"Cartoon characters wear the same clothes every day, because their animators are lazy."

"You are not a cartoon character."

From "6 Telltale Signs It's Time to Upgrade Your Style." [A "sponsored" article at Gawker.]

Does that mean Steve Jobs was lazy and needed to upgrade his style? And as long as we're doing lists, we might as well shift over to "18 Famous People Who Always Dress The Same": Jobs, Zuckerberg, Tom Wolfe, Michael Kors, Larry Page...

These people are so not lazy. They're style icons, projecting power. The same clothes every day projects industriousness, efficiency, and — if you pick the right stuff — style.

Remember the scene in "The Fly" (the one with Jeff Goldblum)? He shows his closet:

 [H]is girlfriend,  Geena Davis, asks him why he never changes his clothes.

“What are you saying?” he replies. “I change my clothes every day.”

“Well, how come then you always wear the same thing?”

Goldblum walks over to his closet, opens it, and shows Davis a long rack of identical suits, ties, white shirts, and black shoes. “See?” he says. “What did I tell you?”

Albert Einstein was even less fashion-conscious and reportedly had only one suit of clothes.  Like the Goldblum character, Einstein felt that having to worry about what to wear distracted him from more important work.

Do you follow this path? If you do — or if you were to do this — what do you wear? Why isn't everyone wearing black knit tops and blue/black jeans (or a black skirt with or without tights)?

"In the mid-1970s, the tiny Canadian town of Dauphin... acted as guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called 'Mincome.'"

"For a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks to supplement their earnings."

Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.

Evelyn Forget is such a great name that I almost want to believe what she's selling. But I'm one of those people who fear the lost incentive to work. I remember a professor here at UW some years ago propounding a guaranteed minimum income of $20,000. He just assumed most people would work so they could have more than that. What if you were just starting out in life and knew you could go work-free if you were willing to live on $20,000?

I'm sure if that deal were offered to me when I was 20, I'd have taken it. I'd have worked at living on that $20,000. Oh, yes, eventually I might have wanted to write a book called "How to Live Well on $20,000 a Year" — because it would have amused me and I wouldn't have minded some extra spending money.

But who knows what the psychology of it all would be? It's one thing to experiment on a tiny town in Manitoba, but what happens when it gets bigger... and less Canadian?

Who's giving up now? Early warning signs.

1. "The Art of Lying Down: A Guide to Horizontal Living," a book by Bernd Brunner that is an "ode to lying down... ranging from the history of the mattress to the 'slow living movement." It "makes an eloquent case for the importance of lying down in a world that values ever greater levels of activity," and presents lying down as "a protest."

2. A New Republic piece by Ben Crair about protesting against excessive activity by staying in bed. "When you’re in bed, everything seems too far away, even the other rooms of your apartment—and I live in a studio. My water intake dropped to almost zero, which I never noticed until I went outside on some errand and found myself desperately thirsty after a few minutes of leisurely walking. One evening, returning home, I planted my right foot on a step in the hallway, and lifted my left foot assuming it would follow, but nope: It went back down exactly where it had started."

3. There's this new essay in The New Yorker by Evgeny Morozov called "Only Disconnect/Two cheers for boredom," that begins with a reverie about a 1903 essay called "The Metropolis and Mental Life," that says closing the shades and "surrendering oneself to one's boredom on the sofa" is good response for people who "are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they no longer know where their head is." You'll need a subscription to read the whole thing, but I can tell you that Morozov is reading some new books that resonate with that old surrender-to-boredom-and-inactivity theme.

"Cleansing reduction" — the new trend of bathing only once a week.

The idea is to preserve the skin's natural oils. And the environment. Plus: lazy.

Beyond banning large cups for Cokes... ban large bottles for Tylenol.

That's the suggestion in "A Simple Way to Reduce Suicides."

We need to make it harder to buy pills in bottles of 50 or 100 that can be easily dumped out and swallowed. We should not be selling big bottles of Tylenol and other drugs that are typically implicated in overdoses, like prescription painkillers and Valium-type drugs, called benzodiazepines. Pills should be packaged in blister packs of 16 or 25. Anyone who wanted 50 would have to buy numerous blister packages and sit down and push out the pills one by one. Turns out you really, really have to want to commit suicide to push out 50 pills. And most people are not that committed.... 

Why haven’t we seen more blister packages? One reason is money. Manufacturers would have to redesign packaging, and the blister packaging would cost more compared with loose pills in a bottle. The other main reason is that some consumers — notably people with arthritis — might find it challenging to open the packages.

But if we could save one life... the life of the insufficiently committed... suicidal but too lazy to poke enough pills out of the blister packs...

You know the type. For them, life is not worth the trouble. And then suddenly killing yourself is also a lot of trouble. What's more trouble? Living or these damned blister packs?

Young people are driving less and less.

But why? Is it economic pressure?

Online life might have something to do with the change, [suggested Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan]. “A higher proportion of Internet users was associated with a lower licensure rate,” he wrote in a recent study. “This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that access to virtual contact reduces the need for actual contact among young people.”

I get the sense that younger people are generally less interested in traveling. The idea that travel is the best thing to do with your free time and extra money... that's fading, isn't it? Something old people do.

There was also this article a few days ago saying "Americans are moving around the country a lot less frequently than they used to." That didn't specifically focus on the young.

So... is something happening to us? We're not so adventurous or not so restless or we've overcome the delusion that moving around changes who you are? We're lazy and the couch potatoism has extended into everything about the way we live? We long for the friends and family that our grandparents and great-grandparents had in the days when everyone — in this nostalgic true/false memory — stayed in one town and you had deep roots and connections to all sorts of people who loved and cared for you (or disliked you but at least knew you).

"And as I get older, I like [flying] less and less. I don't much like driving either. I prefer to be driven."

"And, when I'm in London, I don't even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street. When we're over there, I always say to my wife, 'Stay in the hotel. Don't go out there. It's too dangerous.'"

Says Christopher Walken, who'd like you to know that he's not the creepy guy he always seems to be in his movies. He's  "a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way."

I can see why a fearful, avoidant sort of person could manifest as oddball on screen.

How has he survived in the cut-throat, hyper-ambitious world of Hollywood? "Well, you know, I've always found it to be an honest place. They either want you for a role or they don't. It's pretty simple. People talk about Hollywood being this place where you can never get straight answers, but my experience is the opposite. If they don't want you, it's very clear."

What's the worst thing about his job? "Learning lines, for sure. I don't know how people learn their lines quickly. It's always been a tedious, agonising chore for me. I hate it. It takes me ages to know my lines. I just wish I could do movies with cue cards. That way, it's easy. Not lazy, but easy. You know what? I wish I could live my whole life with cue cards. I really do."

Maybe what we're perceiving as odd is his struggle to recall the lines. As for cue cards: 1. Marlon Brando used cue cards, and 2. What's that quote? Life is a play for which there is no rehearsal and only one performance. Something like that. Or am I merging 2 or 3 famous quotes?