Karmic balance must be the reason I like both tortured dead authors* and pictures of rice balls and spam that look like little piggies.McSweeny's Lists are probably neutral in this Karmic balance--clever enough to be cute but sometimes quite acerbic and mean-spirited. Double win. Some recent ones I like:
Tips for Avoiding Swine Flu: "Don't share drinks with livestock"
Norse Spirituals: "Sven, Olaf, Sigurd, Snorri, Harald, Ivar, Hagbard, Starkad, Haki, Bovar, Hrolf, Magnus, Haamund, Bersi, Bragi, Heimdall, Hakon, Cnut, Erik, Ingjald, Skjalf, and Mikkel, Row The Boat Ashore"
Items Available at the Socratic Grocery Store: The Communist Antipasto
* DFW of course. The New Yorker describing his novel he was working on before he hung himself with an electrical cord: "Broom is a covert autobiography, 'the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction . . . which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.'"