fling93 loves fishies

Gender Balance

I noticed that my Audioscrobbler chart of my most frequently listened-to musical artists is remarkably gender-balanced. Six of the top twelve are women (Tori Amos, Shawn Colvin, Alanis Morissette, Dar Williams, Aimee Mann, and Sarah McLachlan), as are ten of the top twenty and fourteen of the top thirty. The ratio drops a bit after that to twenty of the top fifty, but still, I thought this was pretty good.

Well, as you might imagine, it was no accident. No, I didn’t carefully make sure I played a female artist every other track (I’m not that anal). But about ten years ago, I read a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the underrepresentation of female artists in the music industry (this was before Lilith Fair), highlighting a few artists worth sampling, like Ani DiFranco and Sleater Kinney. As I realized my own music collection was heavily male-dominated (Rush, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin), I started looking specifically for female artists. It took a while, but after a few years, I realized my collection was more-or-less even and stopped consciously trying to balance it. This was a few years ago, and I guess it’s stayed pretty even.

Isn’t this a form of Affirmative Action? Sure, but I believe there are situations when you need to consciously fight irrational psychological tendencies, like the tendency to filter and exclude information. Bias is just another one of those things, and I was reminded of this recently in this post by danah boyd on SXSW, where Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink) appeared:

My Top Ten Films of 2004

Well, I know the Oscars are long over and 2005 is already more than a quarter over, but here’s my belated top ten list of the best films I saw in 2004 (I have no idea how some bloggers do weekly features, since I have trouble with just a yearly one!). This wasn’t one of my heavier movie-watching years due to my night classes, so I’m not separating out “Films That Everyone and Their Grandma Has Already Seen,” like I did last year. So this will be a true top ten list, just of a smaller field than usual.

I just don't get it

Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling… but nice.”

I saw this meme in several places. I was directly called out by Elke, but I also saw this from Amanda Rohn, Julian Sanchez, Gene Healy, and Matt Yglesias. Since work and my Poli Sci class are conspiring to keep me from blogging very often (and that probably won’t change until I’m done with my term paper in late May), I guess I might as well participate.

As Elke said, “I know he loves fishies…” (as well as the hotness that is Natalie Portman) “…but what does he not care for?” Well, it took me a while, but here’s the answer: