9 Major Stories Everyone Got Wrong This Year

9 Conan vs. Leno

The way we heard it:

In 2010, smart, creative, genuinely funny comedy lost out to hackneyed 90s stand-up bullshit once and for all. And it was all Jay Leno's fault.

It went like this: In 2009 The Tonight Show was finally taken away from Leno and given to Conan O'Brien -- the voice of a new generation. We didn't think Leno was funny, but we had to admit it was pretty cool of him to make way for the new guy. He stepped down with grace and class ... only to turn right back around a few months later, when his stupid new show couldn't get its own ratings, and steal the The Tonight Show back. We'd call him an Indian giver, but that's a pretty offensive term, so we'll just call him a giant gaping asshole instead.

Across the internet the story and outrage spread like wildfire as NBC inexplicably folded before the juggernaut assault of Leno's evil team of Hollywood lawyers, morally bankrupt agents, powerful connections and possibly shadow assassins. The network offered to move Conan's Tonight Show to a much later time slot to make way for Leno in the 11 o'clock hour. After trying valiantly to defend himself with elegance, wit and dignity, Conan was ultimately fired, Jay was moved back, and the only people left happy by the whole thing were some ... some old people probably, like in fucking Kansas somewhere, who wouldn't know good comedy if it farted in their mouths.

But the truth is ...

Leno had nearly nothing to do with Conan getting fired. The popular phrasing is that Leno "took back The Tonight Show" after "giving it to Conan." But Leno doesn't "own" The Tonight Show -- NBC does. It was never Leno's choice to make. The sad reality is that Conan signed a tragically shitty contract with NBC -- a contract that held no specifications for his timeslot -- and it came back to bite him. And he should have seen it coming: Both Leno and Letterman have timeslot clauses built into their contracts to avoid this very thing. As Matthew Belloni, an entertainment lawyer and journalist, explains:

"Any talent lawyer worth his five percent fee is probably calling to ask for timeslot guarantees."

So then it was NBC exploiting an oversight in Conan's contract so it could keep their precious Leno waggling his chin and over-explaining his punchlines, right? Actually, the explanation is much simpler and more logical: Both programs were failing. Neither host's audience followed him to his new spot. Team Coco blamed that on Leno's new show providing a terrible lead-in to Conan's, but Leno's new show didn't start until several months after Conan's. Even without Leno's comedy black hole shitting up his lead-in, O'Brien's Tonight Show ratings were still in the toilet.

The only crime Leno committed was having better lawyers than Conan. Conan's contract forced NBC to pay him $45 million if it fired him. But Jay's early termination fee was a ludicrous $150 million. But -- and this is important -- he gets that $150 million only if the studio fires him.

His bosses essentially came to him and said, "Listen, we have two options here: We fire Conan and put you in his job. Or we fire Conan and you refuse to take his job, thus rendering you and your entire production staff unemployed."

What would you answer in that situation? Keep in mind that any way you cut it, the other guy is fired; the only decision in your hands is whether you want to lose your job too. Then also keep in mind that it's not just you -- but all of your friends and co-workers -- whose jobs are on the line.

We can't hate Leno for "taking" anything away. It was the only thing he could have done. We can only hate him because really -- fuck that guy. No real reason we can pin down. He just seems like kind of a dick is all.

8 Christine O'Donnell and the Tea Party

The way we heard it:

"The Tea Party is just a swarm of redneck doofuses, not only unworthy of serious consideration from the rest of us but 100 percent deserving of scrotum-based epithets. Because they're just that ridiculous."

And Christine O'Donnell was the new Queen of the Crazies. It didn't take long for us to find out that she was personally bankrupt, a dabbler in witchcraft and not all that knowledgeable about this holy document she swore she was building her candidacy around. Plus, everything that came out of her mouth was pure hilarious moonshine. Which was probably why she stopped giving her mouth a national platform six weeks before the election. But that didn't stop the media from talking about her, because O'Donnell so perfectly represented everything else about the Tea Party.

