According to FindYourSpot, I should be living in Little Rock, Arkansas. I’m not entirely sure how it came up with that, but OK. Its following recommendations of Baltimore, Maryland and Sacramento, California were somewhat more explicable. However, no matter how many quizzes may tell me to, I will never ever ever live in New Orleans. Ever. I think it’s a serious methodological flaw of this quiz that it didn’t have a question to the effect of Do you have any objections to living in a festering, filthy cesspool of a city built on a swamp? Because this is an important factor in eliminating cities such as New Orleans and Houston from consideration.

If you post in Internet discussion groups or chat on IRC, you may recognize yourself in Mike Reed’s Flame Warriors. It has been suggested that I myself am Issues or Weenie. I hope that I bear no resemblence to Stone Deaf, but I find the profile hilarious.

Sidebar for Laura: I am thinking that Contristo is well described as Acne.

SelectSmart has often had fun little political ideology tests that place you somewhere within the good old domains of conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, etc. But they never had one for assessing feminist ideologies. So, I decided to make one. The result: the nifty little What Type of Feminist Are You? selector. It currently does its best to rank your affinity for radical feminism, socialist feminism, anarcha-feminism, liberal feminism, eco-feminism, libertarian feminism, womanism, girly "femme-inism," Amazon feminism, and anti-feminism.

It has some problems. For one SelectSmart only lets you put in 24 questions, and as a result I don’t have enough questions to distinguish some of the kinds of feminism. Also, SelectSmart’s methods of scoring are kind of limited. For example, I have a question "A free market economy benefits both women and men," meant to distinguish between libertarian feminists and radical feminists, socialist feminists, and anarcha-feminists, and indifferent to liberal feminists, Amazon feminists, etc. But I can only say what a question scores in favor of, not what it scores against, so somebody who disagrees that "A free market economy benefits both women and men" is marked as being equally likely to be liberal, radical, socialist, womanist, etc. … even though they are actually much more likely to be radical or socialist. Because of the problems with SelectSmart, I may end up eventually creating another survey, either with CGI programming on eskimo or with another surveying service.

It was no surprise at all to me to find a reviewer declaring that American Pie 2 was crap [Salon]. But what level of oxygen deprivation does it take to declare that the first American Pie was "one of the sweetest comedies of the ’90s, and one of the smartest." Huh? I mean, American Pie was nowhere near as mean-spirited as some of the teen sex comedies of the 1980s, but what is? And in a decade that gave us Life is Beautiful, Kicking and Screaming, Bamboozled, The Last Supper, Man on the Moon, Bulworth, and more, I believe this review is a clinically diagnosable mental illness.

William Safire is so much better when he is in his crotchety conservative persona commenting on language than when he is in his crotchety conservative persona commenting on politics. For example, see this great invective against the use of the verbalized arch pause (er, um, ahem) to signify Here comes a little witticism, you ninny [NY Times]. People who have talked to me or read my online squibs enough should know that I myself indulge in the occasional er, um, or well. Personally, I try to restrict it to the (apparently British) usage of the pause as a way to understate or state that an answer is obvious or embarrassing. Nevertheless, I’ll be on the lookout for overuse of the Look, I made a pun! usage from here on out.