My friend the priest sent me this photo today from the website uglydress.com. He thought it might be one of my Mississippi relatives. The answer is no...My cousins just wear pistols strapped under their wedding gowns. Machine guns are gauche.
Another site I enjoy is People of Walmart, which includes rude pictures of Walmart shoppers.
If you're a discerning consumer of popular entertainment (and like me, you believe you are, so if you don't burst my bubble, I won't burst yours) but you just don't have the energy to invest in slogging through a myriad of separate entertainment reviews, I'm pleased to present a solution: Metacritic.
At Metacritic, they smoosh dozens of separate reviews for each piece of entertainment you can think of onto one page. They somehow arrive at an average score for the movie--I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt about this. They're even using weighted averages because they give some critics and publications more weight than others. I don't know how they decide that. Yet, ultimately, you get an average review score along with blurbs and links to each invidual review. I love the interwebs.
Neither, it turns out. But if you have to bet, go with Woman. At least that's according to the Gender Analyzer, an artifical intelligence with a database containing 11,000 blogs written by both men and women.
When you type in the url for Turtle Thoughts, the Gender Analyzer says there's a 58% chance that I am a woman. (Like I never heard that before. A mean kid used to mutter that to me all the time. Precocious fifth graders can be so cruel...yes, it was me.)
The good news is, the G.A. says, "...the site is quite gender neutral." and I take that as a fine compliment. I'm a biological male though, but if you want me to prove it, you'll have to buy me dinner first. Or at least coffee or something.
Enter other urls to see if the Gender Analyzer gets it right, wrong, or somewhere in between. Then let the G.A. know if it was right to increase its accuracy. Do it for Science. Or if you're bored.
(If I were a woman, this would totally be my silhouette.)
If you think that all the relevant, salient insights are coming from the blogosphere as opposed to the traditional mainstream media, here's some more confirmation.
New York Times columnist/gossip-girl Maureen Dowd stole a significant piece of her latest column from a blog post Josh Marshall wrote on Talking Points Memo last week.
She's apologized, of course, now that everybody knows about it and she has no choice in the matter.
Here's some more on Dowd from Politico's Michael Calderone who emailed her about it.
The Daily Kos gets about 20 million visits per month, with average weekday traffic at about 800,000 visits. The stats from April 2009 reveal that this diary from MaikeH about his late father's experience with Nazi propaganda had the most views with more than 109,000. It's worth a read.