There were blatant racists and blatant Obama-to-Hitler-comparison-makers. All year we saw misspelled signs and angry, red-faced Colonials. People like Anderson Cooper and President Obama showed how seriously they were taking the party by calling them "tea-baggers." And nobody blamed them, because all year long, the media gave us a picture of the Tea Party that made it perfectly clear: This is a joke.

But the truth is ...

It wasn't a joke.

For all those wackjob birthers captured on film wearing frilly lady blouses and triangle hats, there were thousands of ordinary people just living their lives, being regular, and not liking how their Republican Party had turned out. And even though Tea Party members tend to skew toward older, middle-class white guys, their overall demographics aren't that far from the rest of the country. Of course, regular people are about as riveting as dry toast, so they didn't get much screen time. Which is why it came as such a shock to everyone when 32 percent of Tea Party-affiliated candidates won their elections.

By focusing in on the assclowns the media painted a picture that not only wasn't accurate, but pretty much made constructive political discourse impossible. They didn't just fail to do their job -- they did the opposite of their job, and they've been doing it for years.

Like back in the 1960s, when they homed in on long-haired hippies dancing like spazzes and plugging every orifice they could with flowers, then declared these ding-dongs the voice of their generation. In reality, most kids from the 60s never looked like that or behaved that way, but that doesn't mean they inherently supported the war in Vietnam or were opposed to civil rights. They just weren't part of the hippie fringe. Look at your mom's (or grandma's?) yearbook if you don't believe us. Or look at this picture from Woodstock.

In case you can't tell, most of the guys are sporting relatively short hair ... at Woodstock.

So when we watched coverage of O'Donnell and the Tea Party this year, we were only getting the bonkers half of the picture. Now that CNN is teaming up with the Tea Party Express to host the Republican debates next year, we'll probably see a lot fewer costumed revolutionaries. But everyone will just assume the Tea Party cleaned up its act, when in reality it will be CNN.

7 Kanye West

The way we heard it:

"Kanye West's career is as done as yesterday's jeggings. After all, there are plenty of perfectly good rappers who don't throw temper tantrums like a spoiled toddler."

Three months before 2010 got under way, Kanye made the blunder of a lifetime when he swiped Taylor Swift's microphone at the MTV Video Music Awards and gave his gaffe-tastic "Imma let you finish" speech. What Kanye didn't know was that somewhere on that stage was a magical, invisible line of pariahdom. The consequences of that stunt would play out in the form of disses from American presidents, current and former, a cancellation of his tour with the biggest pop star in the universe, dozens of fellow musicians shaming him publicly and a call to boycott him by Joe Jackson. Yes, Kanye had sunk so low that Michael Jackson's father thought he had the moral authority to call for his blackball.

By the beginning of 2010, our minds were pretty much made up on Yeezy. At best, he was a retarded buffoon who had somehow duped us into buying his records for five years. At worst, he had something very seriously wrong with him. Just about everything he said, did, or wore in 2010 made him look like it might be the latter. Like when he compared himself to Maya Angelou or covered his teeth in diamonds. And especially when he discovered Twitter and started spewing all sorts of incoherent diarrhea. It's almost like Kanye collaborated with the media to present the worst possible image of himself, and we ate it up, because why wouldn't we? Who acts like that, right?

But the truth is ...

None of it mattered.

Kanye's latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is being called the "Sgt. Pepper of hip hop" and a "masterpiece" by critics. For a while there, we forgot that Kanye has been making the music half of "rap music" since he was 20-years old. Before he ever picked up a microphone, other big names, such as Jay-Z, Nas and Ludacris, were clamoring to rap over his beats. So when he actually got around to doing the one thing that made him famous in the first place, we probably shouldn't have been so surprised that he was good at it.

