TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to the master of visual macabre humor, Edward Gorey.

LIKE SO MANY 18-YEAR-OLDS, USA Today (founded in the summer of ’82) has suddenly decided it didn’t want to look like a bratty kid anymore.

So it’s thrown out its old typographical wardrobe (backward baseball caps, team-logo shirts and all), got itself a page-size haircut, and is proudly showing off its “mature” look all over town.

The official excuse: Most of the newspaper industry’s moving to a standardized, narrow page size, so national advertisers can place the same ad designs in papers across the country without pesky reformatting.

USA Today, which uses 33 printing plants that belong to local dailies across the country (unlike the Wall St. Journal, which fully controls its own manufacturing network), had to go along with the scheme.

The paper’s original design, built on seven narrow columns, wouldn’t work at the even narrower new width. So the paper had to design a six-column format, and decided to use that as an excuse to modernize the whole look.

The practical result (and, if you’ll forgive me, a metaphor-switch): A paper that had always looked like a mall-store floor display (bright lights; loud, “busy” signage; lots of merchandise departments; small and shallow selections in each such department) now looks like a mall store that’s been “tastefully” redone to look more upscale.

Appropriately enough, the first week of the new look included a long feature about the Adbusters Quarterly folks in Vancouver, who preach that there ought to be more to life than just the selling, buying, and using of consumer goods.

That’s a slightly less hypocritical version of the “voluntary simplicity” movement, which in turn is being thoroughly exploited by some new mall-store outfits as an excuse to sell more consumer goods.

Like a retailer that figures to get higher sales with a clean, uncluttered, “lack of pretense” pretense, the new USA Today packages its wares in a “modern, elegant,” pseudo-Euro look.

But, like a redesigned and Martha Stewart-ized Kmart store, it’s still the same bazaar of Chee-tos and sweat pants.

And, like a kid trying to look old enough to score beer, its still-youthful enthusiasm and silliness still show through.

Which is just the way I like it.

At least in newspapers.

At least in that newspaper.

TOMORROW: Why Republicans really like baseball.

IN OTHER NEWS: What’ll happen to those IPO-obsessed dot-com slaves now?

ELSEWHERE:

• Learning about life and the Bible, the I Love Lucy way….