What Your Personal Electronics Think About You

Not that I don't love modern life, with its blogging and fuel additives and flush toilets, but I'm a little concerned by the number of inanimate objects that seem to have formed opinions about me. For example, my tivo is firmly convinced that I love the program "How It's Made" on the Discovery Channel. It records as many as it can hold, sometimes up to four a day, secure in the knowledge that I will be delighted to discover the exact steps required to assemble an air filter, or a pool cue. (For the record, I have watched a couple, and I don't dislike it. It's kind of soothing, in a segment-on-Mr.-Rogers kind of way.) Anyway, I guess it's better than the times my tivo thought I was a small, Korean-speaking child, or a gay man.

Spammers, on the other hand, have very different idea of me. The ones who reach my Yahoo account clearly believe me to be a gambling addict who needs to refinance her home (possibly due to debts incurred by too much time spent at INDIAN CASINO), while my gmail spammers have me down as a man who is insecure about his physical dimensions, who also speaks Spanish and is interested in investing in real estate. (I know this because about a month ago I discovered that Gmail had sent at least two critical non-spam emails to my spam folder, causing some social inconveniences and nearly causing Alice to miss a play. I'm not sure if I lost any others, so if you think I blew you off at some point in the recent past, I apologize.)

And then there's the "Recommended for You" feature at iTunes. Its top five choices for me:
1. Sean Kingston, "Beautiful Girls"
2. Fall Out Boy, "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race"
3. Panic! At the Disco, "I Write Sins, Not Tragedies"
4. Emerson Drive, "Fall Into Me"
5. Sawyer Brown, "Some Girls Do"

Apparently, I'm a country-loving emo kid.

Actually, that one's not so far off.


So, what do your possessions think you like?