Stray Hawkeye

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows falls firmly into the category of things I don’t think I really understand, but I’m pretty sure I like.  It’s a list of terms and definitions.  Each is a sort of poem about some feeling or situation, which the term labels.  A sort of free form modern poetic dictionary of life.  Or something like that.  Perhaps an example:

cumulostalgia

n. self-aware satisfaction with discussing the weather, which although a well-worn marker of shallow conversation thwarts the suspicion that any day now our fragmented and variegated selves will no longer overlap long enough to maintain a working definition of ‘we.’

Or:

anti-aliasing

n. -soc. psych. curiosity about the real flesh-and-blood people behind internet usernames, whose vivid individuality suggests that when our parents were tracing their fingers along our nameless faces looking for some hint of who we were to become, they really should have gone with Mr. Cookieface, Unicornpuncher, Dutchess Von Whatever, or Wookiegasm.

Or:

contact high-five

n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job—a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress—that you enjoy more than you’d like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

Intended or not, some of the best contemporary poetry I’ve read since college.

Via Kottke.

Ps – So, after writing this, I clicked the little information button at the top of the page, and it turns out the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is not only cool (and has a bit better definition of itself than what I came up with above), it’s also local, written by John Koenig of St Paul.  Adding local tag…

I… I… I don’t know what to excerpt.  Usually when I go to a site or a blog post or whatever and I find something I like, I grab a little quote or a picture or whatever to excerpt here, to show you how cool it is and prove that it’s worth clicking over to.  But,… what do I do when it’s all awesome?  When there’s just plain too much awesome to find a best one to excerpt?  I… I don’t know…

Now would probably be a reasonable time to explain what I’m talking about.

I read Swiss Miss, and a while ago I came across this post, and bookmarked it because I really liked it.  And then today, I clicked through to the site for the artist/designer that made it (Jennifer Daniel).  And… it’s all awesome, in so many ways.  So, let me try this again, maybe a bullet pointed list of why it’s all so awesome:

• There are visual puns, and playing with expected shapes, and just general cleverness without the sort of annoying “Look at me, I’m clever” kind of feel that sometimes gets.
• Almost everything on the page makes you look twice and then think.
• So I’m saying it both looks cool and makes you think, without being full of itself.  Which is painfully rare.
• It’s all really simple (or perhaps a better word is clean).
• Each one has it’s own little style that is cohesive to itself, and each one is a little different from each other one so they don’t get hackneyed, but they still all have this same sort of clean, witty, cool style to them, so they all sort of go together.
• There’s a joke all the way at the bottom, and a tiny bug that crawls around on the left hand side of the page, and even the URL and page title are funny.

The only downsides I can find:

• I’m baffled by the left navigation, so I’m not real sure how to find more awesome.
• It would seem some of it gets archived / taken down over time (I think I remember seeing a few other ones there a while ago) which means some of the awesome is hiding / gone away.

So, what I’m really saying here is, go look around, it’s worth the five or ten minutes.

Bonus:

So, I emailed Jennifer while I was writing this post, and she was nice enough to send me an alternate version (with a few extras) of one of my favorites (thanks Jennifer!!), so that’s going to be the excerpt.  And thus, in a maybe kind of sort of Stray Hawkeye exclusive, I present a case study in awesomeness:

Boob Slang

A short list of forms of awesomeness embodied in this:

• It takes a second to figure out what it’s about.
• It covers what would generally be viewed as a vulgar theme in a clean, straight forward manner and in a style that you would expect in a science poster on the wall of a high school classroom, which adds to the humor.
• The color complements the theme.
• I tend to think of myself as being quite up on vulgar slang, and there are a few in there I hadn’t heard before, including:
• Bottom row, third from the right.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at the Minnesota Twins baseball team the same way again, especially since next season they’re leaving the Metrodome and going topless.