This isn't the first time we've seen an artist create like a genius while acting like a lunatic; we're just not used to seeing it in rap music. Brian Wilson had a reputation as a tortured genius, crippled by shyness and stage fright but with a head full of opaque brilliance that the rest of us could appreciate only when he sat down at his piano. It might be time to start thinking of Kanye West as the opposite of Brian Wilson. Instead of struggling with crippling shyness, Kanye forces his fans to deal with his crippling case of whatever the opposite of shyness is.

There was even a moment at this year's Video Music Awards when Kanye made us think, if only for a split second, that maybe he'd orchestrated the whole controversy on purpose just to keep us talking about him. He returned to the scene of the crime, and performed his new album's hit single, "Runaway," mixing every layer of the song together on his keyboard as if to remind us that, yes, he's a musician. The chorus "Let's give a toast to the douche bags" had such feeling that you almost forgot that he was making fun of himself while simultaneously making everyone else who'd made fun of him in 2010 look like they weren't in on the joke.

Granted, that's a lot of self-awareness to award a guy who wears shit like this:

In the end, it doesn't matter if he's self-aware, retarded like a fox or retarded like Rain Man. As long as he makes music that critics fawn over and that the rest of us buy it probably doesn't matter.

6 Jessi Slaughter (aka "You Dun Goofed!")

The way we heard it:

"It's an impotent ignorant redneck vs. super-cool all-powerful Internet geeks Anonymous! And Anonymous wins! LOL!"

Some of you were exposed to this story only via memes, usually a screen cap of a hillbilly screaming "YOU DUN GOOFED!" at a camera while a girl cries in the foreground.

Or maybe you've just heard people joking that they'll "backtrace" you, or report you to the "cyber police."

It's all referencing the same video, where a girl is receiving harassment from Anonymous (aka the most tech-savvy and malicious posters at 4chan) and her father screams a bunch of hilarious threats that he in no way has the power or expertise to follow up on. It's funny because he's clearly an old, uneducated redneck, the kind of guy who would beat up on a geek if he saw one in real life. And all he can do is impotently shake his fist into the camera and make a bunch of nonsense threats.

It's the stuff memes are made of, a perfect geek victory we can all celebrate. The video exploded on Digg, Reddit and everywhere else. The family wound up on Good Morning fucking America.

But the truth is ...

It was 4chan making sexual advances to, and then real-life death threats toward, an elementary school girl.

Let's back up for a moment.

4chan isn't entirely pedophiles, but it has a lot of pedophiles. Historians may never know whether it started with real pedophiles or simply hipsters making pedophile jokes in order to be shocking (they invented the "Pedobear" meme, a child-molestation themed mascot), but we know that the No. 1 job of 4chan moderators is trying to stem the tide of child porn (or "CP," as it's referred to in 4chan jargon) that floods the site. Surf /b/ for an hour, and you'll wind up with naked children thumbnails on your hard drive.

So the girl in the video, who goes by Jessi Slaughter, showed up on /b/ one night and, as they tend to do, /b/ tried to get the fifth-grade girl to strip. She refused to show enough skin and eventually took to her webcam to call /b/ a bunch of losers (4chan keeps no archives, but you can find the screen grabs of all this if you Google it and hate yourself).

Anonymous sprung into action. This is the type of cause Anonymous really gets into. Some of you may know them only for their attacks on Scientology or their defense of the WikiLeaks leakers. You probably don't know that for every one "good" deed, they perform several hundred like this. And by "like this," we mean they hunted down the personal information of an 11-year-old girl, including her home address and phone number, and began calling her house at all hours and making death threats. Hundreds and hundreds of 4chan posters jumped onboard, unified in their drive to terrorize a small child.

She was eventually placed under police protection, and her father flipped out and made his hilarious rant into her webcam to try to get Anonymous to back off. A meme was born.

They say one of the worst things you find out about the world as an adult is the way the oppressed, when given the chance, can be just as horrible as their oppressors. Nerds who get wedgies all day at school don't dream of equality -- they dream of being the one doing the beating and humiliating. For proof, all you have to do is look at how Anonymous behaves when given the chance to terrorize someone who they know can't strike back. They find themselves operating by the same rules as any bully: They don't harm the people who most deserve it, but rather the ones who are least able to retaliate.

