The best things in life may or may not be free, but certainly the best things in life resist classification, hyper-categorization, obsessive ranking, and bickering about whether “X” is somehow innately, objectively better than “Y.  I say that because there is something tongue-in-cheek about what I’m endeavoring to do in this piece, based off the knowledge that most rank lists are subjective and sporadic phenomena that have become popular since we’ve become more interested, as a culture, in reading numbers and bullet points than we have in pages and paragraphs.  For more reading about the random, subjective nature of rank lists (albeit in a Star Wars context) you can peruse this cool blog post by the Imperial Talker.  Beyond his insight, I would add that if most of our thinking and speaking is a product of a uniquely Western metaphysical way of understanding and perceiving that we’re hardly aware of, then certainly the competitive, linear, numerical notion of a rank list both reflects and reinforces such tacit thought structures (In other words, the compulsion to rank is, I think, far from what anthropologists would call a human universal, or a cross-cultural constant across time and place—although I suppose this statement could be arguable).  If ranking works of art isn’t a natural human impulse or something that has inherent meaning or validity, then rank lists are also a bit hackneyed in some analytical pop-culture contexts.  So that’s the qualification I’ll write about what I’m doing, here.

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