Tea Partiers, police, dogs, guns, streetcars, John Catoe, cyclists, plastic bags, bloggers’ rights, Mommy happy hours, movies, gay marriage…and ESPN Zone: here it is, the list of the most popular DCist posts of 2010. Happy New Year!

The DCist music staff had a busy year in 2010. In between interviewing dozens of local and touring acts and keeping everyone abreast of events like benefits and record fairs, our writers and photographers covered 97 concerts. 97! So, in addition to reliving some of our favorite moments via the great work of our photographers, we’d like to recognize the performers who came into our venues and made our jaws hit the floor. These were the events that made our feet sore, our ears ring and our hearts swell with the sort of pride and joy that we had been there. These are my top twenty D.C. area shows of 2010.

2010 seemed, for a while, to be an underachieving year for the movies. Yet when I sat down and started making a list of the films that I really enjoyed this year, I quickly came up with a list that was thirty titles long. And whittling it down to 10 wasn’t as easy as I expected. Hollywood struggled to combine quality with box office in a big way this year, so a look at the movies that were big was looking at a list of disappointments (Alice in Wonderland, for instance) and utterly awful failures (Clash of the Titans, Salt). Sure, there were notable exceptions like Inception and Toy Story 3, but many of the best films of the year weren’t found in wide, or even mid-sized, release. It was the smaller indies, documentaries, and foreign films that were quietly released and had to be sought out that really shone.

Instead of our usual Friday Overheard in D.C., we decided to compile our favorite overheards from the last 12 months. (It seemed the timely thing to do.) But like LeVar Burton always said on Reading Rainbow, don’t take our word for it! Check out our archives for yourself, then let us know in the comments what your favorites are, and which ones we missed.

Eating is a daily activity for everyone, and over a year we consume hundreds of foods. This year, Washington has seen a number of restaurants and bars open. Some of which we visited — Capital City Diner, Point Chaud Cafe & Crepes, Muncheez Mania, Merzi, Sidebar, Ray’s the Steaks at East River, Star and Shamrock and Eat Wonky, to name a few. And we’ve seen the Brickskeller serve up its last beer.