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  • http://u.nu/3nf4f This has made my face smile at least twelve times. I can't move it out of my reader. Yes, mark as unread!
  • Happily devastated after finishing Atonement. The movie was wonderful, and the book was better.
  • Suddenly a heavy rain.
  • @stakethisclaim Our dinners were sisterwives. Mine also had a lot of mushrooms in the sauce. I believe in mushrooms wholeheartedly.
  • Oh, Top Chef. If I'm bored with your pre-finale episode, how can I hope to get jazzed for the finale? Stop being so boring this season.

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• Reading:

  • The Demise of “Cathy”
  • cooked my first not-from-a-box pad thai!and i quote the...
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I find it strange and sad that society moves toward regularizing everyone — rather than valuing and helping people with strange, interesting tendencies or abilities, we cram them into a more standard form. The obvious downside is the collapsing of individuality. Beyond that, though, are the consequences of trying to be or simply seem normal and conventional.

A more extreme example of this is hoarding, which is experiencing a strange media heyday at the intersection of disaster-porn and home makeover shows. Salon recently ran an interview with hoarding expert and Smith professor Randy Frost. He put the problem in a way I’d never thought of:

When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we think, “This is useless,” but a hoarder sees the shape and the color and the texture and the form. All these details give it value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all — it may be a special gift or a special ability. The problem is being able to control it.

People often wonder aloud what may have happened to some of the great artists in history if their esoteric habits and sometimes destructive personalities were chemically regulated. More than that, who knows how many of our most productive mathematicians and scientists experienced mild forms of autism, how many philosophers experienced enlightenment through bouts of depression, and so forth.

There is no reason for people to suffer when we have ways to ease their pain, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. But I do think we can understand and help in moderation, while not unnecessarily squashing anyone’s “special gifts.”

The one-size-fits-all problem shows up in more benign ways that are arguably as offensive. On a new Style Network show called Tacky House, people nominate their loved ones for a makeover of a room the nominator simply can’t stand because of its poor design.

In the episode I watched, a husband nominated his wife of several years who had designed a room in their home around the Martha’s Vineyard locale where they met and fell in love. She filled the room with arrangements of silk roses, flower-upholstered furniture, and all manner of pastel pinks. “I thought you loved this room,” she mumbled sadly. “How am I supposed to watch football in here?” he said.

Yes, the room was overkill, but there was so much love coming from the wife and so little appreciation coming from the husband that it was uncomfortable to watch. The show’s host corrected the woman’s memory in hindsight (“Martha’s Vineyard is a beach, it’s not full of roses,” he’d say. “But I loved the gardens there,” she’d answer) and wedged a new image into the room.

Even for those with no involvement in SEO (search engine optimization) marketing, SEOmoz has an interesting, very visual post of observations on the blog posts linked-to most in other blogs or sites.

It’s skewed because the statistics are for a list of 40 SEO blogs, not anything more general, but still compelling. SEOmoz found that the “sweet spots” for title length and post length were 14-16 words and 2328 to 2618, respectively. Goodness, I don’t know if I ever read blog posts that long, and may in fact skip them altogether at first glance. Not kidding about that.

As for a 16-word title . . . Well, you can see here how successful that is or isn’t. I think it’s funny looking, but it at least doesn’t break the look of my WordPress theme. I also had a hard time coming up with sixteen words, so I resorted to a list of nouns. Yeahhh.

SEOmoz is a total rabbithole. My colleague here reads and relies on it pretty regularly, and now that I’ve started keeping up with it on a casual level, I am pretty addicted.

My friend Emily (of the Petit Four) managed to shut the case on one of our great personal mysteries when she traced from the blog Orangette to its progenitor Molly’s new restaurant Delancey. Seeing the “designed by” tag in the corner, she learned the site was the work of Sam T. Schick, our former editor-in-chief and object of great collective fascination.

More than someone I find interesting, Schick is responsible for events that changed my life — namely, when I was 17 and a freshman and a dutiful head-nodding staff writer, he pulled me up when someone quit and installed me in her place. I stayed on staff as the news editor for two years then ran the paper myself for two more, leaving reluctantly when I graduated and fearing for is future well being. I began as someone who could write and ended up becoming an insatiable aesthete with a particular eye and deep personal investment in whatever I do. Sometimes my coworkers or friends don’t understand why I have to spend the extra time to really love the way something looks, why I actually use all those features Microsoft Word offers to change the line height or indents. In turn, I have no idea how those people don’t see the same way.

Schick now operates Sam T. Schick & Wandering Works (what a great name) and seems to be making good for himself, which is so pleasing. He left school and disappeared, and we heard bits and pieces that usually were unsubstantiated. In the website for Wandering Works, I see the same sparse, simple layout that he valued when he trained me at the paper, the same love of negative space, an overall uncluttered look, and serifs. It’s satisfying.

As most internetizens do, I occasionally Google myself and my domain and see what’s up.

Aetataureate shows up on some spammy-looking website that compiles a list of “Websites with ‘tata’ in the name.”

Sorry folks, no tatas here. Move along.

I haven’t been sleeping much, or well, for reasons unclear. The weather finally fell over into summer here so that could have something to do with it; I’ve started swimming again, but this week my work schedule is backwards and my body may just be screwed up. Either way, I don’t love this.

My new favorite late-night time killer is this Flash game on FreeArcade called Globs. (The site is loaded with ads and most of them have soundtracks, be forewarned.)

Also, I’m intrigued by TotalNetGuard, a Christian-themed ISP whose purpose is to block whatever scale of objectionable material you choose. Obviously I’m not religious and this isn’t a product marketed to me, but the internet is full of unavoidable inappropriate stuff. I like that people can make an informed decision to avoid what they don’t want coming into their homes.

I love the YouTube video embedded in Organic’s post If Harry Potter Did Packaging Design. It is also appealing on a subliminal level to any child who ever loved the box better than the gift.

Oh, Rands . . .

The problem with explaining Twitter to the uninitiated is, well, you have to say Twitter. A lot. Then you end up saying “tweet” or “twittersphere” or “twoot” and then you flash back to the embarrassing conversation with your Mom when you tried to explain what a blog was.

“No no no Mom . . . it’s an important thing.”

“What is?”

Sigh. “A blog.”

I don’t have an existing tag for Twitter since I don’t like or use it (beyond following Graham Elliot and fake Christopher Walken in my Google Reader), but autocomplete suggested “twee” and that made me smile.