But most of us who find ourselves on the "geek" side of the equation want to see ourselves as the oppressed and righteous minority, so we cheered on Anonymous and mocked the ignorant hillbillies. Meanwhile, Anonymous went back to their favorite hobby: Defacing Facebook memorial pages of dead children. LOL!

5 The Social Network

The way we heard it:

"The Social Network is a scathing, and probably unfair, portrait of Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook doesn't want you to see."

If you found yourself crapping next to a basket of magazines in the months before The Social Network hit theaters, you were well prepared for the public execution of Mark Zuckerberg. The Sunday Times of London promised a movie about the "seamy life of (the) Facebook boss" who is "driven not just by money or fame but also sexual insecurity." New York Magazine ran a cover article that set the stage for a media throwdown.

Zuckerberg weighed in with the complain brag of the year, saying "I just wished no one had made a movie about me while I'm still alive" (before going on to complain, "I also wish the supermodels I have sex with on top of my money pile would stop getting altitude sickness").

Once the movie came out, the real fact-checking began. The Orlando Sentinel compared the film's "ugly portrait" of Zuckerberg to Oliver Stone's "J.F.K., a dazzling con job fabricated on faulty data and a single point of view." Slate pointed out that the story we get in the movie, that Zuckerberg invented Facebook to get back at a girl who dumped him, is almost definitely made up.

It would have been easier to defend the movie if its screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, didn't openly admit that he wasn't even trying to tell the truth, saying "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling", or roughly translated, "If lying made the story better, I lied."

But the truth is ...

Everyone was completely right that the movie is full of lies and half-truths. They just all seemed to miss that almost every single one of those lies was designed to make Zuckerberg look awesome.

Aaron Sorkin needed to lie because he couldn't write an interesting movie about the kid who gave a rambling 45 minutes interview at the D8 conference earlier this year when confronted about Facebook users' well-documented privacy issues. Sorkin's version of Zuckerberg would have ice skated circles around those interviewers. The only information the real Zuckerberg conveyed was that he may in fact be a very sweaty robot.

The Social Network's Zuckerberg is only "uncool" in the way that nerdy girls in teen movies are "ugly" until they take off their glasses. He occupies the physical space of an "uncool" person and is referred to as such by other characters. But he dominates every conversation and room he enters with quiet, savant-like intensity. No, movie Zuckerberg doesn't smile or engage in social niceties. Anyone claiming that makes him less cool might as well be arguing that Brett is the coolest character in Pulp Fiction because he has better manners than Jules.

The movie took a lot of heat for its theory that Zuckerberg created Facebook to get back at an ex-girlfriend. Slate complains that the entire story line appears to be based on one sentence Zuckerberg wrote on his blog, which read "Jessica Alona is a bitch." But in the film's last scene, we learn that the "bitch" is the answer to the riddle that is Mark Zuckerberg. Slate points out that he might not have even had a relationship with her.

So to recap, the real Zuckerberg called a girl a bitch on his blog, and the movie makes that the salutation on the most epic unsent love letter in the history of unrequited love. Fine. Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook out of puppy love. But that feels less like slander and more like the type of lie you tell about yourself while trying to get laid.

The magazines and sites that criticized the movie for being unfair to Zuckerberg accomplished the rare feat of getting it exactly wrong. If the movie's version of the truth is irresponsible in any direction, it's for letting the real Zuckerberg off too easily. Movie Zuckerberg's low point comes when he's persuaded to screw over his best friend by Napster founder Sean Parker. Real Zuckerberg's low point might have been the time he used Facebook to hack into other students' email accounts.

