The Top Ten "Top 10" of 2014

Was 2014 the worst year ever? Probably not, if you're someone who is aware of the years that have preceded it, such as 1914 (that is, unless you live in Ukraine). Good or bad, it must be noted that 2014 was a boom year for memes, series of useless books, and listicles, which are "rapidly becoming the lingua franca of new-media journalism." Taking that into consideration, as the Volidity Report is a serious journalistic enterprise, we embark once again on an annual tradition: the ranking of the top ten Top 10 lists from 2014, provided to you in helpful listicle format.

10) Spectator UK: My Top Ten Most Fatuous Phrases
Ron Liddle is right. If all goes well, in 2015, we'll all be using more words like "fatuous".

9) Golf Channel - Top 10 in 2014: Controversies
Were you as upset as we were when Patrick Reed called himself a top-5 player? Why, with declarations like that, he'll never make the top ten of golf statisticians, let alone critics!

8) The Top 10 Most Popular DARPA Stories of 2014
The U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency proves it's still on the cutting edge with a self-referential Top 10 list compiled by the best and brightest of social media interns. We're excited to see how the DARPA #brand will grow in 2015!

7) Top 10 Items You're Too Old To Wear
Ladies! Fellas! Time to face the music. You’re just TOO OLD to wear those message T’s! "'The message tee boom was fueled by Young Hollywood [as] a way for people to express frustration.' And that doesn’t exactly come off as mature."

6) TOP 10 shipping container structures of 2014
Do you still think that shipping containers are *just* for shipping things? Then you're in for a rude surprise in 2015 when all your peers will have absorbed the lessons of this important Top 10 list.

5) Top 10 Reasons Libertarians Aren't Nice to You
Had a real Randroid meanie in your life this past year? Chris Cantwell totally gets it - and he's happy to explain why you deserved it!

4) The Top 10 Feminist Hashtags of 2014
As we all know, there's nothing the patriarchy fears more than ideas transmitted on a web platform preceded by a pound sign.

3) Minnesota State Fair Top 10 Places to Poop
If you were like me, you wanted to love the MN State Fair...but there was just no place to drop a load! And in Obama's America, you can’t just poop in the middle of crowded fairs anymore. But worry not Frustrated Fairgoers! Know that Cityblogs has you covered for next year with all the hot spots to squat.

2) Time Magazine: Top 10 Everything of 2014
Somehow anticipating the Volidity Report's meta-approach in trying to cover "everything," Time still managed to leave the assessment of Top 10 lists to us.

1) 10 Things Only I Will Understand
That feeling when Mallory calls you Steamboat...

№ 2, 4, 6, 8 & 9 suggested by Herrence Meritocracy and № 1, 3, 5, 7 & 10 suggested by LK Shov. All methodologies scientific.

Killing History

Producing a book of historical scholarship can be difficult, especially when one is writing for a popular audience. Take a gander at the New York Times Best Sellers if you want to grasp the nature of the problem. Just last week, your Editor spotted in the Top 5 Hardcover Nonfiction and Print/E-book Nonfiction a book with the word "Nazi" in the title, a book by a late night teevee comedian, a book by a conservative "comedian," and a book about a four year old's journey to heaven where he got to hang out with God and Jesus and the gang. America knows what it wants!

So perhaps we cannot totally blame teevee guy Bill O'Reilly for titling his history of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln "Killing Lincoln." It's simple, catchy, and more of a factual statement than Heaven is for Real. But if the American public has been an enthusiastic consumer of this book (and its made-for-TV special!), the U.S. Park Service has refused to sell Killing Lincoln where Lincoln was killed due to its numerous factual errors.

This didn't stop ol' Bill though. Using this template, he went on to co-author two more books on other subjects that have already been written about endlessly, Killing Kennedy and Killing Jesus. Given that O'Reilly's B.A. in History from Marist College (currently ranked 375th best in the U.S. by Forbes!) might not seem the strongest basis for being an author of various history books, Your Editor foolishly assumed that the co-author (always appearing as MARTIN DUGARD below BILL O'REILLY) must then be a trained historian with a Ph.D. in History. Au contraire! Mr. Dugard does not claim any degree and splits his time between writing and coaching high school track, making him that rare person honored as a New York Times bestselling author *and* "Girls Varsity Cross-Country Coach of the Year" in Orange County, CA.

Considering how successful the duo of O'Reilly and Dugard has been, why leave history writing to the historians? In fact, why even leave history writing to history? The Volidity Report has thus decided to write a history of the future, predicting what books might be next for Bill O'Reilly and other potential co-authors (assuming that Martin Dugard will be busy with track-and-field season). Let's review!

Venetian Doge

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. This is despite the fact that dogs have gained rather great prominence on the internet, enough to even challenge the hegemony of the feline. One popular internet figure of late is a Shiba Inu dog named Kabosu, whose thoughts and experiences have been catalogued under the pseudonym "doge."

Americans may know their memes, but they sure don't know much about history. Now, as textbooks have been made obsolete by iPads, we must recognize the need for new teaching methods. By choosing the name "doge," the denizens of the internet have offered us an opportunity to teach the Youth about another set of doges. Hailing from Venice, the *Most Serene* of Republics (and thus the chillest), these doges were in fact humans elected to run the city-state and its maritime trading empire from the middle ages until 1797.

Thus, the Volidity Report presents the Venetian doges in a vernacular understandable to the internet: