Memes and why I fail at them, and also, Rockford!

I started to do the iTunes drabble meme—you know, you put your iTunes on shuffle and write drabbles to the first ten songs—but I started the first one and remembered that I hate writing drabbles. However, I discovered that "Fortress Around Your Heart" makes me think of Sokka and Suki and "Who Do You Think" by Interpol reminds me of Mai, re Zuko. Which might be all to say, I'm really excited to see the end of Avatar.

I keep trying to do that book meme but even malsperanza's variant has me in fits. Too much of an Americanist, I reckon, and possibly too shy to put all those mystery books that I was actually reading on the list. But it's a work in progress and might see the light of day at some point. (I'm much better at movie memes—that's how I misspent my youth.)

This week I caught a somewhat standard countdown of America's Top TV and Movie Sleuths and was reminded of good old Jim Rockford. Steven Cannell, his creator, said that when he was writing Jim and came to a fork in the road he'd think of the cliche and then do the opposite. So Jim Rockford has a network of close friends, lives with his dad, is afraid of guns and is always getting beat up, drives an old clunker and spends most of his time on penny-ante cases, barely eking out a living—instead of a hot loyal secretary, he has an answering machine. No wonder I'd loved Rockford so much as a child—he's a fantastic character.

Riddles

Those of you who've been around the flat know that I've put What's My Line, that classic 50s game show, on the DVR. Two or three regular folks with unusual jobs try to stump the panel (which included Random House founder Bennett Cerf, featured in this icon), and there's also a special celebrity guest, who the panel has to guess while blindfolded. Game Show Network shows it every day at 3am, and at 7x a week for a show that was originally on once a week it doesn't take long to burn through a year. One of the pleasures of the show is the sense of time and place—often the celebrities who come on the show are in the spotlight at that moment. And it's fun to see them try to disguise their voices; on today's show (which I've left on the DVR for you, aethelflaed2) Louis Jordan does a surprisingly good, and hysterical, American accent.

Often the producers try to stump the panel with a woman who has a "man's" job, but the two ladies on the panel generally see right through that sort of thing. And that got me thinking about that classic riddle of the 70s feminist movement, and why it still works, just not the way that those feminists thought it did. (And blackholly, if you're about, I'd love your thoughts on this, since you write a lot of riddles!)

The riddle: A man and his son are in a car accident, and the man is dead on arrival at the hospital. The boy is rushed into surgery, and the surgeon looks down at the boy and says, "Find another doctor. I can't operate; this is my son."

( The answer, and some musings on riddles. )

In any case, I don't think that this riddle is a particularly good barometer of how free of chauvinist or anti-feminist assumptions one is, which was the whole point of the riddle in the first place. Thoughts?