Don't be afraid to stand up to insulting forms!

Filling out forms has become increasingly difficult these past few years. Difficult, and insulting.

Oh, the insult is subtle and easily deniable should anyone call the form-makers to task on the matter, but make no mistake, the insult is there.

Most folks encounter their first form in elementary school. These forms are simple: name, age, names of parents, maybe address and phone number. At age eight or nine, that's all you're expected to know.

Forms don't start getting really ugly until your freshman year of high school. That's when they start asking questions about your hopes, dreams, goals and aspirations. They still want your parents' names and phone numbers, but they're digging deeper now, trying to get to the "real you." They do this so the school's guidance counselor can help you choose the right classes, career, girlfriend and so on.

College forms are worse still, especially those pertaining to financial aid.  Mine were, at least. They were so complex I never realized I could have purchased a nice home in Beverly Hills for less money than I borrowed on my student loans. This fact became apparent about six months after graduation, when the student loan people showed up at my front door wearing brass knuckles and carrying a bucket full of wet cement.

Fortunately, my brilliant academic career landed me a job as a janitor, so I was able to pay off those loans in no time...about two months before my youngest child graduated high school.

The forms I filled out in the Air Force also were confusing, especially the one I filled out at the recruitment office. Turns out they can fit quite a bit of stuff in that small print at the end of the 20-page document, stuff they would really rather you not read.

But I'm digressing here, as I usually do. The point I was trying to make somewhere six or seven paragraphs back is this: the forms I filled out in the past, though sometimes arcane and complicated, were at least not insulting. The forms I've filled out lately, all online now, are. Insulting, I mean.

How are the insulting? Well, like I said, it's subtle. The questions they're asking, I no longer like to answer. For instance, when I was 26, back during the Renaissance, I didn't mind listing my age. These days I do.

I'm not ashamed of my geriatric predilection, but online forms always use those pull-down menus. A lot of time can pass between the instant I click on the "year" box and the moment it scrolls down to my birth year. Along the way, the font generally changes from a clean sans serif to Olde English; a font the form-makers think will be more familiar to folks of a certain age. The typeface also gets larger, ostensibly to make it easier for geezers to see.

See? Insulting, right?

I recently filled out a form on which they asked not only if I was divorced, but how many times I had been married. Since the form offered room for only a single digit, I was forced to fudge the facts a bit here.

Now I'm flying solo (yes, again), so I recently filled out a couple forms at social networking sites in a half-hearted attempt to find Miss Right. These sites require information I usually don't share with a woman until after our fifth anniversary. The form-makers think I should spill my guts before the first date.

I didn't. Sometimes a blank space is infinitely preferable to anything one might fill it with. I refuse to be bossed around by an insulting form.

Mike Taylor's new book Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com and in eReader format at Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other online booksellers. Email Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

There has always been a 'Facebook'

I read another article yesterday about how the world is going to h-e-double-toothpicks because of Facebook. Facebook, the writer implied, is slowly sapping today's youth of the ability to think critically, maintain a modicum of decorum, and tell the difference between good writing and terrible.

It's doing the same thing to old people, but at a slower pace and we're a lost cause anyway; best to focus on the youth. They're the ones who must finish the job we started, that of mucking up the planet and getting aged Hollywood actors elected to high governmental office.

At any rate, aside from all that other stuff, the writer's main concern was privacy, or rather the lack of it. Facebook, he said, is filled with posts containing information most people should probably keep to themselves; everything from personal banking information to the addresses of teenage daughters.

He also complained briefly about the sort of people who leave posts like, "Just had roast beef for supper! Yum, yum!" but we all complain about that. Well, everybody but the roast beef posters. You know who you are.

The point is (I'm sure there was one here somewhere) every article I read comes at the issue as if this is a new phenomenon, something intrinsically tied to the 21st Century, high-speed wifi and computerized data collection techniques. It's not. The problem is as old as communication itself.

From the moment a caveman first slapped two rocks together to warn his buddy on the other side of the valley about the presence of a nearby sabertooth tiger, somebody has been listening in.

When I was a kid, just shortly after the above-mentioned Paleolithic epoch, the most modern device in any American home, aside from the television, was the telephone. It was big, black, rotary-dialed, built like a tank and almost as attractive. Not everyone in the neighborhood had one; they were still considered by some to be a pricey luxury.

