Is your blog a boy blog or a girl blog?

My excellent good friend Nathan recently sent me this link:

Gender Analyzer

It's some kind of something that can allegedly determine your gender based on your blog. It's currently accurate 58% of the time (based on the self-reporting of the users). Is that impressive? Not very, but better than if it were total bunk.

How does it work anyway? The site only says it uses a "text classifier" that was "trained" on 4000 blogs. That implies that the makers of this thing don't really know what the substantive differences between the genders may be (uh, in terms of blog writing, obvs).

Still the whole idea of determining gender from writing raises questions like, Do women write a certain way and men another? Do men/women use certain nouns and verbs more often? Ask more questions? Use the word "feel" more often? Is it sentence length? Punctuation? Is it counting gendered pronouns? What if I put in the blog of a transgendered person?

Anywhoozle, one other interesting thing is the Gender Analyzer doesn't just say M or F, it gives a percentage of how M or F. I've put in most of the blogs I read, including mine, and most of them have come out as "quite gender neutral." One though, librarian.net, came out 98% female. Whoa. AND HERE IS THE CRAZY THING: librarian.net is written by a lady named Jessamyn who also has a personal blog and when I put that in, it came out 88% male. Oh, SNAP. Busted!

HardlyWorking.com

Today I've been thinking about starting a website for people who don't have a lot to do at their jobs.

I've noticed a lot of Facebook status updates in the vein of, "I got so much done at work today! And so little of it was actual work I'm paid to do," so I'm confident there is an audience for this kind of thing. In fact, just recently I was at a bridal shower where the maid of honor informed us that most of the wedding planning had been done while the bride was at work being paid to do something else. And anyone who watches The Office is familiar with just how unproductive a work day can be.

So I'm thinking the purpose of this website would be to give examples of things people have done while ostensibly "working" for their paycheck. We could also have forums for people to discuss any guilt they feel due to how little they actually get done/happiness at having landed a job that requires fewer than 10 actual hours of work per week.

There's probably a website like this already, right? But what domain could be better than hardlyworking.com? I checked and it's available.

Situations in which Seattleites will make conversation with total strangers

1. A dog is involved.

2. A small child is involved.

3. The weather is unbelievable awful.

My Review of the Opera

Yesterday was my first day off in two weeks. I went to the opera. It was not as relaxing or exhilarating as I'd hoped it'd be; it was pretty creepy. Both operas (it was a double feature with an intermission in between) were about tragic love that ends in death--but not in a romantic way, in a chilling, cringe-y kind of way.

Opera 1: Bluebeard

When I was little, we told the Bluebeard story around the campfire to scare each other. Bluebeard was a pirate who took his new wife on his ship and told her not to go in this locked room. But, duh, she goes in the room and finds all these dead women (his previous wives!). She gets blood on her dress (or maybe on the key she used to unlock the room?) and can't get it off, so Bluebeard finds out she saw the dead ladies and...SHE JOINS THEM.

The opera was pretty much the same story, only Bluebeard's not a pirate and it was all sung in Hungarian. The moral of the story: You don't need to know too much about your man.

Opera 2: Erwatung

Erwatung apparently means "expectation" in German. Whatever. I hardly read the surtitles because they were almost total nonsense. The gist of this opera is that a crazy lady (she's in a straight jacket) goes crazy about a guy having sex with another woman. Then I think she killed him. Or maybe she was just fantasizing about killing him. I don't know. But the guy was naked and rolling around on stage for a few minutes, so it held my attention.

The moral of the story: Bitch is crazy!

So what did I learn from the opera yesterday? Hm. Stay away from insane people. Or people who have blue beards and many previous wives that have disappeared.

My Review of: 2008

Let's see how much of 2008 I can remember.

January: I remember nothing.

February: I remember Jeff and I ordered pizza on Valentine's Day.

March: I remember nothing.

April: Yeah, I got nothing.

May: The weather got nicer? Did it really, though?

June: Aha! I graduated from the iSchool and became a Master of Information.

