Reporter’s Notebook

ALEX COOLMAN

In the shade beneath an awning at the Orange County Fair, Cliff

Elder is using science to unlock the most gruesome mysteries of my

personality.

I’ve handed Elder, a 75-year-old man with smoky driving glasses and

tidy silver hair, a small piece of paper with my signature on it. He

feeds the scrap into a refrigerator-sized machine called the Televac

9700. He hits a few buttons, smiles, and stands back.

A light flashes briefly on the Televac console. “Analyzation in

Progress.”

A moment later, Elder has his results: a dot-matrix printout

displaying a black-and-white breakdown of my personality, along with some

miscellaneous advice based on the fact that I’m a Capricorn.

“You sometimes tell ‘white lies’ to escape uncomfortable situations,”

Elder reads from the printout, eyeing me. “That’s about the worst result

you can ever get.”

“Wow,” I say, staring at my printout, which notes that “Isaac Newton,

genius” was also a Capricorn.

The results are a little harsh, but on the other hand, the Televac

notes that “you understand life, its difficulties and problems.” It tells

me that “you often gain what you want through logic and your powers of

persuasion.”

All in all, I decide, I’m pretty psychologically healthy. And I might

also be a genius.

But I only believe that until I head over to the other personality

analysis booth at the fair, the Lazer-Tech Telebrain stand operated by

Bill Antinori.

The Lazer-Tech Telebrain is sort of like the Televac with the gloves

taken off. It prints out something called an “electrohypothetical

romantic nature analysis” using a felt-tipped pen rigged like a

seismograph.

The Lazer-Tech Telebrain, Antinori assures me, is very, very accurate.

And what’s more, it tells it like it is.

Antinori feeds my signature (a newly created version, but with the

same shaky, illegible letters as the other one) into the Telebrain, and

the machine’s pen scrawls its treacherous trail across the analysis card.

A pattern of peaks and valleys appears on the form, a sort of Richter

scale of the psyche.

This time around, I don’t do so well. Under the category of “Schemer,”

my graph tops the charts. I practically break the machine with my results

for the category of “Conceited/Vain.” And I’ve got a massive spike

sprouting up between the lines of “Want to Control” and “Morning Grouch.”

“What’s fun about it,” Antinori explains, perhaps trying to console

me, “is that people get a big kick out of it.”

Maybe so, but I’m feeling a little deflated. Not only did my “Not Too

Tolerant” score dwarf my ranking as a “Great Kisser,” but I’m not even

sure I’m a genius any more.

Nobody said analysis was going to be easy.