The neighbors who didn't have a phone would frequently borrow the phone of a neighbor who did; in these cases, privacy was neither expected nor granted.

My family's phone was serviced by something called a "party line," the Facebook of its day. The phrase party line was entirely appropriate because as soon as you picked up the phone, you could be sure Mrs. Kowalski, the little old lady from down the street who shared the same party line, would quietly lift her receiver and join the party, albeit surreptitiously.

If you discussed anything remotely personal, like, say, the fact you had roast beef for supper and it was yum yum, you could be certain Mrs. Kowalski would gleefully spread the news to the whole neighborhood before sundown.

During my rare phone calls, I would confess to friends regarding gruesome murders I had not committed just to add a little spice to Mrs. Kowalski's otherwise humdrum life. I sometimes claimed to have buried the bodies next to the begonias in her garden.

I'm not singling Mrs. Kowalski out here; both my sisters also listened in on our neighbor's conversations. There were four or five families on our party line and none of us had secrets from any of the others. Just like with Facebook, everybody knew everybody else's business.

So do I worry when I post marginally personal stuff on Facebook? Not really. I grew up without privacy and have learned to get along without it.

I'm just sorry Mrs. Kowalski passed years before the first Commodore 64 rolled off the assembly line and decades before anyone had heard of a social network. She would have loved this stuff. She was a woman who cared deeply about your roast beef supper.

Mike Taylor's new paperback, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available at mtrealitycheck.com and in eBook format at Barnes & Noble, Borders Books and most major online booksellers. Email the author at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Say it loud, I play tennis and I’m proud

It drove me crazy all last summer that James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and one of my personal heroes, is playing tennis on the side of my optometrist’s office.  Even in his younger days, when he could dance rings around Baryshnikov while screaming “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!” in a voice that could startle Helen Keller, I never imagined James on a tennis court.  He did not seem the sort of man who would be comfortable saying, “That’s love-16 Muffy!”

Not my hero.

But there he was, larger than life, featured prominently in the House of Optical mural, right between Elvis and Elton.  John Belushi, Larry King, Buddy Holly and several other glasses-wearing celebrities also are pictured there.

Elvis and Elton are both holding microphones, John Belushi a case containing (presumably) Elwood’s harmonicas, Benny Goodman sports his clarinet and George Burns a cigar.  Everybody, everybody except my hero, is shown doing the thing they do, or did, best; the thing most people think of first when considering the aforementioned celebrities.

But not James.  James is depicted playing tennis. They might as well have painted him with a spatula in one hand and a copy of “A Brief History of Time” in the other.  It made less sense than a Dali painting.  And like I said, it made me crazy all last summer.

Part of the reason it got on my nerves is that I rode past there on my bicycle three, sometimes four times a day.  I had a lot of time to kill and I spent much of it riding bike.  The terrain is mostly flat around Clawson so a four-hour ride isn’t especially taxing and it kept me from thinking about how brutally unkind fate had been to me during the previous year.  (Yes, I am a whiner of epic, and often dramatic, proportions.)

At any rate, in addition to losing my wife, house and job, I was slowly losing my mind, in large part because of that damnable mural!  I did a little research (five minutes online), checking to see if James had ever made a name for himself on the tennis court, but could find nothing.

The mystery haunted me.  James would appear in my dreams hoisting a tennis racket and drinking a glass of carrot juice at an expensive country club.  When he spoke he sounded like Dick Cavett and I would wake up screaming.

Then summer faded to fall and winter, bike season ended and the problem slowly faded from my mind.  It wasn’t until mid-winter, while being examined for new contact lenses at House of Optical, that I thought to ask about it.

“James Brown’s not in that mural,” the doctor said.

“Yes he is,” I said.  “But he’s holding a tennis racket, so most people probably don’t recognize him.”

 At this point the doctor gave me a look indicating poor eyesight was likely the least of my problems.  “That’s Billie Jean King,” he said.

I checked the mural again before driving away.  The doctor was right, it is Billie Jean King, though to be fair, she is sporting a tan that would make George Hamilton jealous.  And she does look a little like James Brown!  Google it, or check out the photos on my blog, then tell me I’m wrong.

Say it loud! It’s love-16 and I’m proud.

Mike Taylor’s new paperback, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com. The eBook version can be found online at Barnes & Noble, Border’s, and other major booksellers. More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.