My beau got a new phone.  And that’s when I realized that he doesn’t know my phone number.

You see, in the old days, and by that I mean about ten years’ ago, a guy would carefully memorize a girl’s number.  Even years later, he might remember it.  But now, with the advent of cell phones, he can call a girl anytime, no problem, just punch up her name.  He doesn’t need to remember a number.

It’s a great system, right up until technology fails you.  Then my beau would have no way to reach me, because my cell phone number, like all cell numbers, isn’t listed.

I have his number memorized, though.  Call me old fashioned.  It’s a dying art.

That’s the thought for the day from The Dubmeister.

So there’s this thing that some young people do, where they put holes in their earlobes and then expand them.  They’re called gauges (pronounced “Gages”).  (There are pictures and video here if you want to see, but I warn you, it’s not for the faint of heart: http://www.eargaugeinfo.com/.  The “problem” pictures in the section “how fast can I stretch my ears” are particularly unappetizing.)  Eventually, you can get the holes large enough to see through them, like circles that are half an inch wide or more.  I want to go up to these young people and say, “What?  Are you stupid?  Are you completely unable to picture a future where you’re elderly?  Or even middle-aged?”  I’ve seen mostly guys do it, but there are young women doing it, too.

Let it be said here, I have made some unfortunate decisions regarding personal appearance in my lifetime.  There was the era when I had, not one, not two, but FOUR pairs of satin pants in my wardrobe.  (Black, white, pink and yellow if you must know.)  There were some episodes of glitter eyeliner.  There was even, dare I say it, the bellbottom jeans years.  However, all of these are buried in my past, never to be seen again, because they’re clothing and makeup!  You can make these unfortunate decisions and then they’re gone with the trash man. 

Changes to your body are different, however.  Once you’ve stretched out your earlobe, you’re never getting it back.  So, I say to these young men and women, what are you thinking?  Because in a few years, when the fad has passed, you’re going to look stupid beyond belief.

Fashions fade, but stupid lives forever.

That’s today’s thought from The Dubmeister.

I admit it; I am one of 23 million people worldwide who play Farmville on the computer.  I was also one of the Facebook users who was a little cranky when messages from people playing Farmville started cropping up on my screen.  Now that I play, let me explain the meaning of Farmville to those of you who don’t play it.

Farmville (www.farmville.com) is a computer application tied to your Facebook account (www.facebook.com).  It’s a charming little game in which you tend to a cartoon farm.  You start out with six plots, on which you can plant things like strawberries and eggplant, also represented by cartoons.  There’s clever little music playing.  As you tend to your plot and play the game more, you can expand it, add other crops, and obtain things like animals, barns and buildings.

If you are on Facebook, you may see your friends post messages like, “Jennifer’s chickens laid a golden egg” with a button to click to get it for your farm.  Or another message might say, “Ron’s crops need fertilizing.”  The genius of Farmville (and yes, I think it’s genius), is that you best progress if you help others with their tasks and share your goods generously with them and create relationships where they share their goods with you.  When Jennifer posts the message about her golden egg, you might pick up the egg and benefit when it immediately hatches into a gift that will benefit your farm (not necessarily a chicken, sometimes a building).  When you fertilize Ron’s crops, you get coins and experience points that lead to other gifts for you.  The underlying message — that you succeed by helping others — is certainly one the world can use.

Now I recognize that all of this is a waste of time.  I watch my own real world plants slowly die as I fertilize my friend’s Farmville crops and harvest my cartoon plants.  But I like connecting to other people, to watch my friends succeed in their small Farmville desires.  I think Farmville works because it connects to the pleasure centers of our brain: we like to acquire things like chickens and farmhouses, even if they’re not real.  If that keeps people from shopping and spending themselves into debt in the real world, the more power to Farmville.

