• Mismatched socks
• That ant crawling up your wall
• Long division

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We’re still steamed that Salon would overlook Heaven’s Gate in a list of “worst movies”, especially when The Movie That Killed a Studio all but defines the category.

But hey, we’re all about listicles, not least when the news of the day is too depressing for a cheerful weekend post. Best or Worst doesn’t cut it for us, however, and our Desert Island DVDs would be overrepresented by porn.

Instead, it crossed our mind that the role of film in our life as an Accidental Blogger (see what we did there?) is to provide go-to references. And two years into this gig, we’ve gathered a collection of favorites for repeated harvesting. That most of them seem to have been made during our adolescence — well, that can only be a coincidence.

We’re limiting entries to ten, because the point of such exercises is to make Painful Decisions, as well as provoke Harsh Criticism that we didn’t include A Fish Called Wanda.

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Peggy Noonan, in the course of explaining how a multinational oil company’s inability to safely drill a mile below the sea compares to a U.S. agency’s inability to safely construct levees around a major American city, slipped in a modern masterpiece of genteel racism Friday:

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen…

And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public’s fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don’t get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.

And you actually don’t write something like that by accident, not when you’re celebrated for your political craftsmanship. It’s too bad we’re so distracted by crude racism these days that we can’t take a moment to appreciate the refined racism of a real pro at work.

He Was Supposed to Be Competent [WSJ]

We’re having a hard time telling the difference between blind faith in private property and blind faith in free markets. Especially since both have proven apocalyptically disastrous.

Defending Rand Paul, Part II [Dave Weigel/WaPo]

That chung-chung thing can really get on one’s nerves.

NBC Cancels ‘Law & Order’ [NYT]

This is a jellyfish. It lives in the sea. It’s not like all the other jellyfish. Its gonads are inside-out. The nice lady zoologist who discovered it says the gonads look like “skyscrapers in a downtown business district.” She named the jellyfish Csiromedusa medeopolis. It means “city of gonads.”

We want to be a zoologist when we grow up, so we can give jellyfish dirty names too.

“City of Gonads” Jellyfish Discovered [National Geographic]

Paramount To Film Mattel’s Magic 8 Ball [Deadline New York]