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...)
So this Goyte "Somebody That I Used to Know" song and the Walk Off the Earth cover video are everywhere and those of us with kids are particularly familiar with both of them. (We happen to know a two-year-old who immediately dons a suffering expression and begins singing ALL THE WORDS every time it comes on, which is often. Hi Eden!) The parents of the kids featured below videotaped some of the many, many, many times the song was requested by them during car rides.
I never should've let Luke watch Marie Antoinette as such an impressionable age.
Common Sense Media is asking for your stories of moments when you wish your child hadn't seen something on television, in a movie, or online. I shared the story of my own horrible moment like that here. Please do go read it and if you like it, vote for me! Or share your own and vote for yourself. (I did. You can win a $500 Amazon gift card!)
An iPhone photo of Luke, at his grandfather's house, reading the comics page for the first time. The comics page in an actual newspaper -- we don't subscribe to any physical papers anymore. I taught a lot of kids to read (or at least helped them learn) but it is so much more amazing when your own child starts to do it, as exciting as when he said his first word or took his first step. It's as if he were the only child in the world clever enough to figure out how to do such a miraculous thing.
I love this video and this story with a passion. Someone in New Brunswick was videotaping in his backyard when a giant face appeared in the clouds. According to The Star "a lightning bolt from the related storm went on to kill 40 goats." Now that's great journalism! If you watch the video, don't be disappointed (as I was) that the giant face doesn't turn toward the camera and say something magnificent. I guess some people are never satisfied. Thanks to Sara O'Leary for the link.
Remember the parents who are keeping the gender of their infant a secret? Well, this interview with them on Q, a program on CBC radio, is perhaps the only follow-up story we'll get to the one that appeared in the Toronto Star a couple of weeks ago. The family has been taken aback by the public reaction and completely inundated with media requests which they have turned down. They said no to Oprah -- so presumably there's no reality show in their future. I wasn't really surprised by anything they had to say except that Kathy Witterick, the mom, didn't mention the picture book X, A Fabulous Child's Story as the inspiration for the idea. She says it was Jazz, their son, who came up with the idea after listening to something about babies and gender on Free to Be You & Me. She also took umbrage with the criticism that they are putting too much pressure on their children to keep this secret. She says it is not a secret, it is private. I know what she's getting at although it's not a completely clear distinction. The interview is well worth a listen -- here's that link again.
I haven't stopped thinking about this since I first heard of it -- it's a fascinating story, with lots to think about, particularly if you are raising little kids. (And isn't "Storm" an apt name?)
Luke and Sylvie are loving everything about this. If I could perform a dance routine like that, I believe my life might just be complete. (I have been fantasizing about putting my children in dance classes. Never mind that old saying, "Those who can't, teach." It should be, "Those who can't, have children. And then pay somebody else to teach them.")
The Imperfectionists: A Novel by Tom Rachman. I'd call this a collection of linked short stories rather than a novel. Christopher Buckley raved about this book for the Times, declaring he was particularly impressed by the structure, which surprises me. I think it'd be easier to write a novel this way. But maybe that's just me. The subject matter, the lives of employees and readers of an international newspaper -- and that newspaper's rise and fall -- is very timely. What better way to get coverage in the traditional media's shrinking review pages? Still, a very readable and entertaining book.
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. I happened across a mention of this book in a piece on five books about childhood innocence and thought it might make a good addition to my list of the best books about childhood. (I need to update that list.) The Go-Between, published in 1953, is written from the perspective of an adult but this is an adult who remembers astonishingly well just what it was like to be thirteen in the year 1900. And the year is key -- for a reader in 2010, that thirteen-year-old is unbelievably naive. I kept thinking the plot might work today but only if the protagonist was maybe 9 or 10 years old instead of thirteen. Still, this is a terrific, eminently readable book and I highly recommend it, even though it is certainly overwrought and almost unforgivably melodramatic. Read it when you are in an overwrought, melodramatic mood. Interesting note: this is the book that begins with the famous lines: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. They do indeed.
Just Kids by Patti Smith. I didn't know much about Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe until I read this sweet memoir of their early romance and lifelong friendship. The jacket copy says that Smith was given the Commander of the Order des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, France's highest honour for artists, in 2005 and I was struck by how her writing, which is elegant, formal, and melancholy, seems very French. It almost reads like a translation of something from the French. As I read, I discovered that she is, or was, very fond of French poets, particularly Rimbaud, so this began to make a kind of sense. She comes across as a bit of a delicate flower in this book which seems at odds with her rock and roll persona and her androgynous crow mystique -- I suppose all that makes for an intriguing contradiction. I was impressed by how devoted the pair were to the idea of making art. And less impressed by their deliberate political forays into the art world. There's a lot of name dropping. There was a definite sense that Smith and Mapplethorpe were interested in being inspired by other, more successful artists rather than using them in order to get famous themselves but there was a lot of the latter going on, too, I think. That was disappointing -- I like the idea of artists focusing only on their art, and not on how to promote themselves.
It was fascinating to read the descriptions of said primer, especially on my kindle and in light of all the recent developments in the field of e-books and e-readers. Designed to deliver a subversive education in living an interesting life to a young girl in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, the primer is an interactive e-reader that doesn't seem all that improbable anymore. It looks and feels like an old-fashioned book, except that it reads the stories it contains aloud, its illustrations sometimes morph into videos and it offers video-game-like problems to solve. Most interestingly, the primer tailors its stories to the circumstances of the reader's own life and is able to respond to the reader's questions. It also teaches the reader to read along the way, as well as lots of other useful skills like martial arts and computer programming.
