Sunday, May 3, 2009

39% man

This week, en route to my psychiatry tutorial, apropos of nothing at all, one of my classmates told me that I looked like Nicholas Cage. At first I was kind of pleased. Who wouldn't want to look like a Hollywood star? Well, me. Nicholas Cage has a lumpy face and always looks like he's in a trance. Exhibit #1:


Later that evening I got a txt msg from an old school friend who asked if I had perhaps been moonlighting as Eric "Rick" Forrester Jr. on The Bold and The Beautiful. I had no idea what or who she was talking about so I had to google up some pictures. As it turns out, there is some superficial similarity there, especially around the region of the rock-hard abs. Exhibit #2:


All this star-comparison threw my thoughts back to last year when a friend emailed me from the US to say that Ryan Gosling had been on the cover of GQ and that he was my doppelganger. I wasn't exactly thrilled since at that point I'd just seen the movie Lars and the Real Girl in which Mr Gosling plays a socially inept loser who falls in love with a blow-up sex doll. Hopefully that's not what my friend was referring to. Exhibit #3:


And finally we come to Frankie Muniz. A few years back, when Malcolm in the Middle was on TV, a work colleague remarked that I looked just like him. I had no idea that Mr Muniz even existed until that moment, when I suddenly found myself bound to him for all eternity. Here is what he looks like. Jolly little twerp, isn't he? Exhibit #4:


Four quite different looking famous people, all of whom apparently look like me. Or me like them, I suppose. Isn't it strange that we don't say, "Hey Frankie Muniz looks just like you!" - it's always, "Hey you look just like Frankie Muniz! Ha ha ha ha!"

Yet when I look at the pictures all together now I do see that there are certain themes. Bad haircuts are right up there. As are big bushy eyebrows. And bags under the eyes. And a certain hang-dog look. I guess I can live with that.

It's closer to reality at least than someone else's assessment of me. The website genderanalyzer.com claims to be able to analyze a blog feed and deduce from it whether the writer is male or female. And apparently it thinks I'm a woman. Although it's only 61% certain.

4 comments:

PTR said...

1. When examining the picture of Eric Forrester Jr., my Smaller Half remarked, "Yeah, I wish". I don't get no respect!

2. Since writing this post, genderanalyzer.com has adjusted its assessment of me. It is now only 60% certain that I am a woman. How sad that my mockery of it only made a 1% change.

Anonymous said...

PTR,

I've just run your blog through a special web-based analyser and it has said that the key sentence was the first one, specifically the first phrase - "I was on my way to a psychiatry tute..."

The prosecution rests, m'lud.

PTR said...

eh? What's so special about that sentence?

Anonymous said...

PTR,

Sorry to be elusive in my meaning, you were probably looking for subtlety that wasn't there.

All I mean was that the people commenting on your resemblance to the rich, famous and chiseled are crazy in the coconuts, balmy, bizarre, brainsick, certifiable, certified, crackbrained, cranky, crazed, crazy, delirious, demented, deranged, disordered, eccentric, erratic, flighty, frantic, frenetic, giddy, giggly, headless, hysterical, irrational, lunatic, luny, mad, , maggoty, maniac, maniacal, manic, mentally ill, moonstruck, obsessional, odd, off-centre, offbeat, over the edge, peculiar, phrenetic, pixilated, queer, scatty, screwed up, singular, strange, unbalanced, unusual, weak-minded, whacky.

They may have been feeling barmy as a bandicoot, bats, batty, bonkers, cockamamie, cracked, crackers, crackpot, crank, cuckoo, daffy, daft, daggy, dilly, dingbats, dippy, ditzy, dizzy, dotty, far gone, gaga, gonzo, hoity-toity, kinky, kooky, like a chook with its head cut off, loco, loony, loopy, mad as a (cut) snake, mad as a gumtree full of galahs, mad as a hatter, mad as a March hare, mad as a meataxe, magnoon, mental, mug, nitty, non compos, nuts, nutty, nutty as a fruitcake, oddball, off one's block, off one's chump, off one's face, off one's head, off one's nut, off one's onion, off one's pannikin, off one's rocker, off one's saucer, off one's scone, off one's tile, off one's trolley, off the air, off the beam, off the rails, off the wall, original, out of one's head, out of one's mind, out of one's tree, porangi, potty, psycho, ratty, round the bend, round the twist, sapheaded, sappy, schizo, screwball, screwy, silly as a wet hen, soft in the head, sonky, spaz, spoony, starkers, troppo, unhinged, up the pole, wacko, wacky, way-out, womba, wrong in the head, or yampy.

Sorry - I may have belaboured the point here.
:-)