crooked house

Cosmo's "What Kind of Female Are You?" Personality Quiz Tells Me I Am Wrong.

Two of my freelance clients are folks who own personality quiz sites. They are very popular and, I am guessing, very lucrative websites right now. People are using the internet like a giant magic 8 ball or  a set of Tarot cards or something -- these personality quizzes seem to fill a deep psychic need.  So I end up writing a lot of them. If you want to know what brand of fried chicken or species of goldfish you are, just ask me. It'll be much quicker.

Anyway, just now I was doing a little research on quizzes targetted to women. So I clicked on this quiz from Cosmopolitan magazine, called What Kind of Female Are You?

I started clickety-clicking through, completed the first page, and hit next to go on to the second page of questions. This is what happened:

That's a screenshot. Cosmo is telling me that I got 4 questions ON MY PERSONALITY QUIZ WRONG.

Another screen shot. I chose "I could see myself as the CEO of a company one day." WRONG, says Cosmo. I also chose "Even after I get married and have kids, I want to continue working." WRONG AGAIN, says Cosmo.

Last screen shot. I chose "I have a clear idea of the kind of man I want to end up with (and if I'm already hitched, I had an image beforehand of who my dream guy would be)." And also "I don't need a relationship to be happy." WRONG WRONG WRONG, says Cosmo.

Uh, okay. What Kind of Female Am I, Cosmo? WHAT KIND OF PERSONALITY QUIZ ARE YOU!?

Actually, you're exactly the kind of personality quiz one might expect from Cosmo...

(I'm guessing it's some kind of bug?)

Update: I kept doing the quiz until I got all the "right" answers. Here are screenshots of those:

You are allowed to click through to your results only when you  get all the answers "correct." At that point, Cosmo's ideal "Kind of Female" is revealed:

Congratulations, you are Girlfriend Material! (And if you are not, just keep trying until you are...)

Luke Completes Proverbs

UPDATE: I forgot to add these ones, which I just found scribbled on the magazine:

A woman's work is hard.

Good things come to those who are good.

People who live in glass houses hurt.

If you don't have anything nice to say, just say a random word.

And Sylvie contributed one, too. She did:

You can't have your cake and ice cream because you have to eat healthy food.

Inspired by this fill-in-the-blank in Real Simple Family magazine, last night I asked Luke to make up some endings to unfinished proverbs. I gave him the words in normal text, his words are in italics. These familiar sayings are still mostly unknown to kids his age and we had a good laugh. You should try it with your kids.

A rose by any other name would be stupid.

A chain is only as strong as a rope.

A fool and his money are toys.

A good man is Santa.

A leopard can't change its stripes.

A penny saved is one cent.

A picture is worth a million dollars.

A poor workman always blames his wife.

A problem shared is a big problem.

A rolling stone gathers no friends.

A thing of beauty is roses.

A watched pot never breaks.

A woman's place is number one. (I think he was sucking up here.)

All good things come to Happyland.

All that glitters is sparkle.

All you need is love.

An ounce of prevention is worth a dollar.

Ask a silly question and you'll get a spanking. (I swear we don't spank here.)

You've made your bed, now sleep.

Beauty is only love.

Behind every great man is a wife.

Better the devil you know than a bad kid.

Boys will be doomed.

Don't bite the hand that loves you.

Don't count your chickens before they are dead.

Don't cut off your nose to smell.

Don't put all your eggs in one pot.

Don't put the cart by a car. (He thought I meant a grocery cart, not a horse cart.)

Don't teach your Grandma to do front flips and back flips.

Don't throw the baby in the air.

Every cloud has a fog.

Everything comes to him who is nice.

He who laughs last, laughs weird.

 

My Article For Brain, Child Magazine: Who We Think We Are

Some months ago I did a little genealogical research and discovered that my children are descended from royalty. I wrote an article about it for the current issue of Brain, Child magazine: 

Friedrich III, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and his wife Eleanor of Portugal were, Ancestry.com told me, the thirteenth great grandfather and grandmother of my husband! There were even pictures of them—well, paintings. There was Great Great Grandpa Friedrich getting introduced to Great Great Grandma Eleanor by the pope, as painted by Pinturicchio. There was a portrait of Friedrich looking steely-eyed and a bit jowly, the way my husband sometimes looks while watching his favorite hockey team lose. And here was a portrait of Eleanor peering wistfully at a flower, something about her expression, the lines of her face, reminding me of my son’s when I told him enough with the video games.

