passionate investigative pioneer
Sunday, Sept. 26, 2004, 9:22 AM

passionate investigative pioneer

It never, ever, f**king fails. If I try to enter a post directly into Diaryland, I lose it.
But I guess I�m a moron, because I still do it sometimes. I lost an opinion piece on those findyouraq.com commercials which have just about driven me permanently from the Discovery Channel. What the frig was I thinking, not writing it in Word first?


Anyway, the gist of it was �Oh, it�s a commercial for a commercial. A Land Rover commercial. Yay. Okay, I�ll take their little personality test. Oh, yeah. I can�t take these stupid personality test, because the possible answers are based on entirely too narrow cultural view. Plus, they tend to consider as mutually exclusive a lot of things that I do not. (I have to choose BETWEEN spending an inheritance on myself, or giving it to the needy? It is possible to do both, you dolts.) And vice versa--they lump things together that are worlds apart to me. (Country and religious music lumped with soundtracks and pop? Are these people on drugs?)�


I long ago realized that these sorts of things are crap (not Meyer-Briggs, or other �real� personality tests. But this is more like a �Cosmo Quiz�.) And it�s painfully obvious that no matter what you score on that thing, your ideal vehicle would be this new Land Rover thing. Uhhh�yeah. But I always dream that someday, I will be counted. My tastes, passions, dislikes and personal beliefs will be recognized as valid, and included in the multiple choice.


Fat chance.

(Once I got a hardcover of �The Second Son�; a book I read in high school that was a fairly �big� book at the time, and was going to be a movie, then�just vanished. No movie, no second editions, nothing. Rumor in the book forums was, it was suppressed by the RCC. Blasphemy, you know. Being about the second son of GOD, and all. Great book, and my treasured paperback copy was just about integrated, so I was thrilled to find a back-up. And for only a buck!)

Anyway, you do sometimes snag �finds� there. As I did yesterday. Two Dell paperbacks, from the late fifties / early sixties, by Stan and Janice Berenstain.
You know��The Berenstain Bears�, beloved of children everywhere?
Well, their cartoon used to be considerably more �adult�, if you know what I mean.
�Loverboy�, and �Call Me Mrs.� Excellent condition, pristine for paperbacks from that era. They are still funny, but not in the way they were meant to be. I am chuckling, but it is the quaint, old-fashioned notions in these books that amuses me. I want to send them to Lileks for their cultural value, as relics of mid-century American culture.

Picking up �Call Me Mrs.�, you wonder--were these topics already stereotypes at the time, or was this book part of the process that created those stereotypes?
Just in the first few pages, we get:

• Women will buy any new fashion, no matter how bizarre.


• �Super-Markets�, TV Dinners, and trading stamps


• Women are bad at math.


• Women are bad drivers.