A social experiment
inspired by mesongles’ can of worms: http://www.livejournal.com/users/mesongles/77205.html
Read the following excerpts carefully. Do not google them or do any other research, just read. Then, comment on this post telling me what gender each of the characters has. If you don’t know, say so. (some names changed to protect the integrity of the experiment. I’m also using “xe” as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun 
)
excerpt one
Not until one summer evening when, passing for a shadow, I heard through the open doors of the black foreman’s cottage a conversation which convinced me that X and I slept in real danger. The slaves knew now we were not ordinary mortals. In hushed tones, the maids told of how, through a crack in the door, they had seen us dine on empty plates with empty silver, lifting empty glasses to our lips, laughing, our faces bleached and ghostly in the candellight, the blind man a helpless fool in our power. Through keyholes they had seen X’s coffin, and once he had beaten them mercilessly for dawdling by the gallery windows of his room. “There is no bed in there”, they confided one to the other with nodding heads. “Xe sleeps in the coffin, I know it”. They were convinced, on the best of grounds, of what we were. And as for me, they’d seen me evening after evening emerge from the oratory, which was now little more than a shapeless mass of brick and vine, layered with flowering wisteria in the spring, wile roses in summer, moss gleaming on the old unpainted shutters which had never been opened, spiders spinning in the stone arches. Of course, I’d pretended to visit it in memory of Paul, but it was clear by their speech they no longer believed such lies.
excerpt two
Frankly, that last bit was something of a surprise. I’d honestly thought xe was already dead when I left xem lying there. Misadventure, the coroner said. I couldn’t agree more. More proof, if any is needed, that you can’t help bad luck. THe cause of the fire was attributed to a radiator accidentally left burning all night in the administration area. Speculation that arson was involved was dismissed by both the company and the police as groundless. The insurance was paid out in full.
Y left an estate worth the best part of two million dollars, including a Broadbeach condominium, an Adelaide motel and part shares in a macadamia nut plantation. It just goes to show what hard work, a bit of thrift, and a remarkable fifteen-year-long winning streak on the horses can achieve.
excerpt three
The difficulties and shortcomings of TCPdump were also noticed by Z of the Ohio State University. Z wrote a program called Review that is specifically a postprocessing analysis tool for sifting through gigaheaps of TCPdumpdata (that’s a lot of data!). As with TCPdump, Review is freely available. (The full sources and documentation for Review and its associated log gathering tools are available upon request. Requests should be made by mail to security@——- The current version is a collection of programs written in C and Perl.) For further information, see Z’s white paper at ——
(all excerpts selected at random from my bookshelf.)