Because excellent records are kept by royalty—in a sense their family history is everyone’s history—once you find a connection to a king, it is possible to go back for generations and generations. I surfed for hours, looking at photographs of a golden crown that had once rested on the head of the fifteenth great grandfather of my children. I started planning summer vacations to the palaces their ancestors had once lived in. I began researching language tuition in German and Spanish for the children, never mind the fact that their ancestors lived so long ago they would’ve spoken entirely different versions of those languages. Basically, I stopped just short of writing to request invitations to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding.

With their bloodlines becoming clearer, some of my children's quirks began to make sense. The way my six-year-old son still wanted me to dress him in the morning, as if I were his valet. My two-year-old daughter's insistence on wearing a pair of golden slippers at all times and her particularly erect posture and imperious manner. ("Play cars, Mama!" she commands with a little wave of her hand and a slight, dignified inclination of her head. "Sit here!" she orders, pointing to a particular spot on the floor, her stern expression demonstrating that she will not tolerate dissent. "Dis one, Mama!" she says, handing me her preference when I pick up the wrong one. And then, "Vivi's turn first!")

This intriguing discovery was, for lack of a better word, brief. You'll have to get your hands on a copy of the magazine to find out the rest.

Luke's Homemade Book

Luke got a couple of magazines in the mail today and, after perusing them for a little while, he asked me if he could make his own book. I was all over that in a heartbeat. Here it is: his "Chickie Book." I suppose in another ten years or so the term "Chickie Book" might have a different meaning for him.

And here is one of the pages, a puzzle page, his favourite.

That says, "Find two strange things." Okay, then. Shouldn't be too difficult, around here.

Annie Leibovitz's Hansel and Gretel and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

Annie Leibovitz does a series of Hansel and Gretel photographs for Vogue. Lady Gaga is the witch. Via Marina Tatar's blog Breezes from Wonderland.

And, speaking of Wonderland, here are some amazing posters from Tim Burton's movie version of the classic. Alice has inspired so many beautiful images, I have half a mind to start collecting both the books and the films.

Jayme McGowan's 3D Cut Paper Illustrations

Many of the parenting/design blogs are talking about the latest issue of small magazine. I am most struck by the 3D paper cut illustrations done by Jayme McGowan. Here she talks about how she started -- she was trying to quit smoking and needed a new obsessive habit to distract her. Just take a gander at her first project:

You can buy her prints -- and sometimes even the originals! -- in her etsy shop. I don't know if she's done illustrations for picture books but she should. I'd love her to illustrate the one I'm working on now.

The August 2008 Issue of O And Oprah's Messiah Dress

I've started buying Oprah's magazine -- I like the Books section, especially the "Books That Made a Difference" feature, where a celebrity of some kind talks about her favourite ones. And recently there have been some essays and articles by writers I admire, often surprising ones like George Saunders and Jim Shepard. Catherine Newman's been in there a number of times lately and this month features memoirs from eight writers including Elizabeth McCracken, Amy Hempel, and Jo Ann Beard, as well as some advice on writing your own from Abigail Thomas. So I'm down with Oprah. I like her. A lot. But get a load of this dress she's wearing on the cover of the August issue. It makes her look like either a science fiction princess or the Messiah. Which doesn't require much of a stretch of the imagination, actually -- I'm betting there'll be an entire new religion devoted to the woman within two hundred years of her death. It's what she should have been wearing in the photo accompanying The Onion headline Oprah Launches Own Reality.

New Print On-Demand Sites

Tikatok is a new site where kids can write and illustrate stories -- and then have them published for a fee. I can't decide if this is a good idea or a bit of a money-grab. The writing program looks good -- it's got lots of prompts for children who get stuck -- but I'm not familiar with the other writing programs for kids that are out there. And if you want to publish one of your kid's stories in book form and handmade isn't good enough for you, there are already a couple of sites out there (like blurb) that print nice-looking books.

And here's a site, MagCloud, that allows you to publish your own magazine. They even take care of mailing and subscription management.

Chatelaine Magazine's Meat House

This meat house, made of layered sandwiches topped with cold cut shingles, was featured in the 1971 Christmas issue of Chatelaine magazine, the Canadian equivalent of Good Housekeeping. You can read "If You Must Wear Pants, Here's How" from the June 1943 issue and other articles from the magazine's  archives here. But you'll have to buy last month's anniversary issue to get a look at the first page of a 1966 article called "How LSD Ended My Alcoholism." Maybe the food editor was trying the LSD cure when she came up with that meat house idea.