In what is sure to become known as "The Age of the Executive Summary", we have experienced an unexpected flowering of many of the most tedious forms of communication ever invented. But really, enough with the lists already.

Like leaf blowers and sport utility vehicles, lists were once useful tools in the hands of skilled professionals where they were, in general, not subject to overuse by ham fisted amateurs. Over the past ten years, however, lists have swarmed through American media in a phenomenon that resembles something like a great dust storm, coating everything in its path with utter blandness.

Unfortunately, the abuse of lists has gone beyond its often unnecessary inclusion into every single corporate Power Point presentation ever; professional writers -- people whom we allow to actually use our common language to garner fat paychecks -- have been shoveling them at us in geometrically increasing proportions. The reason behind this proliferation of list making has to do with their only positive attribute: They are easy to write, if quality is not a concern.

A list is a terribly rigid type of writing. In some sense, it is almost an offshoot of poetry, a confining framework in which to place ideas, hoping that it doesn't hang together too badly when it's all said and done. But writing good poetry is hard, and it's the same when it comes to writing a good (which is to say, entertaining) list.

There are minimalists in every art form, but they are often the first to admit that it can be very difficult to produce something worthwhile when you don't have very much to work with. This is why most lists are embellished with parenthetical notations, or even full blown essays, which attempt to describe the listed items. But sometimes, even that is not enough to save the list; often, in invalidates the whole mess, because it causes the reader to wonder what the it's there for in the first place.

It seems to be a natural human behavior to allow lists to spring up all over the place near the end of set periods of time. There can be little doubt that the end of the last millennium caused, at least in some small part, the deluge of "100 greatest/most important/etc." lists that poured forth from our nation's media orifices. But two years later we seemed to have broken free from their pernicious influence.

Until MTV and VH1 realized that they were a useful tool for showing music videos, without actually showing music videos. While the rest of our country seems to have moved on, saving its list making skills for the end of the year, the twin tedium-mongers of cable began hitting us the bastard offspring of the list: The countdown. Which essentially is the something as a list in this context, but with an additional, forth-dimentional component. The coy (and boring) process of revealing the listed items, attempting to build tension until it is released at the last possible moment: Number 1!

So we have the 100 sexiest videos, and the 10 most controversial, et al. The most annoying aspect of these countdowns is not merely that the order and selection of the videos seems completely arbitrary; it's the fact that often times the videos are completely obscured by unnecessary voice-overs and various celebrity talking heads, even the final video on the countdown, the alleged paragon of whatever the hell the whole theme of the program was supposed to be. I can appreciate the fact that "Smack my Bitch Up" is a very controversial video without Madonna's face popping up out of nowhere to try to spell it out for me.

Hopefully, this trend will pass and we can go back to watching television the way it was originally intended: With a continuous stream of scrolling text along the bottom, station identification at the lower right, and promos for upcoming programs appearing at top left. God willing, all that writing will be able to distract us from the show.

-B. C. Silvia