Some people go to Cancun for spring break. Or Barbados. Or Southern California. Or any one of a dozen places where the sun blisters down and the women are fine and deliciously easy.

I envy those people. Unlike them, I contrived to spend the last week at home in semi-charming southern Connecticut, where the rain washes down and the women are, well, pasty and uncommonly ugly.

Now I know, that's not entirely fair to Connecticut females. In fact, it's a dreadful, horrible, recklessly awful generalization. So let me immediately backtrack, backpedal and otherwise retract what I just said, lest the lovely, gorgeous, impeccably attractive ladies of my home state rise up, march to Cambridge, seize every copy of this fine paper and put it to the torch in protest.

Because we wouldn't want that, now would we? And an apology--well, it's pretty easy, isn't it? Especially given the fact that in daring to suggest, without benefit of exhaustive research or even statistical sampling, that most of the women from my neck of the woods are frightfully unappealing, I was guilty of employing--drumroll, please--a stereotype. And as we are all taught, from our mother's teat to the nursing home feeding tube, there is nothing worse, absolutely nothing, than the use of a stereotype in print. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

How can we tell if something is a stereotype, one might ask? Well, there's a pretty simple test--it's a stereotype if it offends a group of wonderful, intelligent, virtuous people. Like, say, southern Connecticut females. Or Mongolian nomads. Or retired Soviet cosmonauts. Or Harvard Asians.

To illustrate, we'll take the last group--just for the sake of argument, you understand. If I wanted to set about offending Harvard Asians (not that anyone would, mind you), I might draw a comic strip that contained an Asian-American character who happened to go to Harvard. We'll call him, er, "Mr. Wu." And then I might refuse to make this "Mr. Wu" perfect--I'd give him a flaw or two, like pronounced flatulence or a fondness for reading Foucault and Derrida in his spare time.

If I did that, you see, everyone reading my strip--we'll call it the "The Post-Modern Mr. Wu"--would automatically assume that crikey, this strip implies that all Asians are flatulent and read European deconstructionist writings in their spare time! And they would be offended by that implication. (I know I would be.) And apologies would be in order.

But this is small-scale stereotyping. If I really wanted to offend Harvard Asians, I might sit down and write an article in which I was, well, a tad critical of the Asian community. For instance, I might suggest that there was, let's say, a slight trend toward ethnic self-segregation, or a slight proclivity for the sciences over the humanities among Asian-Americans. And I might, if I were so inclined (not that anyone would be), get downright nasty and suggest that a large chunk of these self-segregated, math-and-science types are self-absorbed, clannish and downright weird.