Or maybe it was the AIM conversation where he called Harvard's student body "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their private information, or the chat log where a friend asked him what he planned to do about the Winklevoss twins (who in the movie and in reality accuse him of stealing the idea for Facebook from them) to which the real Zuckerberg replied:

ZUCK: yea i'm going to fuck them

ZUCK: probably in the year

ZUCK: *ear

Look, we've all had conversations that we'd rather not see surface. Some of us may have even threatened to perform that exact sexual act on Harvard's entire student body without a trace of irony. We're not suggesting that Zuckerberg should be judged for something he wrote as a 19-year-old. Just that he really shouldn't be defended as though The Social Network wronged him in some way. It turned the world's youngest billionaire into something that should technically be impossible: A punk rock billionaire. It was because of the movie, not in spite of it, that Zuckerberg seemed interesting enough to be Time's person of the year. The movie made him Gordon Gekko for a new generation, and with a heart of gold. If you don't understand why that's good for Zuckerberg, ask Michael Douglas about "the number of people who tell him that his Oscar-winning role was the reason they went to work on Wall Street."

4 Project Natal/XBox Kinect

The way we heard it:

Project Natal was announced late in 2009, and for most of the next year, the Internet creamed its collective jeans over it. This isn't a motion-sensing controller, like the Wii -- this is fucking body recognition! Facial recognition! Voice recognition! This is your Xbox coming to life, becoming best friends with you and then taking you on fantastic adventures! It's not going to be a toy or a novelty item; it's going to be the future of gaming itself!

Then, Project Natal was finally released as the Kinect, and we got exactly what we didn't want: Another Wii built around the cheapest, shallowest gimmick possible. Just look at each system's bestselling games:

Wii: Wii Sports, Wii Party, Just Dance, Wii Fit Plus, the Petz series

Kinect: Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventures, Dance Central, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, Kinectimals

Kiddie bullshit and housewife fodder, all of it. We wanted to lightsaber duel in a fully interactive digital environment -- perhaps a bar fight, so we could pick up in-game chairs and bash virtual Chewbaccas to death with them -- and instead we got to molest virtual tigers and go bowling. Again.

The scenario shouldn't have been a surprise: This is what nerds do. We get way too excited about the potential of something, then, when faced with the disappointing reality, we howl in impotent rage and set out to destroy it. We put these things up on a pedestal, then immediately stand at the bottom of that pedestal with an ax, just waiting for the moment we get to chop it down. And the Kinect definitely deserved it.

But the truth is...

In the right hands, the Kinect actually does all it promised and more. You just have to head out to the fringes to see it:

For starters, it's effectively changing the future of graphic user interfaces. The medical field is making use of Kinect's software to enhance and tweak how technicians interact with radiological scans. Instead of awkwardly manipulating a 3D image with 2D tools like a mouse and keyboard, a Kinect-driven interface uses voice recognition, body position and hand gestures to attain an entirely new level of precise, intuitive control.

And all without any sort of physical controller -- hell, even Minority Report had to use gloves to accomplish the same thing.

The current Kinect games mostly recognize only a few predetermined gestures and broad, sweeping movements, but it's not the software's fault. For example, this Japanese gamer built a full-body 1:1 motion recognition mod. Every single movement he makes, his avatar makes in kind. Of course the Japanese guy uses it to inhabit the body of a slutty anime schoolgirl -- that's the endgame of literally every technological development Japan's made in the last century -- but think of other potential uses for this: With some collision detection, this could easily bring about the aforementioned lightsaber fantasy that takes place in a fully interactive digital environment.

Kind of like this: A fully rendered (if glitchy and unintentionally hilarious) environment with two-way interaction. He lifts up, moves and repositions digital objects inside the space, and the space, in turn, renders the real objects he places in it -- his chair, for example, is present in both reality and the game. And that's just what the Swedish version of Kip from Napoleon Dynamite here can do; if you throw some real funds and a professional development team behind it, you've got the closest thing we've ever had to true virtual reality.

Oh, and what's this at the end? Yup: lightsaber duel. Fucking told you.

Finally, as if that wasn't enough to foster painfully fierce nerd erections around the world, there is the inevitable end point: VR porn.

