More nonsense that doesn't mean anything

Entertainment Weekly took the week off from actual reporting to fill an issue with lists of the top 100 of the past 25 years.

Looking over their list of the Top 100 films since 1983, I counted the number I'd seen.

75!

Why should I be semi-pleased by that? Well, on many occasions I've been talking with someone and had them mention a movie that I had to admit I had not seen. Their reaction in those cases tended to be so vociferous that I developed a bit of a complex, where I tended to think I was so out of touch with popular culture that I may as well go crawl in a cave.

But hey--a bunch of writers I don't know who arbitrarily ranked artistic efforts as though they were sports teams, implicitly declaring their opinions to be the arbitration of society's beliefs about those works, and over the period of my life between 15 to 40 (when I should be involved in popular culture) I somehow fit in time to witness 75% of those works.

And, uh, yeah, that is supposed to mean something.

Whether I actually liked all those 75, or whether I had a good reason for liking the ones I did, or whether I even remember anything substantive about even a majority of the 75 I did see, or whether I actually saw a majority of them on video/DVD long after they had left the theaters, or whether all those hours would have been better spent trying to help the needy... that was completely irrelevant.

I was able to delude myself, even if only for mere moments, that I wasn't as utterly out of touch with everyone else as I suspected.

It didn't take long to remember that being in touch with everyone else is a specious aspiration.

No magazine is going to rank that.

~

(Yes, I did spend a number of after-school hours during my adolescence by myself. How did you guess?)