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![[what sort of man reads playboy?]](img/type-playguy.gif)
It's a regrettable but unavoidable fact of life that stereotypes,
rather than being the aimless
fantasias of crackpots, often have some basis in fact. People of refinement generally
eschew the crass, blanket lingo of ethnic and racial typing in favor of more broad generalizations
based on class, but still, the kernel of observed life remains.
There's a routine joke that defines the whole nebulous class of college students
who waste their academic careers on pointless gut courses with names like "Gender Roles in
Psychopharmacology," and "Problem of Hitler in Twentieth Century Caribbean Francophone
Literature." But rather than waste our time with such amusing but prolix titles, we usually
condense the phenomenon of the collegiate mouth-breather into the easy phrase: "He's
majoring in basket weaving."
While it's doubtful that "basket weaving" is offered as a major-worthy course of study
anywhere, I have proof that the concept is closer to the truth than we might like. Recently,
while watching the excellent film There's Something About Mary, on the campus
of San Francisco State University, I spotted an SFSU student absorbed in a textbook
with the title Indian Basket Weaving. The open confirmation of a stereotype seemed
impossible to believe, but I managed to get a picture of the student in the act of
study:
![[studying for the mid-term weave]](img/type-basket.gif)
Whether this was the edition of Indian Basket Weaving
published
in 1971 by the Navajo School or Sandra Corrie
Newman's
Indian Basket Weaving: How to Weave Pomo, Yurok, Pima, and Navajo Baskets, I
can not say. But I'm impressed that this student, in bold defiance of wicked talk, not
only read his basket weaving text in public, but read it with (it seemed to me)
considerable enthusiasm. We can always lament that he wasn't absorbed in a more
improving book, or
scoff at the wry proof that SFSU isn't one of America's more
stellar universities,
but it's comforting to know that basket weaving, like many another self-fulfilling
prophecy, appears to be a fitting activity for at least one student's youthful energies.
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![[simpleton]](img/simptitle.gif)