Top 5: A Rambling Introduction

I’m a very list-y person. Some people have called me listless, and they may also be right; such are the paradoxes of the universe. I’ve inherited this inclination—to sort all of life’s ups, downs and sidewayses into short bulletted columns—from my father, who enumerates his days’ activities in a notepad, with gleeful anticipation. I’ve tried to help him add more value to his lists: by prepending each ‘to do’ with the item "Make List" you give yourself one thing to strike off straight away, giving you a good run up to the rest.

The reason I bring this up is that I want to introduce what I think may become a new… thing here on Soylent Red: my top fives. I’ve taken the rebelious step of naming them ‘Top 5’s in order to save myself three keystrokes. These are the fast paced times we live in. We do things like replace numbers with digits, and end sentences with prepositions. And start sentences with conjunctions.

Sorry, what I meant to say, before I started channelling Lynn Truss, was that I hope to start posting my Top 5 lists of such things as songs, movie directors, blogs and such like. I figured five items is a reasonable length for these lists, given that I want to be able to go into at least a little detail about why I chose these five foos to be my top five foos.

There are two founding principles in this series. The first is that these lists are based solely on my opinions, and opinions I’ve appropriated from people that sound like they know what they’re talking about. I make no claim that I’m going to evaluate every movie before I name my Top 5. If Taxi Driver doesn’t make the list that’s because I haven’t seen it yet. The upshot of this is that if you don’t agree with my choices, don’t come whining to me about it. The second founding principle is that the lists are not final. Okay, I’m not about to go editing the posts to change the lists, but I’m willing to have people make suggestions, point out omissions, etc. The upshot of this is that if you don’t agree with my choices, do come whining to me about it. I realise that these two principles are not entirely consistent, so I leave the descision about whether or not to argue with me to you. Just bear these two principles in mind when you do.

I have a sufficiently long, er, list of topics that I hope to cover, beginning with the list that inspired this whole venture, my Top 5 Steve Martin Movies. Expect to see that post soon.

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