Topical relief

I hear occasionally from a web-usability guru who was kind enough to advise me during the NCPR website redesign. He dropped me a note this morning to say how much he liked the results, but he cautioned me on the dangers of fragmenting the news into too many topics--citing the mess of Yahoo's old topic-driven navigation system. I had already been thinking about this as a result of going to a major news site yesterday, and finding that of all the things going on in the world, their top story featured a guy who had been walking around with a two-and-a-half inch nail driven into his skull by a nail gun.

Here we see the freakish x-ray, and here is the guy himself, seemingly unharmed. He says the weirdest thing is that the surgeon chose a claw hammer as the best instrument to do the extraction. Owww! Not having had enough, I then Googled "nail in skull" and found that this is not only an irresistible topic of discussion, it happens way more often than one would think. There was the guy who drove the four-inch nail up his nose into the brain, then there was the guy who wandered into a Portland hospital, complaining of headache. The cause--twelve nails shot into his head in a failed suicide attempt. And the guy from South Dakota with the three-inch nail near the brain stem, and on and on.

An hour later, I closed my gore-spattered web browser and realized that I never did find out what was happening in the world. But on that one topic, I had it nailed.