For now, all ThriXXX does is render a virtual hand that you can use to cavity-search dead-eyed whores in a shady motel, but again, these are the very early stages of a completely new technology. With the right amount of money and expertise behind this kind of software, you could be standing in an empty room that, at the touch of a button, fills with your virtual office. You could manipulate programs in the air in front of you. Come break time, you could play a few holes working on your actual, physical golf swing. Or, if the mood strikes, you could just lock the doors, turn the lights down and air-hump some digital poon until the shame overcomes your horniness.

The Way We Heard It:

"THE FINAL SCENE ISN'T CLEAR! WE MUST ANALYZE EVERY FRAME TO DETERMINE HOW THE STORY ENDED! SURELY THE ANSWER IS ENCODED DEEPLY IN THE SUBTEXT!"

Inception was entirely about characters not knowing the difference between dreams and real life. In the final scene, Leo DiCaprio is reunited with his long-lost children, and as he greets them, he spins a top (it's established earlier that if in a dream, the top spins forever, while in reality, it eventually topples). The camera hangs on the top for a few seconds and then ... cut to black. The audience groans. What happened?

Ever since, the Internet has been on fire with analyses to find out how the film "really" ended, picking apart every detail. Someone floated the theory that because DiCaprio's children are wearing the same clothes in every scene, it must all be in his head, so someone interviewed the goddamned costume guy to find out if they were wearing the same outfits (they weren't). The conclusion:

"That's huge. If the kids, clothing really is different, then Cobb, who always imagined them the same way when in a dream, is no longer in a dream and actually in reality. On my second viewing of the film ... the clothing looked identical. But Kurland dressed them, and ... I'm inclined to take his word for it."

Someone else pointed out that the children don't age in the film. Immediately the Internet scrambled to find out who played the children and determined that different, older actors were cast for the later scene.

On our own forum, we actually had to moderate pages of discussion extensively analyzing the exact spin of the fucking top to determine whether the lean exceeded the amount allowed by gravity and thus whether, by the laws of physics, it was destined to topple after the final frame.

And on and on and on.

But the truth is ...

Christopher Nolan did not run out of film. It was scripted, and shot, to end exactly the way it did. It's an ambiguous ending. Lots of movies have them. Not an "encoded" ending or a "secret" ending or a "hidden" ending. Ambiguous. On purpose.

We're not trying to be dicks here, but to this day, fans act like we were watching a live news event when the feed to the camera just got cut, and we're just waiting to hear from somebody else who was on the scene with additional information. But the movie didn't cut to black because the power ran out, or the budget fell a hundred bucks short of what they needed to shoot the whole final scene. The ending wasn't left up in the air. What you saw was the ending.

Again, we are not mocking nerds for overanalyzing pop culture. We're professional nerds who overthink pop culture for a living. But we're kind of disappointed that even the hardest of the hardcore movie geeks seem totally unfamiliar with the concept of an ambiguous ending. Nobody has seen The Thing (where the credits run with it still unclear whether the main character is the shape-shifting monster)? Or Total Recall (was everything part of the virtual reality fantasy)?

Nobody had to read The Lady, or the Tiger in school?

It's a common, age-old technique. The idea is to make you feel uncertainty, in the same way horror movies make you feel scared or pornos make you feel a boner. Asking what ending the director "really" intended is a total nonsense question, and it's kind of ruining your own enjoyment of the film. It's like refusing to accept the events of Lord of the Rings until somebody tells you exactly where Middle-earth is located. If Chris Nolan wanted you to leave the theater knowing it was a dream, he would have goddamned filmed that. He didn't. He wanted you to leave never knowing, because the main character himself doesn't know.

That's the point.

The whole thing is threatening to turn into another Blade Runner "is he a robot" debate, which continued for two decades. If only the filmmakers would just tell us!

