IF I WERE A RICH MAN...
My return to Xanga marked by the first ever installment of:

Stupidest self-righteous statement of the day award
The context behind this one is this story from TSN that NHL players will have about 10% of their pay withheld in escrow in case the league overspends on player salaries and misses revenue targets.  The exact percentage is determined by pegging the total cost of all player salaries against the total revenue of the league.  Essentially the players are on the hook if the owners overspend their revenues.  Great deal for owners, stupid stupid deal for players, having already conceded to a flat 24% salary cut.

Of course much of the blue-collar public is unsympathetic.  For some reason, they see some of the hard-working players out there as lazier and less deserving of sympathy than the capital-laden billionaires who own the team and watch the games in the plushy chairs of their boxes.

That public outcry against the players led to this fantastic declaration, and winner of the stupidest self-righteous statement award, from markl29:
"If I was making over $400,000 a year I wouldn't be complaining about 10% off a paycheck"

Spoken surely by a man who has never made close to $400K a year.  How obnoxious, and yet, how common is this statement?  I'm beside myself at how many people say this every day with a straight face.  If you won the lottery ($63 mil in New York today) and I told you "wait, I get 6.3 million of that," would you hand it over smiling without complaint?

Stupid.

Ari's lament
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To Ari:

There was an interesting interview on local tv with the artists who put up "The Gates" installation in Central Park. Jeanne-Claude (one of the artists) was saying (and I paraphrase), "Art is meant only for the artist. If anyone else likes it, that's just a bonus."

One of the things about design is that the idea of absolute best practices in design is a pipe dream. Like some sort of utopia, some people cling to the idea that there is a correct way to design, based on some study in usability science. This would be great if we all wanted our pages to accomplish the same purpose and reach the same people.

"Form follows function" would be about the only universal design maxim I would subscribe to. Lenssen seems to have completely missed this memo. Otherwise he might have postulated that the Drudge Report intentionally wants a freshly typed press release feel, or that for each link on Amazon.com someone really DOES click it. Or that stock photography saves Dell and IBM money that they'd rather spend elsewhere. Wouldn't Lenssen like to save money too? His critiques show no understanding of design requirements and challenges that force adoption of the techniques that he rails on. Clearly we can all agree he should critique his own amateurish site.