At the 10 Commandments of Love Café...

... take happiness with the heartaches and go through life wearing a smile.

The 100 Best Lists of All Time.

#1 is the periodic table of the elements and #2 is the Bill of Rights. I'll leave it to you to guess what #3 must be, with the additional clue that #4 is the 10 Commandments.

"The ten most overrated things in the world [SLIDESHOW]."

Let me guess. Is one of the things internet slideshows? Top 10 lists?

Noted author and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that the four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics.

First sentence at the link. So much better than anything in the slide show that you've got to click through. I miss Christopher Hitchens. He wasn't overrated.

ADDED: After reading the comments (and writing some), I've gotten to the point where I can give the first 3 of my top 10 most overrated things in the world:

1. Sitting in an audience, listening/watching something on a stage/screen.
2. Working at some fucking job.
3. Bruce Springsteen.

McSweeney's makes a comical list of "Suggested Buzzfeed Articles."

"Elvis Presley’s 42 Sweatiest Moments... The 100 Filthiest Bathrooms in Philadelphia... 11 Retired History Professors Being Stung by Wasps... 26 Celebrities Who Look Worse Because of the Passage of Time... 84 Things That Aren’t On an Everything Bagel... 41 Close-Ups Of Severely Rotting Teeth... 3 Raccoons That Would Kill You and Your Family... The World’s 13 Laziest Salmon... 16 Beautiful Photos From Underneath a Bed...."

You get the idea, don't you? Do you? Let's assume you do. Anyway, Buzzfeed — that website with those lists that are there to get you to click on them, because people love lists — went ahead and made "84 Things That Aren’t On An Everything Bagel," and got the upper hand, I'd say. And they kept going.

Forget McSweeney's. Buzzfeed is a thing, e.g., "Annoying Photo Trend: Girls With Mugs In Front Of Their Faces. This is a Thing." And: "The Unnecessary Censorship Of Men's Olympic Diving."

"The 50 Best Political Quotes For 2011."

According to Right Wing News. Hey, #47 is from me.

"A song so titanic that it basically changed the entire trajectory of pop music history."

"The opening is pure bliss and glee and stands as a complete change from the creeping blahness of the early 60s. Instead, we get a charge of guitars and a thump of drums and simple profession..."

List-a-Beefy finally reaches the end of the line, #1 on the list of 100 greatest #1 songs in the history of the Billboard top 100 list.

The 4 Mistakes of Ezra Klein... [ADDED: or Rich Yeselson].

1. He's written a blog post titled "The four habits of highly successful social movements," but he never talks about any habits.

2. He does have paragraph containing "four things," but the verbiage is mind-numbing and lacking in parallelism:

Whether [the Occupy Wall Street protests] will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

3.  He evokes the best-seller title "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"  which prompts us to think about his ineffectiveness.

4. He promised a list of a specific number of items and then he didn't put it in the form of a numbered list. People love numbered lists. The internet is full of them. They're highly clickable. What's wrong with us? Why do we keep falling for that? 

ADDED: The post is signed by Ezra Klein but has an italicized parenthetical at the top saying he asked Rich Yeselson, a research coordinator at Change to Win, for some "thoughts on Occupy Wall Street." The post I'm complaining about is introduced as "some notes" from Yeselson, which Klein says he thinks are "worth publishing in full." Obviously, I didn't think this was worth reading in full, but now I assume the published text is completely the work of Rich Yeselson. As Bill Harshaw alerts me in the comments, this is "The one mistake of Ann Althouse." This is the great danger of pointing out someone else's mistakes: You look especially bad if you make a mistake yourself — and chances are you'll make the mistake at that point. (It seems everything every time I decide it's worth mocking a typo, I make a typo.)

"It is hard to write good songs that are sad without being needlessly dramatic."

"First, he is jilted and this makes him suicidal. I get that. This leads him to flashback to his parents' deaths and how all of this has left him alone. And his loneliness is palpable because there's nothing left for him to grab on to. The unwinding of the simple everyman (in a fortunately non-allegorical sense) is a story that's presented in a simple direct way without being flashy or even really pointing to its emotions. Consequently, I too have cried listening to such simple pain played out over my speakers."

A fine argument in favor of a song I would never even have considered putting on the list of top 100 songs that ever reached #1, let alone giving the #31 slot. There are so many overblown pop songs, and if you loathe excessive drama, rather than rail against those songs — which is more drama — it's a nice strategy to honor the spare and simple, restrained expression of emotion of a song like this. Still, surely, there must be some other, better songs upon which to exercise this anti-drama strategy.

"List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition monsters."

#1 on the list of 100 Longest Entries on Wikipedia — a hilarious list that had me asking Who the hell is Larry Norman? and Fanny Crosby? And why all the fuss about Italian moths? And euphorbia?

(Via Instapundit.)

"Those snaps are all you need to know."

"The working man's plight is boiled down to the struggle for money.  Ford uses his gospel training to make this fight seem almost as fight that Jesus himself would join to defeat the forces that make him 'another day older and deeper in debt'.  But because he lacks hope of escape, Ford's message here seems to subscribe to the 'take this job and shove it' school of country music as opposed to the aspirational.  The snaps, though; that's the heartbeat of America there."

#180 on List-a-Beefy's top 200 #1 songs of the last 55 years.

"15 conspiracy movies that don’t fall apart at the end."

An excellent idea for a list, and the 15 choices seem pretty good (although I haven't seen them all).

