Choosing a Secure Password - Boing Boing: "As insecure as passwords generally are, they're not going away anytime soon. Every year you have more and more passwords to deal with, and every year they get easier and easier to break. You need a strategy."
To which I propose a modest change: have one good password be your LastPass password, and let LastPass take care of providing the rest of your accounts with very long complex passwords.