fine whine

Bookblog has updated their Gender Genie to better reflect the differences between fiction, nonfiction and blog entries. For those not in the know, a report was published in Nature revealing a rather accurate algorithm that determined a writer's gender based on certain common words and their usage. More information is provided on the Genie page.

Anyway, according to the new and improved Gender Genie, I write like a girl. I sent my previous entry though the paces as a blog entry, fiction and nonfiction and scored the hat trick. Female every time. This entry, however, is considered masculine by the site. Go figure. So don't buy me that skirt quite yet.

So the wife and I are walking to the library to take back some movies, see, and it starts downpouring. Torrentially, monsoon-style. We're getting drenched, and she says "Hey, it wasn't raining when we left."

And I retort, "Yeah, that's what Noah said."

Bah DUM bum.

So in the last week I've watched both versions of Insomnia, Chris Nolan's and the superior original by Erik Skjoldbj�rg. So it is only slightly ironic that I can't sleep right now, right?

When I'm tired I often get songs, spoken phrases or jingles stuck in my head. Right now I'm tormented by the end of the commercial for Galoob's Bouncing Babies, a toy long forgotten (not that I ever had or wanted one) but the freak chorus sings on and on in my head as I wash the dishes. I can't sleep, so might as well clean while my brain runs on and on...

I'm not much of a worrier, even late at sleepless nights. Instead, I ponder mainly random things, usually vocally. Dictating to myself, I blather on and on as though I'm supposed to be taking these down, a long-overdue email here, a resume's coverletter there and the occasional blog entry. Like this. I tried leaving my Palm under my pillow to scrawl this stuff down without getting up, but I was killing batteries too quickly with the backlight and I'm somewhat faster typing than "writing" with Graffiti. So type I do.

Sometimes my thoughts aren't statements but questions, the depth falling far short of the great thinkers. I wonder if everyone thinks in complete sentences, if anyone else plays secretary to himself when staring at a dark ceiling. I wonder if maybe I should tell my wife that the brown animal we see in a nearby loading dock is almost definitely not an otter but probably a woodchuck.

I wonder if it's okay to not know for sure the easy visual differences between an otter and a woodchuck. Is that the sort of thing people should know? When we were walking in the downpour of a couple days ago, we passed by a middle-aged couple futilely avoiding the rain after dinner at a restaurant, and the woman asked the man (who looked reasonably intelligent, despite his date), "Which do you think comes first, the thunder or the lightning?" This is a grown woman, mind you, asking a question most of us get out of the way well before puberty. I wonder if I'm in any position to judge such a question, as I cannot tell the difference between a woodchuck and an otter. Or is it something else? Most of the woodland creatures I conjure up in my mind come courtesy of cartoons, and those representations are notoriously flawed.

Who loses sleep over this sort of thing anyway?

I was never much a fan of small talk. One of the first things that attracted me to my wife was her honest answer to "How are you doing?", after I'd crawled out from under the table. I looked on small talk the way a comedian once described it: basically it is a blindingly obvious conversation which can be distilled into this exchange:

PERSON 1: Are you alive?

PERSON 2: I am alive.

PERSON 1: So am I!

Since developing that view, I have worked in a couple different environments which seem to be build, in part, on a foundation of small talk and other mindless pleasantries. As I do not want to be seen as unfriendly, I gradually have developed competency in the pointless conversational arts. At first I answered the stock "How are you?" with a look upward and "Fine" or (failing that) "Eh". The problem with those responses is that they tend to end the exchange, providing no return volley. To add a "How are you doing?" after the "fine" just didn't work, for reasons of balance and rhythm. It just didn't flow right. So I remained the black hole of small talk.

Lately, though, I upgraded from "fine" to "good", accompanied usually with a pursing of the lips and a small nod. For some reason, this works much better with "how about you?" for a trailer. Flowing even better is the contracted version "how 'bout you?" which is much snappier for the dropped syllable. Coupled with "doin' good" instead of merely "good" seems to work pretty well for me now.

As I try to catch myself up on ketchup I encounter (or rather, don't encounter) sites I remember that have since gone away. A few have officially closed, like Jeffrey Huston's Believe-me, the only movie review site I thought I'd ever need, but most just disappear, such as Impropaganda, F-u-F-me, and HQ2O. I understand that time erodes the humor or poignancy of some content, but I would prefer to make that judgment myself, dammit. It's annoying, moreover, to see "Page loading..." in the status bar, only to be disappointed by a search-portal and numerous pop-up windows. Clearly somebody is aware of "hot" addresses and buys them up chock-a-block, preying on the foolish few still expecting the site they recall or seek. I can only wonder if, undaunted, they click on some of the new links presented, eager to click on something and proceed.

I was once a music reviewer for 181.4 Degrees From The Norm. Now the address points to a site entirely void of music reviews. What gives? Am I asking too much to demand to have every site ever created always remain? I've kept my site up for a number of years without a hiccup or significant damage to my wallet, and I guess I expect the same from everybody else. The closest analogue I can envision is the spontaneous combustion of books on a library shelf. There and readable one minute, gone the next.

True, spontaneous library book combustion would have one upside: it would make room for more books. The internet isn't constrained by shelf space. It is supposed to be a dynamic medium, unlike books which are static, unchanging, dead. And a lot of sites do wear out their welcome, such as those for the oncoming-millennial-party/apocalypse and every movie made in the last three years, but the idea of their content disappearing makes me uneasy somehow. Websites are supposed to be there for me whenever I want them, not just as long as somebody keeps paying for them. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive, I guess.

Until they too pick up shop and move on, of course.

Oddly enough, I had two experiences today that made me happy. First, I got to be a major part of rejecting a production run of a badly-made garment at work. You see, until my ship comes in and I have a computer engineering job, I'm working for a large multinational fashion and beauty empire, doing various menial jobs. Lately, in between days cutting boxes open, I've been working in somewhat of an inspector role. And the jean I was looking at today had a lot of issues. It was stitched badly, looked ugly, and (my own turn of phrase) the belt loops were throwing up. That is to say the inside belt loop was longer than the outside. Which is like putting a Large Fries container inside one from a Happy Meal (thankfully, I've never worked for the big M). In other words, it's crap.

The other thing that made me smile was an interview on NPR. Not the content of the interview, but the fact that I could still recognize what both sides were saying between the lines. Being able to decode that meant that despite my recent NPR-listening, I have yet to become a mindless liberal radio devotee. Or whatever NPR's sinister plot for hapless listeners could be. And not to say that NPR's evil—it's not. I had just begun to suspect that my brain was turning to mush.

These suspicions started long before I got the PS2. Really.