Beauty is Imperfection

I see some horrible person is getting some WordPress attention doing Top 10 lists. As you know, Beauty Is Imperfection reader, I’ve done a fair number of those in my time. I started to feel a little cheap relying on them instead of offering you some well-thought-out, well-crafted prose. Writing Top 10 lists to me is easier than drawing breath. But to see someone else get attention for it, while I sit over here in Transcendentalville howling alone in the wilderness, is too much.

So I offer my first one in ages. Top 10 reasons to do a top 10 list:

1) It’s a cultural meme that everybody understands, nay, one that makes them feel a sense of belonging to their social subgroup

2) It takes about 2 minutes, whereas a real editorial takes hours to craft.

3) It’s almost always possible to insert Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Snooki or Britney Spears into a Top 10 list somewhere, and when you’ve got them in your list, you can put them in your tags, and then it becomes part of Google search universe and makes your a site a destination on the superhighway rather than a gasoline outpost somewhere in Arizona.

4) Top 10 lists employ the sort of repetition and variation that’s key to comedy.

5) Top 10 lists employ the sort of repetition and variation that’s key to comedy, y’all

6) Every Top 10 list comes with a free kitten

7) Except this one

8 ) When people can absorb information from a well-understood social convention like this one, it is easier for them to assimilate information that is otherwise difficult to digest–for instance, if we had the Top 10 reasons why Barack Obama should have closed Guantanamo by now and why in failing to do so he’s let a lot of us down.

9) If you get really good at Top 10 lists, you will be compared unfavorably to David Letterman, but hey, at least you’re in the same neighborhood.

10) A snappy ending makes you feel warm all over: The monster at the end of this list was Grover all along!