Lipstick & Magazines #8: Thinkers

This week, a couple of items to make you go hhmmmmmm - errr?

Cosmo sex quizzes could be written by monkeys. Hey, I love monkeys, but if I can figure out by the second question that picking all "B" answers will make me seem really outgoing, then it's not really worth the time. Enter the BBC's Brain Sex ID quiz - take about 20 minutes, includes word questions, visual and perception challenges and more, and then the computer will tell you if your brain is primarily male or female. Or hermaphroditic. Fascinating.

Want to make real money bets about the future of the written word, computer intelligence, or the next presidential race? If you want to both stretch your mind, and see what some of our current "great minds" predict will happen over the next decades and centuries, check out Long Bets, which describes itself as a "public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake."

Lipstick & Magazines #7: Household

Utilitarian household items are becoming totally glam.

Witness:

* Hello glitter spatulas.

* Hot little toasters.

Lipstick & Magazines #6: Smirk

SHOCKING though it may seem, I was a very, very, very sarcastic teenager. Though surviving in the working, and social, world has required tempering that a bit, I still enjoy a really wicked website. I imagine some of you who embrace the juicy side of pop culture will take as much gleeful pleasure from these sites, but if your sensibilities are tender, you might not laugh as much.

The ladies at Go Fug Yourself write ravaging commentary about fugly-dressed celebrities. Endlessly funny, especially the B. Spears section. Oh, Britney.

Diana Goodman, who also makes some funky crafts, comments on postings to baby name websites at Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing. If you wonder about why people name their children after liquor and cars, this is a good site for you.

And to wash it all, down, Television Without Pity is the site to visit when you want to pretend you don't care about "bad" TV, but still want to know what's going on. Or maybe you fully 'fess up to watching bad TV but, tragically, had to miss an episode of, say, America's Next Top Model. Funny, funny writers, and they also cover "good" shows like, mmmm, Lost and Alias.

Lipstick & Magazines #5: Flicks and Reads

Sometimes the perfect movie or book recommendation comes at the exact right moment. Other times, you can flounder for awhile, starting and stopping books you hate, watching boring and/or just terrible films. While a personal recommendation from someone whose taste you trust is best, here are a few of the cool tools available for finding ideas when your other sources run dry.

Flicks

Rotten Tomatoes compiles movie (and video game) previews and reviews, and then ranks films as either *fresh* or *rotten* tomatoes. Their movie database features more than 100,000 films and the site has a really good look too,

Google (ah, google) has recently added a movie search tool, so if you vaguely remember something about a film, but not the name or any of the actors, you now have the best shot of finding the movie (and compiled reviews, links to theaters in your area, etc. etc.) Just type, for example, "movie: french kids" (or whatever you remember, even a quote) and see what comes up.

Netflix has also added a new *Friends* tool for members, so that you and all your special friends can see how each other ranks different movies. You can also store suggestions for each other.

Books

Boldtype used to be a Random House newsletter but has been (thankfully) taken over by the ever-cool Flavorpill. They send out a really good monthly e-newsletter full of current book recommendations, each of which has a quick synopsis, a review, and a bunch of related links.

Books We Like describes itself as "collective intelligence and activist e-commerce." People recommend books, and assign tags/keywords, so that you can browse by topic or recommender, and everything grows organically as more people come to the table. If you join in, you can also store a reading list.

As for my personal recommendations, I'm raving about Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, a mysterious, and very smart novel that weaves together a few sneaky story lines: perfect for cold nights. Also, a new-on-DVD documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey about a man trying to discover the real story of his father, architect Louis Kahn, who died when he was 11 years old.