Worst. Recommendation. Ever.

Just a note: I had planned to post this last night, but I instead ended up going out with my dear friend, who just moved to town with her husband and adorable baby girl (aka, the future Mrs. Toopweets). We went to Target. Cause for merriment even under the most mundane of circumstances, but this? WAS HER FIRST TIME THERE! I felt like…like…I don’t know, somebody who knows something about Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter/Star Wars, insert the appropriate mentor/protégé analogy here. It was glorious; many fun things were purchased, some essential (Baby formula!New measuring spoons! ) and some…not. (Heads up, y’all: Neutrogena has a new lipgloss/sheer color stick thing, and it’s pretty good.) Anyway, we--oh! I’ve got the proper analogy. I was the Mr. Miyagi to her Daniel-san. Ahem. All of this to say that if taking someone to Target for the first time doesn’t qualify as a reason to temporarily overlook my blog, then I honestly do not know what does. (Side note: Does the phrase “Taking someone to Target for the first time” seem like a dirty euphemism only to me? Help.) Moving on… I recently discovered something that I hesitated to share because I figured that everyone must already know about it, and I’d seem quite the fool talking about old news. But this “discovery” is so fantastic that I must share it, in the event that there is even one of you who hasn’t heard of this. Yahoo lets you customize your own radio station. To which I say, of course, yahoo. You pick the artists/songs/albums that you like, and it creates a station just for you. (You know what? Rather than repeatedly saying “my own radio station,” I’ll just call it “MORS” from now on.) It’s also intuitive to an extent; based on your ratings of the music it plays, and what you select as your favorites, it plays other stuff its algorithm “thinks” that you would like. And the more songs you rate, the better it gets at predicting things you’d like. I can’t describe to you how awesome this is…most of the time. I mean, through this nifty little feature, I discovered my new (to me, anyway) favorite album.

There IS, however, one caveat: Sometimes, MORS thinks I’m someone else. The other day, for instance, I was typing away, happily listening to the Arcade Fire playing on MORS. The song ended, and then the voice of a malevolent demon poured out through my headphones. I quickly clicked open the MORS window to see what the hell it was. SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS. I was hurt, of course, as anyone who’d worked hard to create a good radio station for herself would be. Shocked and confused, I wanted to search for answers, but there were none to be had. Why MORS had selected this as a song that I might like was a mystery, so I quickly skipped over the song, and tried to put it behind me. A few days later, though, MORS started up with me again. Not Spongebob, thank God, but something perhaps even weirder:

Hi - Hi! We're your Weather Girls

- Ah-huh -

And have we got news for you -

You better listen!

Get ready, all you lonely girls, and leave those umbrellas at home. - Alright!

…It’s Raining Men. Which wouldn’t have been so strange, were it not followed later in the day by YMCA. MORS apparently thought that I was a stereotypical gay sidekick in a romantic comedy. Then, the past few days, MORS seems to be under the impression that I’m going through a bad breakup. There’s a LOT of Enya, Sara MacLachlan and as of today, Jewel. Um, wow. This is possibly the worst recommendation ever. Despite the above, I really do love MORS, and I think you’ll love yours (YORS?) too, particularly if you, like me, work in front of a computer for much of the day.

(Just don’t be surprised if it, apropos of nothing, starts playing a mixture of death metal and polka music.)