Contraceptives: Is There Anything They Can't Do?

Katie's been watching a modern, well-scrubbed teenaged version of Thunderbirds on the Disney Channel. I sat and watched a bit of it with her. Ben Kingsley is in it, I'm sorry to say. He's the bad guy, and has trapped all our teenaged heroes and a few accompanying adults in a freezer vault using his evil red-eyed mind pulses. I had to leave the room.

Katie followed me a few minutes later. "Oh my God, Mom!" she said. "That was disturbing! That was so wrong!"

"What happened?" I asked her.

"The lady in the freezer vault just pulled out her, what's that birth control thing that's made of wire? They used it to pick the lock!" she said.

"Her IUD?!" I asked. "Is her gynecologist trapped in there with them?"

"No!" exclaimed Katie. "She just started reaching up under her clothes, and everybody turned around, and she pulled out this wire! She said she didn't really need it anyway."

I didn't know what to say. "But you can't, you can't do that," I protested. "It doesn't just come out."

Katie insisted. "She really did! I swear!"

I still couldn't believe it. "On the Disney channel?!"

"Watch it yourself," Katie told me, and rewound it.

Don't you love DVR? Remember when you used to have to videotape things? Remember trying to edit out the commercials? We had a Betamax, with a remote control whose cord snaked across the room. I'm not sure they shouldn't have stuck with that design. You couldn't lose it, and you didn't have to remember to buy batteries all the time. For all the technological advances of the last 30 years, you know, batteries are still batteries. Why hasn't anyone done something about this?

We watched the scene. The manservant informs Lady Penelope that he could pick the lock if only he had a wire of some kind; and a slow look of understanding, then resolve comes into her eyes. Her hand moves to her waist, and she begins to reach under her clothes, and everybody gets embarrassed and turns around. There is a closeup of fumbling underneath pink fabric, and after a few moments, she emerges with...

With the underwire from a bra, Katie. For God's sake!

Still fairly risqué for the Disney Channel, but note it was directed by Commander Riker.

People Who Watch Buck Rogers Are Stupid

Well, I'm watching it right now, actually. "Buck Rogers in the 21st Century." Gil Gerard! Erin Gray! Either Lorne Michaels, or a close enough facsimile thereof to make no difference! A penis-headed robot who says "Bee-dee-bee-dee-bee-dee" all the time despite the fact that he is clearly capable of normal speech! What's not to believe?

Well, to start with, it's the commercials. The first one was not too bad: just a bunch of people sipping champagne and telling you how they started out making $5,000 a month and are now making $18,000 a month or more!

They don't really get into what they do.

The second ad is worse just because it does get into what you do. You sell crap, including, apparently, highly tasteless green-glass mass-produced leaping dolphin sculptures which people even stupider than the people who watch Buck Rogers (because that's you, remember? You forgot, didn't you??) will put on their mantelpiece, in flagrant defiance of every law of good taste ever known to man.

That's not what's bad about the second ad. No. What's bad about the second ad is that it tells you how all this works. And the way all this works is that you get to use a giant sales, marketing and warehousing network supporting all the crap you're selling, so you can make all these sales and build your personal fortune, right? And they show you the warehouses, and the customers, and the crap; but where it all falls apart is that they also show you the workers: a big panned shot of a vast cubicle farm full of purchasers and marketers and telephone operators who are showing up at 8am every day just to bring everything together so you, dear Buck Rogers viewer, can work from home and make a small fortune. Maybe even a large one.

I bet they don't even get dental.

This is where, unless your brain was completely liquidated by the aerosol fumes of the mid-to-late 80s (and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the advertisers had taken this possibility into consideration), the record goes scrrrriiiiiiitch!!! And you say, hey. Wait a minute.

If I can make $15,000 a month or more, selling tasteless crap, presumably the people working for me in the cubicle farm are aware of this fact. Right? So - why, again, are they content to work full-time jobs in a soulless cubicle environment to get you rich? Are they ruined Ginsu investors? Survivors of Richard-Simmons-induced cardiac arrest?? It just doesn't make sense.

Again, when you look at some of the stuff that science fiction has thrown at us, faster-than-light travel doesn't seem all that improbable.

Elegance and Etymology

You know the conversation's going downhill when you find yourself having to explain who David Niven is.

Not to be confused with Larry Niven, who is (as far as I know) rather a better science fiction writer than David, but is not as likely to wear a cutaway and kid gloves in public.

David Niven played James Bond in Casino Royale. You know - the real one, with the Bacharach theme music. I consider him to belong to the same breed as James Mason, with an impeccable, yet unstudied and wholly good-natured elegance. He's a little more polished than Mason, though. And here's an interesting bit of trivia for you: Audrey Hepburn once glanced at him over the rim of her champagne glass and hiccupped, and that's how the word "debonair" came into existence. Look it up if you don't believe me!

Nonetheless, it pains me to tell you that one of the very best friends I've ever had did not know who David Niven is. I can't reveal the details of the conversation that led to this, but I can tell you it nose-dived pretty quickly, with my friend finally offering to have me whacked by the transportational stalker who lost his job over my former cube neighbor Audrey.

Not to be confused with Miss Hepburn.