Okay — let’s avoid throwing rocks and gunning for my crucifixion, again: I don’t mean to be that columnist who’s cheeky and caddy material is plagiarized from something he saw on TV. E.g. That hipster whose iPod music collection is actually the “Heard on ‘The O.C.'” podcast, or that girl who dishes out the latest celeb gossip and you can’t tell which is sadder: the fact that she repeats everything she says from www.thesuperficial.com or the fact that you actually know this is true because www.thesuperficial.com is your home page. I guess as my ethnic housekeeper (a.k.a. Sarah Boyette) used to say, “the pot shouldn’t call the kettle black,” mainly because that would make the pot like un-PC and totally racist.
http://www.myheritage.com
While I may have gotten this entertaining yet non-pornographic website from Vh1’s “Best Week Ever,” it’s a site that cannot be ignored. In fact, when I caught the “Best Week Ever” rerun airing at 4 a.m. Sunday morning during my post-coital-pre-post-Toad’s-pre-coital stupor, I immediately jumped out of bed and left it on an open web browser so I’d remember to check that shit out the next morning.
Needless to say, my entire afternoon the next day, which began when I woke up at 4 p.m., was consumed by the life-changing technology offered at myheritage.com. How does this scrumtrulescent piece of electronic machinery work? Well, you upload a picture of yourself and/or a crumpled photo of the person you’ve been stalking most recently, and myheritage.com will analyze the picture and search through its database of “faces of the world’s 3,200 most famous men and women.” With myheritage.com, it’s only a matter of seconds before — voila! — you have a thumbnail slideshow of the celebrities you look like (or, in my case, the celebrities that look like me). One is naturally inclined to think that there is, in fact, a crowd of a 3,200 children (miniaturized of course), who live in the wall and sit with miniaturized celebrity screen shots to look for face matches. This, however, is not true … ask Yale’s room repair crew and my indebted bank account.
I have reaffirmed that, based solely on 2-D photographic appearance, I have a stunning 83% similarity to Jake Gyllenhaal, though I have two confessions to make: 1) This fact is only true for pictures where my facial hair is grown out. 2) By “Jake Gyllenhaal” I really meant “Elton John” and by “where my facial hair is grown out” I meant “even when I use the best Facebook pictures I have.” For example, if you do a face scan of Dick Cheney, you’ll end up with matches including Smigel and Alfred Hitchcock; scanning in a picture of Viviana Rodriguez (BP ’05), on the other hand, will match Adriana Lima, and while I am not sure if she knows this herself, the collection of Viviana’s photos on my computer confirms Adriana as a match about 90% of the time with a standard error of ± 3%. Wait. Did I just say that out loud?
While you might find yourself excited enough by the prospects of finding your inner celebrity (and no, Mei-Mei, photoshopping your pic before uploading it only helps your chances marginally), I figure with a little programming skills, a bit of my self-taught algorithm-creator-izing and a collection of People’s “50 Most Beautiful” from the past two decades, I’ll be able to cut a deal with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and sell my invention: finally — a way for everyone to categorize their Facebook friends by attractiveness (just imagine having the filter to “Show: Attractive and Recently Updated”)!
So before you run over to your PC (sorry Applephiles — I don’t know if the site is retard friendly!), here’s a little tip from me: when using the Cognitec powered, face-matching portal of coolness, you don’t have to register with a real e-mail address, but that doesn’t mean you can’t put in that douche eachingTay ssistantAy’s or your eanDay’s.
Another site to check out:
http://www.aninote.com/
An aninote is lingo for “Animated note,” which is different from an e-vite, because it isn’t a prerequisite to a blow job, and is different from an e-card, because it is a musical animation that is customized to display the name of the recipient. It’s a bit hard to explain unless you actually go to the Web site itself, but to give you an idea of how it works, please refer the following: http://cocaine.youaremyfriend.com (No. Seriously. Do it.)
A site to NOT to check out:
http://www.google.com
Why shouldn’t a person check out www.google.com? Because, dad, this is what you will find when you Google my entire name. Please stop, before you see something you wish you hadn’t, or before you start asking your colleagues what “yay” and “bukkake” mean.