Eyes, Eyes, Baby...Lists that Separate

For years, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern has amused and bemused thousands of us with its peculiar blend of half-truths, fantastic flights of logic, poker-faced whimsy, and playful harangues against authority figures.

Now since about 1999, McSweeney's Internet Tendency has done the same thing on line.

(How's that for acting like I'm all cutting edge when the little blighter's been going for six years now?)

The fiendish genius of McSweeney's is hard to pin down, but often it has to do with its send-up of pretty much every system of thought or approach to comprehension that humankind has ever attempted, in our frail effort to forestall the unrelenting terror of our deep ignorance and inevitable annihilation.

McSweeney's contributors excel in combining unlike taxonomies, such as when one McSweeney's correspondent carefully enunciates the implausible claims made by Vanilla Ice in recent songs, or when another painstakingly lists--in alpha order--prescription drug names and character names from Shakespeare. The currently sparkling entrant in this category is a list of presidential cabinet members renamed according to the etymology of their first and last names (and sometimes middle).

What this means is, this shit is funny.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a total list hoe. I once wooed a guy with a daily series of lists to amuse him, mostly G-rated. That's how good a lister I am. When I get depressed, I know immediately because I feel deeply and irredeemably...listless.

I do!

But this isn't about me.

Sure I'll throw down for the first good-looking list that rolls its i's and crosses its t's at me. But the overriding point here is, is, uh...

...Oh! That this shit is really, really funny.

Check it off!