At first, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the creators of Farmville would bother.  Clearly, it was a lot of programming time, effort and cost.  What was the point?  Surely people weren’t spending their own money to play what was essentially a free game (although there’s that option if you wish, but it’s not necessary).   Then I noticed the ads at the sides.  It’s advertising that keeps Farmville going.  They have found a way to do something that commercial newspapers can’t do: they can make their website so absorbing that people will play for hours, and perhaps click on the occasional advertisement.  I wish newspapers would learn how to do this so they could stay in business and continue providing journalism to us.  That might be wishful thinking – newspapers seem to be going the way of the dinosaur – but I devoutly hope for it, even as I rush through the news sites and go back to Farmville.

That’s your thought for the day from the Dubmeister.

Weddings are pornography for women: the glamour, the gowns, the plot line.  It’s the dresses that annoy me today.  Pick up any wedding magazine and there are the sumptuous pictures of wedding gowns, apparently designed to make you appear 22-years-old with flawless skin and not an ounce of excess fat.  Many of these dresses defy gravity, staying up without visible means of support.  And they are expensive.  God, are they expensive.  Figure $1,000 to $5,000 or more.  Now, the women buying these will never wear them again.  Even if they marry again, and perhaps half of them will, they will not wear this dress again.  They won’t loan them to a friend or a sister.  These dresses will sit in a box for decades, perhaps offered to a daughter who will turn up her nose and demand her own dress.  Therefore, that’s thousands of dollars that will never be seen again.  And these are women who probably don’t own a decent raincoat, something that they’ll wear hundreds of times.

What’s the point?  To have a custom-tailored dress fitted to your body?  Any tailor or seamstress can do that.  To have a ballgown?  You can have a ballgown for a couple of hundred dollars, not a couple thousand.  To fulfill the fantasies of some marketer telling you that you must have this dress – oh, hey, maybe that’s it.

Because the wedding industry is an industry, a $125-billion dollar industry (that’s about the size of the Gross Domestic Product of IRELAND!  http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/20/pf/weddings/).  It is an industry designed to separate you from your money as pleasantly as possible (actually, that’s a description of the casino industry, too, and the vacation industry, and the cruise industry, and quite a few others).  So women are told that they have to have a wedding event weekend that costs, on average, more than $28,000 (http://www.theweddingreport.com/), and a dress that costs thousands of dollars, and that they should cut the guest list if need be, but God forbid they should spend less on a dress they’ll wear once.  Because when it comes to the wedding industry, your soon-to-be-disinvited cousins are NOT supporting them with ad dollars, but the dress manufacturers are.  So cut that guest list!  But don’t rent a dress!

That’s today’s thought from The Dubmeister.

An old nickname for newspaper advice columns was “The Agony Aunts.”  The columnists were always women (with the occasional male writer having a female byline), and the letters were always written by people in agony from their problems.  I read a lot of these advice columns, mostly online, and I’d like to share my observations with you (both of you).

Some columns have made the transfer online and some haven’t.  After Ann Landers died, her two editors took over her column and renamed it “Annie’s Mailbox.”  Apparently, even though Eppie Lederer wasn’t the first Ann Landers, she intended to be the last, hence the name change from “Ann Landers” to “Annie’s Mailbox.”  Her column has not transitioned well.  Rather than have its own website, it’s at http://www.arcamax.com/anniesmailbox. It seems so stuck in providing advice suitable for a family newspaper that it’s not relevant to the current world.   Most of their advice can be summed up in the words, “Go see a counselor.”  It’s stuck in the 1970’s.

“Dear Abby” has done only slightly better on the web.  Written by Jeanne Phillips, the daughter of the original Abby, Paulline Phillips, who was the identical twin sister of Ann Landers, it’s on the web at www.dearabby.com.  It only gives the publication dates of the column and isn’t searchable by topic, but people can use email to write in with their problems or to comment on others’ problems.  It’s an improvement.  However, much of the advice seems to be only one step up from “see a counselor.” 

