Ten ten TEN. TEN! Poorly veiled corporate hell-spawn keep sending Da-da Top 10 lists selling this and that. Manipulation aside, why does the Western world auto-code its point-blank zeitgeist with TEN? Is it from the french verb,
tenet, which is where we get the word,
tennis, french obloquy for, "Here it comes!"? (Well, not for Da-da's serve.) So, what's the real source for Top 10 obsession? Da-da has no idea, but he can hit brain bushes with a stick. Ready? Here we go.
- Ten Fingers, Ten Toes -- Duh. You're taught to use them for BASE 10 amusement, arithmetic and Boolean Algebra (well, backwards, but who cares). Oddly, George Boole himself (who not only invented Boolean Algebra, but also famously said, "I think, therefore I am Rene Descartes") used to run around his London flat yelling, "TEN TEN TEN!" till the neighbors hit him with the taxidermied penguin atop his TV... which is where Monty Python got the joke, right. You writing this down?
- David Letterman's Top Ten List -- Besides his joke graveyard, Dave is also a member of "The Ten," a secret celebrity cabal that controls not only what re-runs are run, but also how many rolls of toilet paper go into a Costco bulk package. Spooooky.
- The Decimal System/Dewey Decimal System -- Dewey was actually a vampire, and they're all OCD, hence the extreme TEN classification system... but if you need Da-da to spell out the plain ol' decimal system for you, you (like Da-da) might be suffering from low cranial pressure.
- The Ten Commandments -- More decimation. Note that there were actually more
commandments, but the extra ones didn't fit the tablet, so they got tossed. One reminded the reader that these weren't, "commandments," per se, but friendly suggestions. Another suggested that Moses was rather odiferous and badly needed to be hosed down. And another mentioned not eating cassoulet in certain restaurants. As a useful aside, you can't understand the software that 48% of the brains in the U.S. are running without a thorough study of the fear, anger and guilt that is The Old Testament.
- Ten Plagues of Egypt -- Some believe these were caused by the eruption of the massive volcano known as Thera, but the Ten Plagues actually caused by an initial Plague, making ELEVEN. The Initial Plague was when all the attorneys (fresh from sinking Atlantis) descended upon Egypt, thus initiating the other Ten Plagues. With Ancient Egypt destroyed, the plague of attorneys moved en masse into religion. Civilization has been in decline ever since. (Note: prior to Atlantis, all the attorneys were on Mars, where they laid waste to the entire planet -- also destroying the planet in-between Mars and Earth, now the Asteroid Belt, in the process -- before coming to this planet. This is why so many people in government keep talking about going to Mars.)
- Ten Lost Tribes of Israel -- These aren't really lost; legend tells that they were just late for a potluck.
- Hammurabi's Code -- Same as Ten Commandments above, except with less zealotry and more draconian, king-y mightiness. Mighty kinginess?
- The Magic Ten -- A fleshed-out list of TEN THINGS seems just big enough to hand an editor without them saying, "Where's the rest?" (See LAZINESS.)
- Ten Lords a-Leaping -- This has NOTHING to do with the prevalence of the dreaded Top Ten List, but it does show the fun writing tradition known as, "padding." Da-da will instead remind you that you're conditioned to think in DECADES, as well as seasonal Hallmarks, to keep moolah flowing. TEN!
- Finally, there's Blake Edwards' movie, 10, which installed said subroutine permanently into your lower cranial code, reducing everyone in the world into a simple numeric value of immutable hotness.
Yes, there's more. We may also blame the sub-basement hurrah of ten-pin bowling (but no one really thinks about bowling, not even bowlers), as well as ten yards to a first down in football ("1st and ten"), ten guys on the field in baseball (including the batter, hello?), 10 Downing Street,
Ben10, the state number of Virginia is 10 (huh?)... but in reality the TEN LIST thing is really about
INERTIA.
Once people's minds are locked in a lame writing/reading framework, they're loathe to get out. Top Ten lists are what people do when they're too lazy to be creative, too lazy to think in the much superior
BASE 6 system. Speaking of that, you should SO look down your nose at lists that don't make it to ten, they're just lazy. But the real secret to our
DECIMATION mania is...
Yup. You guessed it. There are TEN PROVINCES IN CANADA. The truth is always shocking.
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| Da-da doesn't know what to make of this Unconscious Human Paradigm, either. |
