It must be a sign of encroaching age that one's tolerance for cuteness increases.

As a young man, I could not stand cute. Cute was for little girls, Japanese fads and crazy old ladies who dress up their little dogs in red sweaters and Santa hats for Christmas-card photos. I saw cute as the refuge of the juvenile, the pathetic and the superficial.

Of course, I was an idiot. Did you see those videos of the pandas and their baby at Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo?

CUUUUTE!

So comes now www.cuteover load.com. This may be enough to send me back over to the other side.

At Cute Overload, a winner of a 2006 Webby award for best People's Voice site, staff members (essentially, founder Meg Frost and friends) "scour the Web for only the finest in Cute Imagery. We offer an overwhelming amount of cuteness to fill your daily visual allowance."

The site features tons of pictures of cute little animals in cute little animal situations, including cuddling with another animal, staring into a fisheye lens, picking up one paw, relaxing in a sink and so on. You know. You've received the Christmas cards.

But the site does more than flash photos. It's created an entire cute orthodoxy, including the 21 trademarked Rules of Cuteness: "Rule of Cuteness 7: A thing, accompanied by a smaller version of that thing, is always cute."

This is more than a hobby; it's a religion. If you go to church, you sing the doxology. If you're a follower of Cutism, you chant: "Aw, wook at da woodle bunny!"

The Web site's photos are in categories by animal — birds, bunnies, farm animals and, my favorite, hedgehogs. There's a section called "Cute or Sad?" that includes photos of puppies with leg splints and the like. Also, a contest in which viewers can vote on two cute animals pitted against each other. So completely cute is Cute Overload that the Windows alt-tab icon to the site has a little winking emoticon. ; )

If you require more, go to the ingenuously named StuffOnMyCat.com, where cat owners post photos of their felines, festooned with Post-it notes and so forth. "Do you like to put stuff on your cat?" the site asks. The mind reels with snappy comebacks.

The pet Web site I'd like to see would be video-based. It would be called TryingToGiveMyCatABath.com. I'd pay money to see those videos.