Compare and contrast these two with premier advice columnist Carolyn Hax at the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com).   She’s using her website presence in a number of really terrific ways.  First, she has an interactive chat every week.  People can write in with their questions, and she can write answers of any length – she’s not limited to the newspaper word count.  The writer can respond live to her answer.  Other people can respond live and she can respond to those people.  Then, she takes some of the best questions and the interactive comments and creates newspaper columns from them, which are both online and syndicated in papers.  She also writes fresh columns for the papers as well, and these are posted online.  She posts separate questions for people to answer for each other, and when she’s on break she lets her readers step in to comment on questions.  Her work is accompanied by very clever cartoons from Nick Galifianakos, who is also her ex-husband.  And sometimes she uses her pulpit to raise money for the fight against ALS – Lou Gehrig’s disease – which killed her mother.

I love Carolyn Hax’s work.  She is sensitive and insightful.  She tackles different problems than what’s in Dear Abby or Annie’s Mailbox.  While the older columns seem limited to “my husband doesn’t pay attention to me” Hax answers situations that are more modern or more complex, from the young woman who doesn’t want to go canoeing on a second date, to the woman who wants to keep a child that resulted from a rape but her husband wants her to have an abortion.  Because Hax can answer people online, she can post things that might be too troubling for a daily newspaper (one couple can’t seem to bond with their newborn baby) or too revealing (you have no idea how many people have colleagues with really disturbing bathroom habits).  The best part is that Carolyn Hax rarely uses the “see a counselor” answer unless she really must.

I also love columnist Cary Tennis, who is taking a break right now but who is usually at www.Salon.com under the column “Since You Asked.”  His column is searchable by topic.   He is a great and lyrical writer who is also an admitted alcoholic in recovery and who has faced substantial problems in his life.  Tennis’ writing is strange and beautiful and he writes at great length, something he can indulge in online.  My favorite column is when he responded to a woman who wrote about continually dating losers, but who was now in love with a man who stole, and she asked if he could change.  At first, in his answer, Tennis seems to be addressing the initial question, whether a thief can change, but slowly I came to realize that Tennis was asking her if *she* could change, or if she would continue to date losers like this thief.  Brilliant!  I wrote a card to Cary Tennis, wishing him recovery from his cancer surgery, and then I bought his book.  I look forward to his return when he recovers and I miss him.

There’s one final columnist I must comment on: Dan Savage at www.thestranger.com.  He started out as an angry gay man who wanted to give terrible advice to straight people in order to make the point that gays got terrible advice from straight columnists.  Then he developed compassion for straight people and started giving them real advice.  His column, which is also syndicated in independent papers, is hilarious and troubling at the same time.  He answers his letters at great length, something that non-independent papers couldn’t make the room to do.  He answers questions that are astonishing in their breadth and which are disquieting, to say the least.  Reading Dan Savage, I realize that I had no idea of the list of fetishes that some people desire.  Electrical stimulation!  Plushy sex! 

Dan Savage has invented interesting concepts, like GGG, which stands for Good, Giving and Game, and which should be required of any sexual partner.  Another catchphrase of his is “DTMFA” which he uses when people write about dating people who should be dumped immediately.  (You can look it up.)  He was also so annoyed at conservative senator Rick Santorum that he had people invent a new meaning for santorum as a word.  If you google the senator, you’ll find this meaning first, before any mention of the senator, and, trust me, you won’t be able to hear his name ever again without having a very disturbing image come to mind.  If Rick Santorum tries to run for a national office, like president of the United States, this word will be popularized worldwide.  Since I don’t like the senator’s beliefs, I’m happy to see this.  Finally, Savage popularized the use of the word “Saddlebacking” to mean Christian teenagers who participate in anal sex but who still call themselves ‘virgins.’  You’ve got to love a columnist like that!

There are other advice columns, to be sure – Dear Amy, Dear Prudence (begun by the daughter of Ann Landers), Miss Manners, and Marguerite Kelley come to mind – but in my opinion Carolyn Hax, Cary Tennis and Dan Savage are the best on the net.

That’s your thought for the day from the Dubmeister.