Good news, gang -- they totally have! Harrison Ford and Michael Deeley (the film's producer) both have come forward and said Deckard is a human. There's your answer! Oh, wait. Ridley Scott, aka the director, aka the guy deciding every shot and edit and how the overall story is told, says he was a robot. Because even in the minds of the people who made it, there is no answer. Because it's an ambiguous ending, and that's exactly how they intended to tell the story.

2 LeBron James

The way we heard it:

"LeBron James ditching Cleveland for Miami Heat is the worst thing that has ever happened to the NBA, he should be ashamed of himself."

Freakishly giant and impossibly talented basketball star, LeBron James, did what a lot of players do every single year: He went from one team to a different team with the hopes of winning more basketball games. But Cleveland was LeBron's first team, located in the same state where he grew up, and he intended to treat them with respect and fulfill his promise to bring a championship home ... right up until he ditched them in favor of a stellar team of superstars in Miami. Just as sports fans had been fearing all along, it wasn't about heart, or loyalty -- it's strictly about LeBron: The Brand. And LeBron's brand needed LeBron to win a ring for LeBron.

It didn't help that he drew the process out over months. He dodged direct questions and gave misleading answers about his upcoming free agency. He flew around the country, flirting with New York, Chicago and any other city hoping to win a title. Finally, he reserved an hour of time on ESPN to deliver his horrifying decision in the most douche-chill inducing sentence possible: "In this fall I'm going to take my talents to South Beach."

When that wasn't enough, he came out with that irritatingly long Nike commercial wherein he implies, among other things, that he is in no way sorry for his behavior. Nike even includes a pretty damning visual bit where LeBron literally destroys a basketball court by driving a forklift through it.

And that's basically what he did to the game, if you listened to basketball purists shouting on ESPN about how Jordan, Magic and Bird never would have done this. It was like LeBron was an NBA manchuriancandidate, programmed to make everyone love him, only so he could tear their hearts out and make them abandon the sport he'd made interesting again.

But the truth is ...

LeBron's move, including and especially "The Decision," was the best thing to happen to the NBA since Michael Jordan retired (the first time) 14 years ago. Sports are entertaining, but not as entertaining as sports movies. Anyone who would tell you otherwise hasn't seen Rudy.

People love a good story. Sure, every team has an army of loyal fans that will watch and support no matter what, but if you want to get the rest of the world to pay attention, you need a story.

It's why the New York Giants defeating the New England Patriots a few years ago was so exciting -- it could have easily been a sports movie. You had your undefeated yet morally bankrupt Patriots, with their smug quarterback, and their scrotum-faced coach. Meanwhile you had your quintessential underdogs, the wildcard Giants, featuring Eli "The Other Manning" Manning, and a coach that, swear to God, might be Mick from the Rocky movies.

The Patriots became every blond, strong-jawed, arrogant 80s movie bully to the Giants' scrawny, "aw shucks," wacky best friend who it turned out you were in love with the whole time. When the Giants beat the Patriots at the last minute, the world celebrated, not because America was suddenly a Giants fan, God no, but because America loves an underdog sports movie, and this one happened in real life.

But every such story needs a villain, and LeBron James created one for the NBA. Why else would anyone be paying attention to basketball way back in July? And not just paying attention, but actively thinking about it? Basketball fans and nonfans alike all had an opinion about LeBron's decision. Everyone had something to say. If it didn't work, you wouldn't be hearing so many of your coworkers say things like, "Can you believe that LeBron James fellow? I just think it's shameless, whatever it is that he did." If it didn't work, would Christmas Day's Lakers-Heat game have drawn a 45 percent ratings increase over last year?

For the first time since the early 90s Pistons, basketball had a villain, but not just any villain, the worst villain. He turned on the hardworking, blue collar people of Cleveland, lied to them and then rubbed their faces in his betrayal on national TV! The Heat staged an elaborate introduction ceremony so LeBron, Wade and Bosh could show off because they think they're so great. He only plays basketball for the money and fame, and not the love of the sport. What an asshole. LeBron James stole your girlfriend.

The entire ordeal could've been scripted by the WWE, and the NBA couldn't be luckier.

