'm ready to engage in Feats of Strength. It's a Festivus miracle!

Strip Club Sign Declares "No Negro's [sic] Allowed" - The Consumerist

Strip Club Sign Declares "No Negro's Allowed" - The Consumerist:

The next racist to spell an entire sign correctly will be the first.

'If I've got a problem with you it's going to be on the front of my store,' says the open-minded business owner. 'I'm going to stick to my guns because I think I have the right as a business owner to reject service to anyone. It's not all the black people there are just a few bad ones.'

O Wisconsin, Aryan strip clubs? Really? 

NC leads US in lost jobs in November.

NC leads US in lost jobs in November :: WRAL.com:

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina's unemployment rate is up as the state led the country in the number of jobs lost in November. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says North Carolina lost 12,500 jobs in November, the most in the country.

Poll: Obama's losing support; Romney would beat him now | McClatchy

Poll: Obama's losing support; Romney would beat him now | McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's approval ratings have sunk to the lowest level of his presidency, so low that he'd lose the White House to Republican Mitt Romney if the election were held today, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

I think it would probably be a mistake to underestimate Mitt Romney. He did manage to win the Massachusetts election in 2002, but he's going to have to run against his own record on health care reform and I think he's going to have more trouble with his religious affiliation on the national stage than he did in liberal Massachusetts. I'm guessing that as Republicans in the South find out a little more about some of the ... uh ... more interesting aspects of LDS theology, they're going to have some problems with it.  It's C Street Twat Mike Pence I'm more worried about. His odious brand of wealth worshiping church-state unification theology has, I suspect, more selling power with the GOP's fundamentalist base. 

Here's hoping the GOP ends up nominating Sarah Palin in 2012.

Via Robert's Daily Dose

I turn 40 on Festivus!

It's not too late send your presents in time for my 40th / Festivus celebration! In lieu of gifts, you could also make a donation, in your own name -- don't drag me into mailing-list hell with you! (unless you flipped a few bucks to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, they've already got my info -- and just let me know about it. I will consider that a Festivus miracle!

Click image for a list of (real!) secular charities.