There is really no reason (or excuse) for this post. But you’re welcome!

I’m baffled when someone says something like, “I don’t really like Chinese food.” Chinese cuisine is as varied, in terms of ingredients, manner of cooking, and flavors as are, say, latkes and lasagne. Yet you never hear anyone say, “I’m not really into that whole Western food thing.”

Idea for a terrible daytime drama: Dr. Zhivago, M.D.

Idea for a truly frightening reality show: Sen. Dr. Oz, (R-PA), M.D.

The Texas State Legislature’s concept of sex education in the public school system: teenagers won’t have sex if you just tell them not to. And if they do it anyway, then any unwanted pregnancies or STDs are their own fault and they deserve it. I have a theory that the majority of our legislators were never actual teenagers. They were born fully-formed as pious, vindictive, insecure, middle-aged white Republicans.

Also, there apparently is no such thing as racism in this country, as long as one doesn’t mention it. (Or leave any books lying around that do.) I wouldn’t be surprised now if the Julian calendar is scrapped and 2016 becomes “Year 1.”

Think I’m joking? Texas state legislator Matt Krause, chairman of something scary called the Texas House Committee on General Investigating, recently sent a list of 850 book titles and asked each of the state’s school superintendents to “Please identify how many copies of each book in the attached Addendum your District possesses and at what campus locations including school library and classroom collections.”

Here’s the ‘Addendum’. Among the titles he wants “identified” are dangerous, controversial and lascivious entries such as “An indigenous peoples’ history of the United States for young people,” “Sexually transmitted infections,” and “They called themselves the K.K.K. : the birth of an American terrorist group.” We sure don’t want to educate our young people about sexually transmitted infections, since ignorance is the only sure prevention. And, we wouldn’t want to hurt the K.K.K.’s feelings by referring to them as terrorists. That might lower their self-esteem!

I have to admit, there are some titles on Krause’s list that mystify me, such as “Homosexuality: opposing viewpoints.”

It’s become increasingly embarrassing to be a Texan. I think I’ll just start lying and say I’m from Oklahoma. That’s how bad it’s gotten.

I don’t miss the typewriter. But I’ll give it this: you didn’t have to sit around for forty minutes waiting for it to boot up and load Word.

I’ve been thinking lately about a commercial I used to see on TV in the 1960’s. It told a little story, and to the best of my recollection it went like this: A young woman is sitting at a little table in some kind of beauty parlor, her fingers soaking in a little bowl of liquid. Across the table from her is a confident older woman. The young woman, a customer, is complaining that her dish soap leaves her china greasy. The older woman, apparently the beautician, suggests she try using Palmolive—it cuts through anything. But, the young woman anxiously asks, won’t it make my hands rough? No, the older woman patiently explains, in fact, you’re soaking your hands in it right now! The startled young woman yanks her hands out of the bowl, but the older woman firmly pushes them back in. Palmolive dish soap actually moisturizes your skin!

I remember that commercial clearly because I saw it hundreds if not thousands of times; it seemed to play several times an hour, hour after hour, year after year. It didn’t mean much to me. It was an idealized version of a strange scenario I didn’t really understand in the first place. My mom usually did the dishes. (And still does, for herself and my father.) She didn’t especially enjoy it and certainly had better things to do, but I don’t remember her ever being concerned about rough skin. Nor (as far as I recall) did she ever have the slightest desire to set foot in a beauty salon. So to me, that commercial was just some boring adult stuff I had to suffer through to get to the next cartoon. Over and over again.

But as I think about that commercial now, I see how very wrong it was—wrong even in the moral sense. The lies, verging on phony medical advice; the playing on the viewer’s insecurities about good housekeeping and physical attractiveness (both in the service, it was understood, of an offstage husband); all the assumptions about what it meant to be a good woman, wife, and mother. The perversion of the important role that older people should play in mentoring the young of their community.

That commercial is probably on YouTube somewhere, and comes across now as silly, camp late-mid-century nonsense. Which it is. But now I think it was also kind of evil.

Have things changed, really? Yes and no. Commercials still play on our insecurities, they still lie to us. They still nag at us to buy things we don’t need and won’t make us happy, to eat and drink things that will shorten our lives. But if that commercial were made today, it would probably be an ironic, tongue-in-cheek sketch with two guys wearing those front-loaded baby papooses. And that’s an improvement.