Thu, March 15, 2007

FameTracker and the beloved Television Without Pity got bought, which prompted me to visit FT, something I always seem to forget to do more often. When I got there, I noticed that the venerable FameTracker Forums seemed to have disappeared from the site. (Shows how often I visit; this happened two years ago this month.)

Some Googling and visiting of related sites unearthed the fairly entertaining story of how this came about, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is, I'm passing some time today reading The Vine, which is an advice column by Sars, one of TWoP's newly wealthy founders. I've mentioned the Vine before (and in fact, Arksie and I have sent in letters). It's a fun read. I also read Annie's Mailbox (by the editors of the late Ann Landers) and Miss Manners in our paper during lunch, so I'm obviously a total idiot, but I do it mainly to enjoy Miss Manners's dripping contempt for most of her own "gentle readers" and to laugh at the people on both sides of the Annie desk. (The odds are very nearly even that a given day's Annie headline will include the word "hubby" – almost all the questions are about the sex drive of one spouse or the other failing to match up, or about neighbors or relatives that do something stupid. And almost every single response includes a recommendation of "counseling.")

Anyway! Sars is way better than the syndicated newspaper advice columnists, because she prints letters that are far more interesting, and she's a little more catty and "tough love" in her replies. But one thing Annie has over her is an insistence on editing letters to comply with a simple standard for changing names to protect the innocent. The neighbors will be referred to as "Sue and Al" or the cousin will be called "Daisy." The quotes are enough to let us know that it's not her real name.

On the Vine, you frequently get people referring to their friends as J, T, or C, maddeningly vague in that this lacks often-necessary gender context, and also it's just hard to remember who's who when all you have is one letter. The reason most people have multi-letter names is that it's easier to form an association with that than just an initial. Also, people will write something like, "for anonymity's sake, we'll call her 'Daisy'" and Sars – an editor by trade – is seemingly too polite to edit this down to just "my friend, 'Daisy'." This drives me up the wall like the title card in the early moments of Enemy of the State: an overhead establishing shot of Washington, D.C., with the frame nearly filled by the Capitol building, still sports a title card, "Washington, D.C." Where else might this be? Similarly, why else might we be calling her "Daisy?"

If I were Sars, and I had my own advice column, I would replace J, T, or C, with "Jim," "Tammy," or "Carolyn," and I would trim – or flat-out reject – letters with long-winded explanations of exceedingly simple conventions of the advice-letter format. I only mention this now because I wrote about The Vine a couple of years ago, this was already driving me batty back then, and for some reason I didn't mention it before.

This, however, is the best re-working of a cutesy anonymous sign-off I've ever seen:

Signed,
Did You Catch The Linda Ronstadt Reference In Paragraph Two

Dear No,
[...]