TOP 100

I think that the column you are about to read is going to qualify as one of the Top 50 Best Of “In My Humble Opinion” columns ever written. I’m absolutely sure of it! Yes, you are correct, if I have only written a little over one hundred of these things then the bar is set pretty low, but that’s not the point. Apparently, EVERYTHING has to have a “Best Of” list including the Top 100 Best of Lists. Seriously, there really is a list listing the best lists you can list. According to who, or is it whom, they do not say.


And these lists not only claim that they are uncovering the greatest or the best of….as in: the best songs, the best books, the best poems, the greatest romantic comedies, the greatest Canadians…et al, they are claiming that these things are the greatest or best whatevers of ALL TIME! Not just of the Twentieth Century, or the past decade, or the things released in the month of October, or something, no, of ALL TIME!

Topping off my list of the lists that bug me the most is the list of the Top 100 Most Beautiful Women of All Time. Let’s take a serious look at the flaws in this statement shall we? First of all, the population of the planet Earth has just topped over 7 billion beings so for easy figuring let’s say that half of them are women so we’re at about three and a half billion women in the world, right now, and considering humans have been around for quite some time and we can extrapolate that the historical number of women produced throughout time going back thousands of years maintaining today’s ratio of 103 men to 100 women and calculating the descending population inversely to today’ numbers added to the already 3.5 billion…the results …WOULD BE AN ATRONOMICAL NUMBER OF WOMEN!! And you can narrow that number down to 100…ALL TIME? Really? I aint’ buyin’ it, man.

You know, people’s tastes are so diverse how are you ever going to get any kind of consensus on any of these lists anyway. Besides…nobody but the list compilers really care what the “Top 100 Car” songs, (not to be confused with the Top 100 80’s band “The Cars” songs), are. Also, do they mean songs that you sing in the car while on a trip like, “Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts”, or “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”, or do they mean songs with a car theme like “Little Deuce Coup”, or something? Only the list makers know for sure. Or seem to care.

And let’s not forget the most debatable of all things Canadian… all of the Top 100 Hockey Themed Lists. Unfortunately, this list includes the Top 100 Hockey Tweeter Lists??!! Seriously? And you can find lists from the “Top 100 Greatest Goalie Saves”, (like you can narrow that one down, too, from a couple of zillion saves to 100), to the likes of “The Top 100 Greatest Goals Scored By A Right Hand Shooting Left Winger That Played On A Team With The Colour Blue In The Uniform Between 1930 and 1967 With A Minimum Of 200 Games Played In the NHL”, or some damn thing. They have to have something to fill in the never-ending hockey coverage, don’t they?

So there you have it. This column might rate a number 7or 8 out-of-10 based on the allowable criteria set by the “Column Readers of Kipling & District” which would then place it near the top of the #’s 20-10 on the list with a likelihood of cracking the Top 10 depending on the scoring of the…….oh, who cares!?

“If you name one person out of one hundred “The Best” you have created one winner and ninety-nine losers,”- Bruce Lee (Calgary Productivity Coach).