A pretty girl is like a melody

One more insult added to the injury of buying into the Apple myth as we were trying to follow the mighty Daniel Drezner into the great unknown this afternoon. Sensing our lingering vanity after all these years, he taunted his readers, drawing us down the rabbit hole of something called MyHeritage.com, "which claims to have a face recognition program that lets you upload a photo and tells you which celebrities you look like." Clicking on the link, we were greeted by a message familiar to former Windows users used to going wherever we may and hearing/seeing whatever we like now caught in the quagmire of the Apple Terror:

Apologies to Safari browser [Apple's default browser] users! We are in the process of adding support for Safari in this site. In the meantime, please use Firefox for Mac if possible.

Gak. Being used to this kind of cyberabuse, however, we went to our Applications file on the C Drive and called up Firefox. Soon we were in business, downloading the image we had used for our Pajamas Media Profile. And guess what? The image of our own mug most closely resembles that of Mussorgsky. Does it get any better? Actually, yes . . . Theo Van Gogh comes in at a close third, while Henry David Thoreau is in the runnning, and the Leader of the Free World himself, George W. Bush, is right up there.  Are we pretty?

Comments

[Laura Lee Donoho]

You are pretty Sissy....obviously feminine. Nothing like the Mussorgsky....who had no eyebrows. Yours arch high with disdain at whoever is photographing you.

[Joan]

God bless you, Sissy Willis, for having the courage to post this. Now I feel so much better about my proposed matches, which ran the gamut from J.R.R. Tolkein to Ariel Sharon. (The cutest in the list was Clark Gable.)

I think they're giving too much emphasis to the nose!

[Laura Lee Donoho]

Ugh, I spelled Mussorgsky wrong in the previous comment. I tried it too and my daughters got a kick out of seeing who their celebrity matches were. One photo of me I posted matched with Cary Grant. What's up with that???? And some were old men. But also Meg Ryan. Thanks for some fun on a very dreary and sad night for us.

[Barry Campbell]

No worries, Sissy. The software's closest match for me was Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and it even matched me better than 50% with Barack Obama.

I think they're both very interesting people, but I'm a fat, florid-faced redneck of Scots extraction, unlikely to be mistaken on the street for someone of Asian or African ancestry.

My verdict: the face-matching software needs work.

[triticale]

A clear example of the program's excessive dependence on camara angle mentioned in the comments at Drezner. Try using whatever image-processing program in which you cropped your submission, and rotate counterclockwise a few degrees. I would expect a very different matchup.

[Benjamin]

Well, it is very interesting and I must say that their both are very interesting people...