Although the primer was designed for the privileged grand-daughter of a wealthy and important man, instead it falls into the hands of an impoverished little girl with a mostly absent mother who brings home a constant stream of abusive boyfriends. Here is that little girl's introduction to the book:
It appeared to be a flat decorated box. Nell could tell immediately that it was fine. She had not seen many fine things in her life, but they had a look of their own, dark and rich like chocolate, with glints of gold.
"Both hands," Harv admonished her, "it's heavy."
Nell reached out with both hands and took it. Harv was right, it was heavier than it looked. She had to lay it down in her lap or she'd drop it. It was not a box at all. It was a solid thing. The top was printed with golden letters. The left edge was rounded and smooth, made of something that felt warm and soft but strong. The other edges were indented slightly, and they were cream-colored.
Harv could not put up with the wait. "Open it," he said.
"How?"
Harv leaned toward her, caught the upper-right corner under his finger, and flipped it. The whole lid of the thing bent upward around a hinge on the left side, pulling a flutter of cream-coloured leaves after it.
Underneath the cover was a piece of paper with a picture on it and some more letters.
On the first page of the book was a picture of a little girl sitting on a bench. Above the bench was a thing like a ladder, except it was horizontal, supported at each end by posts. Thick vines twisted up the posts and gripped the ladder, where they burst into huge flowers. The girl had her back to Nell; she was looking down a grassy slope sprinkled with little flowers toward a blue pond. On the other side of the pond rose mountains... The girl had a book on her lap.
The facing page had a little picture in the upper left, consisting of more vines and flowers wrapped around a giant egg-shaped letter. But the rest of that page was nothing but tiny black letters without decoration. Nell turned it and found two more pages of letters, though a couple of them were big ones with pictures drawn around them. She turned another page and found another picture. In this one, the little girl had set aside her book and was talking to a big black bird that had apparently gotten its foot tangled up in the vines overhead. She flipped another page.
The pages she'd already turned were under her left thumb. They were trying to work their way loose, as if they were alive. She had to press down harder and harder to keep them there. Finally they bugled up in the middle and slid out from underneath her thumb and, flop-flop-flop, returned to the beginning of the story.
"Once upon a time," said a woman's voice, "there was a little girl named Elizabeth who liked to sit in the bower in her grandfather's garden and read story-books." The voice was soft, meant just for her, with an expensive Victorian accent.
Nell slammed the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor and came to rest by the sofa.
There are passages and passages about the marvels of the primer, so many good ones that I found it difficult to choose which ones to excerpt. As a former teacher of reading to small children, I was intrigued by this one:
What's a raven?" Nell said.
The illustration was a colorful painting of the island seen from up in the sky. The island rotated downward and out of the picture, becoming a view toward the ocean horizon. In the middle was a black dot. The picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. "R A V E N," the book said. "Raven. Now say it with me."
"Raven."
"Very good! Nell, you are a clever girl, and you have much talent with words. Can you spell raven?"
Nell hesitated. She was still blushing from the praise. After a few seconds, the first of the letters began to blink. Nell prodded it.
The letter grew until it had pushed all the other letters and pictures off the edges of the page. The loop on top shrank and became a head, while the lines sticking out the bottom developed into legs and began to scissor. "R is for Run," the book said. The picture kept on changing until it was a picture of Nell. Then something fuzzy and red appeared beneath her feet. "Nell Runs on the Red Rug," the book said, and as it spoke, new words appeared.
"Why is she running?"
"Because an Angry Alligator Appeared," the book said, and panned back quite some distance to show an alligator, waddling along ridiculously, no threat to the fleet Nell. The alligator became frustrated and curled itself up into a circle, which became a small letter. "A is for Alligator. The Very Vast alligator Vainly Viewed Nell's Valiant Velocity."
The little story went on to include an Excited Elf who was Nibbling Noisily on some Nuts. Then the picture of the Raven came back, with the letters beneath. "Raven. Can you spell raven, Nell?" A hand materialized on the page and pointed to the first letter.
"R," Nell said.
"Very good! You are a clever girl, Nell, and good with letters," the book said. "What is this letter?" and it pointed to the second one. This one Nell had forgotten. But the book told her a story about an Ape named Albert.
The folks at the Complete Review saidThe Diamond Age is an "ambitious
story with interesting ideas, but [it] never really takes off."
Apparently, they were most put off by the primer: "Stephenson relates a fair number of tales told by the
Primer to Nell,
but though these are meant to be tied to the narrative, they are not
very successful and certainly the most tiresome aspect of the novel."
Whereas I found much of the rest of the novel somewhat tiresome -- although chock full of gripping ideas -- and the story of Nell's life and
her constant interaction with the primer enthralling. In fact, I felt most of the book was a sloppy hot mess and that the other story lines could've been dumped in favour of fleshing out and properly
finishing Nell's story. (For the San Francisco Chronicle, Jon Carroll wrote "Perhaps the loose ends are not all tied up,
but then he's very profligate in the creation of string.") Clearly, however, the science fiction community
disagreed with me, as the book won both both the Hugo and the Locusand was shortlisted for the Nebula in 1996.
The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer leaves me
wondering -- are there other fascinating e-books and/or e-readers in
fiction that I've not stumbled across? Someone should do a round-up.
as the inspiration for the idea. She says it was Jazz, their son, who came up with the idea after listening to something about babies and gender on 
. She also took umbrage with the criticism that they are putting too much pressure on their children to keep this secret. She says it is not a secret, it is private. I know what she's getting at although it's not a completely clear distinction. The interview is well worth a listen -- here's that 
by Tom Rachman. I'd call this a collection of linked short stories rather than a novel. Christopher Buckley 
by L.P. Hartley. I happened across a 
by Patti Smith. I didn't know much about Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe until I read this sweet memoir of their early romance and lifelong friendship. The jacket copy says that Smith was given the Commander of the Order des Arts et des Lettres 
last week.