July: I turned 26!

August: Hm. It must've been pretty hot? Oh, yeah! Hawaii! That was great.

September: I worried that I hadn't found a real job yet, but I was subbing a lot for SPL.

October: I started my current job at the EngLib.

November: Kiera came home from Florida.

December: It snowed A LOT.

So my powers of monthly recognition are not strong. I do remember last year's resolution: REMEMBER TO BRING REUSABLE BAGS TO THE STORE!!!!! I think I did pretty well on the reusable bag tip, so let's make this year's resolution: KEEP REMEMBERING TO BRING REUSABLE BAGS TO THE STORE!!!!!!!111

D$ out.

My Review of 7 Brides for 7 Brothers at the 5th

Through his work, BJ got free tickets to this show so, even though I was never a big fan of the movie, I agreed to go.

Did I mention this Seattle production stars Mo Brady as youngest brother (and true romantic) Gideon Pontipee? It does! So of course I had to go.


In case you're not familiar, let me break down the plot of this little show: A mountain man goes into town to find himself a wife to take care of him and his six grown brothers. The lady he marries is not exactly thrilled to be taking care of seven slovenly dudes, so she helps the brothers shape up their act so they can go into town and find their own dern wives. Unfortunately, the other town girls are not so easily won, so the brothers take a cue from a story they read in a book (Plutarch's Sabine Women) and decide to just kidnap the girls and carry them back to the mountains. Just your standard romantic abduction plot, I guess.

The show's jokes pretty much revolve around how clueless and horny the brothers are (except for Mo's character, the youngest brother, who is clueless, yes, but more lovestruck than aching for any available warm body). You'd think that a bunch of jokes about dopey, sexually frustrated mountain men would be kind of one-note, and you'd be right, but I had a good time.

The misogyny in the book and lyrics runs pretty deep (to illustrate: at what is probably the emotional crescendo of the play, Mo and the female lead are singing about being deeply in love while the male lead is singing the musical theatre equivalent of "one bitch many faces"), but the whole thing is so lighthearted that it's hard to take it too seriously.

Besides, though the softer sex gets short shrift in the play, the male actors have to dance around in various degrees of undress, making them more the objectified than the the objectifiers (at least from where I was sitting). There is something icky about romanticizing the sexism of olden times, but if I'm watching a lot of hot, shirtless men do flips while it's happening, I get a little distracted.

My Review of: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was extraordinary this year for the following reasons:

1. It was marked by Kiera's (temporary) return to Seattle from Florida. Happy graduation, Kiera. You are now officially trained to do a real job.


2. The Sutton-Raineys had a joint Thanksgiving with my Mom's BFF's family, the Moores. There were like 20 people over at Carl and Marilyn's house, including an exchange student from Vietnam that Tristen brought through Highline Community College's Thanksgiving Adoption program. Her name was Anne and she was very nice. I hope we didn't scare her too much.


3. The Seahwaks lost spectacularly.


4. We got into a debate over whether Thanksgiving is a religious holiday. That was weird.


5. Amelia wore a super cute dress and learned to flap her arms like wings and say "Gobble gobble gobble."


6. I didn't spill anything!

The day kind of went by in a blur because there were so many people. We were about halfway through the meal when someone (I think it was Carl's brother) remembered to say Grace. We all stopped eating so he could thank Our Heavenly Father, and then we went back to eating. Normally, my mom makes us all take turns saying what we're thankful for during dinner, but we didn't do that this year. We did try to explain to Anne what Thanksgiving is about, but that led to the aforementioned disagreement over the religiosity of the holiday. (It's totally not, right? I think Abraham Lincoln made it a holiday because the woman who wrote "Mary Had a Little Lamb" wrote to him and suggested it.)

All in all, the day really affirmed something I've been thinking ever since Amelia was born: babies make family gatherings way better. She was pretty much the center of attention the entire day, and, when you think about it, she's probably the thing we're all most thankful for. I'll put up some pictures soon.