1 The iPhone 4 and iPad Disasters

The way we heard it:

It was hard to find a beloved figure who got more bad press than Steve Jobs this year, which is pretty remarkable, since 2010 saw Michael Jordan try to bring back the Hitler mustache.

The great unraveling of Jobs' mythos started almost immediately after the keynote address in which he unveiled the much-hyped iPad to a unanimous "Whaaaa?" Depending on which tech blog you read, it was either the least-powerful laptop released in years or it was a giant iPod Touch that didn't fit in your pocket unless you were a kangaroo. What was supposed to be yet another of Jobs' spellbinding magic shows created such bad buzz that Apple's stock price went down before it was even over.

With the stink of his last brain fart still hanging thick in the air, Jobs tried to reset the stage by releasing the iPhone 4 well ahead of schedule. The day it hit shelves, reports began pouring in that it was about as good at being a phone as the iPad. If you picked it up with your left hand, it dropped calls.

Rather than admitting he'd made a mistake and recalling the product, Jobs stuck his fingers in his ears and then his head in the sand. Tasting blood in the water, the tech blogs rushed in, forcing Jobs into one embarrassing news conference after another until he admitted he was wrong.

But the truth is ...

If you read only the headlines in the days before and immediately after the launch of the iPad and the iPhone 4, that's the story you got. It might still be what your brain pulls out of the filing cabinet when you hear either mentioned. Well, it turns out that both products did all right for themselves. And by all right, we mean that they were the most successful products in the history of Apple. They beat the shit out of the iPod and the original iPhone.

The real problem was something that social scientists, borrowing a phrase from movie theater racism, call the loud minority. The idea is that a small group's niche point of view is overrepresented simply because that's the group that's more likely to share it. In the case of the iPad, the loud minority were tech bloggers -- people who write and think about cutting-edge technology. The problem is that the more they know about technology, the less they're like most Americans.

If you trust census data over Whitney Houston lyrics, old people are the future of America, mostly thanks to the post-WWII baby boom. And according to an informal survey conducted in line at a Best Buy, not a single damn one of them knows the first thing about operating a computer. The iPad was a computer that finally made sense for people who didn't know how to use a mouse. It responded to your touch in exactly the way you, or even a marginally intelligent orangutan, would anticipate. Push the page you're reading left, and that's where it moved. If the link at the end of that gypsy-cursed email leads you to a scary page full of dicks, you just had to hit the only button on the machine to get back to your pretty, tiled home base.

But if the iPad launch showed that the loud minority had lost touch, the iPhone 4 was the point at which the loud minority found itself shaking a stranger by the neck while screaming "look what you make me do." As Jobs pointed out, they seemed to be willfully ignoring a few things: All smartphones have places you can touch that will make them lose a bar or two; it couldn't have been that big a problem, since Apple was selling more of the iPhone 4 than any iPhone ever and seeing fewer people return them.

Of course, when you're arguing with someone who's already made up his mind to disagree with you, logic only makes him louder. This time, they got so loud that Apple's stock dropped nearly eight percent. For weeks, it was all the Internet was talking about, and then, with a suddenness that was almost startling, the Internet shut the fuck up about the iPhone 4. Jobs had agreed to waive the restocking fee if people wanted to return their phones, and nobody returned them.

In a rare moment of candor, the blog CrunchGear, which had been one of the leaders of the scandal dubbed Antennagate posted an apology titled: "We have met Antennagate, and it is us" in which they admitted that they were "grasping at factual straws and thrusting them into the faces of everyone we encountered " because "controversy generates traffic." Of course, this was a marginally popular post on a site whose most popular iPhone 4-related post is still "The top four iPhone 4 hardware issues so far."

The rest of the silent majority, and even The New York Times just shuffled their feet around and avoided making eye contact by playing with their iPads and iPhone 4s.

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For more attempts to set the record straight, see The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You in School and 6 Ridiculous History Myths You Probably Think are True.

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