Reasons To Be Cheerful

#9 This just in. Andrew Hetherington has been tapped for the prestigious Oppy, awarded annually by the American Academy of Opticians for the scariest glasses in New York. Go Jacko!

#10 Did you see Nancy Franklin’s description in last week’s New Yorker of reality TV as an opportunity “to watch real people at a safe distance”? Just like the blogosphere.

#11 Awesome Ideas You Might Want to Reconsider: David Alan Harvey’s upcoming road trip, on which, with the help of several thousand of his closest friends, he will take America’s temperature by photographing its families. A rectal thermometer if I ever heard of one. Although, with all the joyous festivities for the 50th anniversary of Steichen’s Family of Man just a few years ago, he may know something we don’t.

#12 The runner-up for this week’s Quote of the Month is the always lucid Jim Johnson: "I have not an will not vote because it seems to me that you cannot determine the worth of ideas I think the the worth of ideas by majority vote."

#13 And our winner, Cara Phillips: “I fear that the world is starting to lack irony.” So true, Cara, so true.