"Having these all on the same list is kind of like saying, 'You know what my pet peeves are? People who crack their knuckles, genocide, extreme poverty, and shopping cart wheels that get stuck.'..."

"... I mean, OK, but the juxtaposition is a little insensitive."

Jac is offended by TIME's list of the 50 worst inventions.

Things singers sing that they do that they actually never do.

I'm starting a list:

1. Hop a train.
2. ...
3. ...

I need some help with this one. I don't want fantasies, but real things that are intended to make the singers sound gritty and deeply in touch with life, but you know damned well they don't do.

(Here's the song that was playing....)

"If I Ate Lab-Grown Human Tissue or Organs, Would I Be Considered a Cannibal?"

I'm adding this to my list of moral questions about things nobody wants to do.

Questions:

1. What else can we put on that list?

2. If you bite your cuticles or the inside of your mouth and keep chewing and swallowing, are you a cannibal?

3. Why does it matter whether a particular word — such as "cannibal" — applies to something, when the real question is whether something is right or wrong?

From an article about "the art of list-making."

Finnish architect Eero Saarinen itemizes the attractiveness of his wife:

I. First I recognized that you were very clever

II. That you were very handsome

III. That you were perceptive

IV. That you were enthusiastic

V. That you were generous

VI. That you were beautiful

Handsome and beautiful? I'm picturing the very clever Mrs. Saarinen reading the list and saying, "Not 'very beautiful'?"

Let's talk about "The Hot Issue" of Cosmo.

I was just waiting in line at Walgreens, trying to buy some toothpaste, and this grabbed... well, I don't want to say it grabbed me by the balls, but that's the kind of thing it would say, just like it would say "5 things that can BLOW a JOB interview."


(Enlarge.)

Cosmo is just so sexually aggressive. It tires me out. It makes me want to to find out how not to look tired. Get hit on all the time? Get hit on to annoy your friends? Can't I just quietly contemplate whether my breasts are normal or what pittance I might spend to make my skin amazing?

And now you want to tell me about 125 sex moves — in rank order, no less. 125! What if I'd just like some — maybe 40 — little tiny ways to connect with a guy? (One guy!) Not even sex ways, you know? Duh! Sex is just the 41st way, and we already know about it. It's so desperate to need that one thing broken down into 125 parts.

And maybe I don't want thousands of men sent over the edge. That sounds dangerous! Like some kind of war. Over the edge! Come on, back off a bit, ladies. Cosmo has been handing out secrets to drive men wild for decades, to the point where I've been wondering why the streets aren't, by now, teeming with rampaging wild men, all these secrets being so widely dispersed among so many women for so long.

Then there are the 5 things — always with the lists — you should never let your "gyno" do. That underlining, frankly, scares me. You mean there are some rather disturbing things you might occasionally let your gyno do, but there are 5 of them that you really never should let him/her do? What kind of crazy shit are gynos trying to get away with, anyway?

And that leaves us with the Orgasm Whisperer, which I guess is like the Horse Whisperer or the Dog Whisperer, but for orgasms, so supposedly this is a man — woman? — who is has a special, highly effective way of talking to orgasms and extracting appropriate behavior from them. I don't really understand. Maybe it's a little like playing Mozart recordings to unborn babies in the womb. Still, if the orgasm is there, what's the problem? And if the orgasm is not there, what are you whispering to?

Oh, lord, I just want to know some beauty tricks from top models and the real deal on the guys Taylor Swift sings about.

Jack Kerouac did not text.

I need to get some blogging up, and I actually have about 5 things I've been meaning to write, that is, after the completion of various Sunday morning activities, such as transforming the corn leftover from last night into breakfast and analyzing why I didn't quite replicate my mother's corn fritters. But somehow, I'm reading the comments over on Richard's blog — not even my own blog.

(I did read some of my blog's comments on my iPhone in the middle of the night, and I'd just like to say, Lem, I'm sorry no one was in the buckets of flowers with you last night to say, yes, we're your friends and thanks for telling us that you've found comfort here.)

Anyway, over at Richard's, Penny commented:

I just noticed your new blog header. NICE! I like it a lot. I do have one comment though. Pen authors need to watch out for what I will call "texting creep".

That refers to the quote in Richard's banner:

SCRIBBLED SECRET NOTEBOOKS, AND WILD TYPEWRITTEN PAGES, FOR YR OWN JOY... SUBMISSIVE TO EVERYTHING, OPEN, LISTENING... SOMETHING THAT YOU FEEL WILL FIND ITS OWN FORM. --JACK KEROUAC, FROM "BELIEF AND TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE"

Kerouac wrote "yr," long before anybody was indulging in rampant abbreviation for texting purposes. I'd read that quote in Richard's banner many times, but this morning was the first time I was moved to Google the quote. I wanted to make sure of what I was already sure of, that the abbreviation was Kerouac's. And the cool thing about that, for which I offer a penny to Penny, is that I found the whole context, "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose," which is written — Richard elides this — as a numbered list. I love lists, especially numbered lists.

(We've been eating salads from that 101 salads list, and, for example, #2 really is — as billed — "[a]stonishing.")

There are only 30 items on Kerouac's list, so it's easier to read than not to read. Nevertheless, I'll copy a few here, with commentary:

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

And don't even yell as if u were drunk outside yr house, especially at a cop.

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

Consider it done! Since 2004.

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

I often write bottomless. Much more than topless. Because I like to write in bed.

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

K.

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

Would all the political bloggers please take a day to do exactly this? Then, if you can do it, do it all the time.

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea...
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

See? Blog!

And text, if u want 2.