Ridiculous advice (IMHO)

[mrs_sweetpeach]

So I'm leafing through the September issue of Better Homes and Gardens before I toss it into the recycling bin and come across this gem from Patrick Mele on page 52:

Best way to spend $50 "A bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. You can't go wrong with a good bottle of wine!"

Clearly I am the wrong audience for this magazine. I have nothing against good wine but if I had a a spare $50 I'd put it toward repairing either of our cars.

Comments

[siberian-skys.livejournal.com]

I'm apparently the wrong audience as well. I didn't know that Better Homes and Gardens was doing that sort of articles these days. Did Martha Stewart suddenly become the editor?

[mrs-sweetpeach.livejournal.com]

That would explain it, but no. I read the editor's column (Gayle Goodson Butler, between friends) in which she wrote:

Four years ago, we introduced the September Stylemaker issuer, our first issue to focus on personalities who influence style at home and beyond. In 2011, that seemed like a big move for a magazine not known for featuring famous faces. (...) As the world has become more social, so has style.

She mentions blogs, instagram, pinterest, and I think she was also thinking about facebook and twitter as she wrote.

Personally I think it's crazy that we pay so much attention to celebrities and wonder if it's really all that different than it was in the 50s & 60s when non-celebrities devoured magazines focusing on Hollywood actors and lifestyles.

What struck me the most, besides recognizing that I am apparently out-of-step with society as a whole, is that Better Homes and Gardens seems about ready to embark on a course that will render it as irrelevant to my life as the previous subscription with which I was gifted. I don't know who signed me up for BHaG, but I suspect it was the same person who had a full year of US sent to my house. I'd leaf through the thing and toss it into the recycling, usually wondering just how many of the names and faces in the issue meant anything to me.

Years and years ago, in the A-Team fandom, one of the authors wrote that she could no longer create stories because, on a cruise, she'd met one of the actors from the series and she could no longer reconcile his reality with her version of his character. That made sense to me and I took it as a warning not to learn too much about the real people behind the characters I love. (Although clearly I am violating this rule when it comes to Vin Diesel. He, Laurence Fox, and Kevin Whately are the only three actors I actively follow. I'm bad with names anyway, but I make absolutely no effort to learn actors' names and I'm old enough that the majority of people featured in US were unrecognizable and unknown to me.

Once, before the subscription ran out, I sat down and counted the names and faces I recognized. It was something in the order of one person per six pages -- more than I would have guessed but far less (I suspect) than the average US reader.

[polly-b.livejournal.com]

That made sense to me and I took it as a warning not to learn too much about the real people behind the characters I love.

This is so true. Back when I was writing Star Trek Voyager fanfic (nearly 15 years ago, which is like, 150 internet years), a lot of information was disseminated within the fandom about what a jackass in RL the actor is who played Chakotay, and it really colored my view on the character.

I've done my best since then to avoid learning too much about actors. There's only a rare few I care to follow on Facebook and they seldom talk about their personal lives.

[siberian-skys.livejournal.com]

These days I mostly only keep track of Jeremy Renner, Robert Downey Jr. and Clark Gregg. I do have subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide. I got such good deals that it was cheaper to buy them in subscription format than it was to just buy the issues that I wanted. I've been tempted to start getting Real Simple. I really like that one. I was happy when my Writer's Digest finally stopped coming. Those are not very good. There's like one a year that's worth reading. That's sad.