What is it about some people that they think the solution to not having a particular, personal relationship with a given person is to murder that individual? That's so messed up on so many levels.

"She walks like a man!"

That's what i heard when i passed four teenagers on the street today. Back in my 20's when someone addressed me as "sir" i might joke about it but it was pretty offensive. The red-necks in Illinois who sneered at me and said i was trying to look like a man only confirmed for me the stereotype that red-necks are stupid, parochial, and a waste of carbon. Now that i'm middle aged it's more amusing than offensive--but it still strikes me as pretty weird. I suppose it's better than someone saying that i'm walking like a three-legged terrier.

But it still isn't clear to me what it is they mean. My gait is rather wide and tends to be quicker than that of many people. Except for those periods of my life when i've been limping from an injury there is a tendency for me to bounce; but i've never noticed men as a general group to bounce. If anything i'd be inclined to say i walk like a cross between an android and a pogo-stick.

So, how does a man walk anyway? Or perhaps the more interesting question would be: why do people expect folks to walk a certain way depending on their gender?

Fun flash animation (even if you don't speak or read Japanese):

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/461635

blog rating revisited
Worldle.net has a fun toy that takes text and makes a word cloud out of it. My blog entry concerning the rating of blogs, when run through their applet, looks like this:

If you're interested in American politics...

You might be interested in what Mr. Uhler writes about the current interest in dissecting whatever Obama says. Remembering from high school history class the contrast/compare exercises concerning Jeffersonian versus Jacksonian democracy I can't help but think that what he writes is true. Corporate culture is American culture, sentimental thoughts to the contrary notwithstanding. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? That probably depends on what one thinks of humans in general.

Experian, one of the top credit reporting companies, isn't very happy with another company called LifeLock because

LifeLock's scheme costs Experian millions of dollars every year in processing large numbers of improper initial fraud alerts, mailing mandatory notices to consumers, and providing free credit reports to consumers who are not eligible for such reports

There are also, apparently, other reasons why Experian is not happy with what LifeLock is doing, too.

Under other circumstances i might actually have some sympathy for Experian, but given my experience with them hounding me for months to provide information about a company that doesn't exist simply because one of my domains has ".com" at the end of its name, i can't say that i'm sorry that Experian is being compelled to provide free credit reports to people whose records may well be inaccurate for reasons for which Experian only has itself to blame.

This blog is not suitable for young children

Tell me something i didn't already know. On the other hand, it's mildly amusing that one of the factors that resulted in the R rating was the use of the word "crap".

Oh, my.

Back in the days of my formative years, "crap" was considered a reasonable substitute for the nasty, never to be said aloud word "shit". I remember the first time i said the word "shit" in school; my third grade teacher's reaction was such that you'd think i had just pulled a stiletto out of my sleeve and stabbed a classmate; her eyes got really big, the color of her face changed, and she screamed at me. Mind you, i had been hearing the word tossed around at home by my father for as long as i could remember. He used other words that were considered unsuitable for public speech, too, but considering how often he used the word "shit" compared to the others it seemed a relatively innocuous word at the time. So if even the word "crap" is considered unsuitable i have to wonder how the folks at justsayhi.com would rate a site that offered tutorials on statistics and used a certain gambling game to illustrate concepts of probability.

What's really a hoot, though, is that my website magpiebridge.net is as a whole rated "G" by these same people. The poetry page mentions fun things like guns, ropes, and arsenic, the prose page alludes to death only slightly less often than a page of obituaries, and the nonfiction section by itself easily gets an NC-17 rating from all the times the word "suicide" is used. To give a more apt rating of a website there should probably be an option to indicate that it *is* a website being evaluated so the script that does the rating digs a little deeper than the URL of the page it's initially led to.

Of course, it's really all for fun and isn't meant to be taken seriously. The site that hosts the blog/site rater also carries fun items like How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight? and What Are Your Chances of Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse?