My Mariah Carey Theory

I have a theory that I'm being stalked by Mariah Carey's greatest hits of the 90s. When I was in Sydney, we took a bus trip out to the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Moutains. It was a pretty long bus ride. Anyway, for 85% of the trip, the bus driver played a tape of Mariah's hits from the 90s. The first time he played it I thought "Okay, this is kind of fun. Reminds me of when I was a huge Mariah fan when I was eleven." However, on the second to fifth times he played the tape, the nostalgia wore off pretty damned quickly. He was playing it very loudly too, so it was hard to drown it out with my own music.

Anyhow, Mariah's 90s hits have followed me back to Canada. Whenever TB and I meet up for coffee at the 24 hr Second Cup near her place, they are also playing 90s Mariah. It happened again tonight! What the? TB frequents there far more often than I do, and she swears they only play the Mariah when I'm there. Mysteriously scary.

Oh, if you want to have fun dressing Mariah or other celebrities go to www.paperdollheaven.com. It's hours of fun! I spent too much time on there today.

Another fun internet toy I came across today was The Gender Genie. You can paste in a sample of your writing, be it fiction, non-fiction or blog, and the genie uses an algorithim to determine your gender. When I pasted in my blog enteries for October, I was almost gender neutral. However, I've been more feminine in my writing for November. I also pasted in a couple of stories I've written and they were quite high on the girly scale. I wish I had some essays from university on my computer. I lost them all in the post-university hard drive crash - I only have hard copies stored somewhere at the parents' place. It's be interesting whether to see if my academic science-related essays would score as male. The authors of the study did say that they used female writing from scientific journals to create their algorithm. I'd like to see if my science writing would identify as female... Since I don't have any of my essays, I tried I some work-related writings (tests and assignments) and they were very male. I wish that I could read the Nature article about the Genie, but I'd have to pay money for that. It's pretty interesting stuff. Incidentally, I wrote an essay about gender differences in language usage for a first year anthropolgy paper. I remember none of it. ;)

By the way, I'm feeling much better after my lazy day. Although my voice is still a bit scratchy. I should be all mended and ready for action on Monday. We'll see if I get any nasty notes from the supply about my classes.

Edit: I ran this post through the Gender Genie and it scored as male. I think overally my writing is pretty gender confused. Oh, I just read that the scientists predict that the Genie should be right about 80% of the time but stats on the website say that it's been right 58% of the time. So maybe it's the scientists are confused. Although I would suspect people probably report when the Genie is wrong more often than they report that it's right so I highly doubt that the website's statistics are very reliable...