Word: cutely
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...Cultural rebels are supposed to be many things - defiant, foul-mouthed, self-dramatizing. But cute? Cute is Kryptonite to cool; irony may be dead, or mortally wounded, as sages proclaimed in the wake of 9/11. But how has its opposite number - the rapt adoration of fluffy little mammals - gained such a purchase among the net-savvy hipster set? Cute has always had a home on the Net. But putting up homepages for one's pets or devoting a suite of sites to The Little Mermaid doesn't seem as mockable next to sites like Cuteoverload.com...
...This is not your mom's cute...
...Call it hipster cute or avant-adorable. Cuteoverload.com saves itself from treacly Jean Teasdale territory by being self-conscious and even nerdy. Meg Frost, who started the site last fall, has a gift for writing captions that avoid the patois of faux innocence that turn those calendars into instant kitsch. While Frost anthropomorphizes wildly, these kittens do not encourage readers to "Hang in there!" or enthuse, "Thank God it's Friday!" Rather, sleepy stoner kittens complain, "Look. I cannot deal with you right now," and ponder the need to check their MySpace profiles. Angry pug puppies quote Goodfellas ("You think...
...child, the seemingly oxymoronic impulse to do violence to tiny creatures is a rather scary aspect of the world of Mom-cute; I remember with chills when, at about eight, I thought about the threat implied by my grandmother's exclamation, "Oh, I just want to eat you up!" The commentators of Cuteoverload.com rescue themselves from such twee clich?s with fine-tuned irony: "He looks so edible - I mean adorable" says one of a bunny. And they threaten to turn the violence on themselves. To judge by the comments alone, Cuteoverload.com is a factor in the demise of dozens...
...still rather geeky culture of blogging also mitigates - or provides cover for - those of us who do not envision Hummel figurine collections in our future. The site's fans call themselves "cutologists," and they have composed a careful list of cute rules, including "small ear to head ratio" (rule #15) and "a thing, accompanied by a smaller version of that thing, is always cute" (rule #7). That slang has grown out of the commenting community of cutologists is not surprising; that someone compiled a list of definitions is slightly more so. (I admit I have incorporated "redonk" - the comic-book...