Returning to a fine New Year’s tradition*, I bring you the most-read Inkstain posts of 2010.

The thing is, it’s frankly a crap list, or at least a particularly odd one. It’s not based on some profundity on my part, but rather some weird Googlejuice, drawing random readers who no doubt click, scratch head, then leave, because it wasn’t what they were looking for:

1. Dust in the Sahel
2. Malaria and Global Warming (depending on how I do the counting, these first two positions reverse – call it a tie?)
3. The Sheet Metal Screw Fairy (I’m reasonably certain people leave this post disappointed. It has a certain charm, but is at a bit of a remove from the search terms.)

It’s only when you get to position #4 that you get a real post I wrote this year where I think I actually had something useful to say – Drought, American Style, on my visit to Hoover Dam last October on the day Lake Mead dropped to record low elevation:

We are sufficiently buffered by affluence that almost no one I talked to today had any inkling of what was going on. Just another tourist Sunday on Hoover Dam. The best I got was from one the folks in this picture, who were on a Sunday drive at one of the Lake Mead overlooks. One of them, a Las Vegas resident, knew the lake was way low, and said the solution was simple – somebody needs to have the political courage to make them release more water from Lake Powell, upstream.

For search terms that bring readers to Inkstain, “Sahel” is number one, and I’m happy to see “Lake Mead drought” on the list. But my particular favorite slots in at #31: “the Indian of the group“.

Happy New Year.

* OK, it’s really what I saw some dude do just now on Twitter. Working a holiday shift at the office. Bored.