Metrosexual …. what?
It’s been a while that I have heard a good ’stereotype-expression’. Today a friend of mine told someone (with a very British accent) “You look so metrosexual” ………….. pause – metrosexual, what is that, I know heterosexual, bi-sexual, homosexual, but not mertosexual ……….. .
“Metro-what?” I heard another friend say.
Turns out that most people have heard this expression – at least the Brits.
It also turns out that it was “Word of the Year ‘03”
So, meterosexual – what is it?
Well, find out if you are a Metrosexual; take the ‘Am I a Metrosexual Test‘.
According to Salon, David Beckham is the ultimate metrosexual.
Urbandirectory has some 60 definitions of meterosexual, the highest scored is:
Metrosexual: (noun) Of or pertaining to a straight, urban male who is eager to embrace and even show off his feminine side, especially when it comes to expensive haircuts, designer suits, and $40 face cream.
-From Netscape Celebrity
The kind of guy who paints his nails, wears flip-flops, owns a lot of shoes, takes an hour to do their hair etc. but is not really gay.
Metrosecual is probably a term that has been invented by the magazine publishing industry – the new style men’s mags like FHM, Stuff, The Face and Esquire after calling someone GQ started to have the Versace-gay connotation with it – stylish, beautiful, body-shaved very Miami-like. [source]
In other words, it is all the things women like about a certain type of gay men – well dressed, beautiful, comfortable with their feminine side, interested in culture, … – BUT they can have the metrosexual, but not the homosexual.
I wonder if the term will catch on – Google currently counts metrosexual in 70,200 search results.
More resources:
AskMen
MSN – WebMD
Banana Republic
Another quiz
The perfect spam filter
Spam is a problem we are all too familiar with. I have stopped using my primary email account (thomas @ korte . de) some time ago – it was simply to much to take. My Yahoo Mail was still very spam-free – and that after using it for some 4 years already. Recently – probably since about 6 month – I noticed a dramatic increase in spam. And I am not talking about the sneaky spam e.g. Subject: RE: your credit card was declined – I am talking about penis enlargement, viagra, and (surprise) porn – in any way and shape …. Spam that seems to be rather easily detected. I wonder if Yahoo or for that matter any web-based email provider has a real incentive to block spam. After all, the CPM based banner impression is served on any email.
This week things got worse. I enabled the Yahoo spam “”protection”". WHAT A MISTAKE. Yes, it does filter a lot of junk – BUT, it also filters about every personal email I get. My relationship was about to take a serious hit (not really, but the story reads much better like that) when I kept telling my girlfriend that she did not send me any emails: “Sorry, I did not get any emails from you in weeks – which email did you send it to? Can you cc my work email in the future …”. Well, to make a long story short – Yahoo filtered almost ALL my personal emails in the junk folder.
I really wonder about the engineers who developed this! How difficult is it to filter spam in a collaborative network like Yahoo, where thousands of people mark messages as spam. Here is what you do:
1. filter emails with offensive text – easy.
2. filter emails with identical text that is delivered to hundreds of people – easy, but it might include newsletters.
3. filer emails that are reported as spam by the human spam reporters – once 100 people marked it as spam, it probably is spam.
4. don’t filer emails from senders that I have opened and not marked as spam
Maybe I am missing something about the complexity of the problem??
Oh, one more
5. when in doubt, DO NOT filter emails – the price to pay is not justified. I’d rather delete some spam emails that made it through the filter than missing another email from my girlfriend; really from any friend.
Finally, if a Yahoo developer reads this:
STOP FILTERING ORKUT.COM EMAILS – I LIKE THEM (sorry, I had to yell that)
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