The New Panhandlers

I'm not sure quite why, but I'm pretty sure we are experiencing an increase in the number of panhandlers on the streets of Palookaville this summer, walking the sidewalks or perhaps positioned with their dogs and tin cups,  holding up "Help Me!" signs outside (say) the supermarket.  And in particular, what I think is a novelty: the number who are  pretty,  or at least personable, young women.  

My guess is that these  are not actually hookers--no dimple-length short shorts, no garish lipstick, no Swedish-housemaid wigs.  And to be fair, I don't think they are getting much hooker traffic: we're talkin' full daylight here, in the ordinary humdrum shopping strip.  It would take a particular kind of raw  courage or blind lust to try to leverage this offer into an opportunity.  As to the girls themselves, I suspect the thought has never crossed their mind and that they would be shocked and horrified if did.  Indeed my next guess is that at least some of these are fairly ordinary middle class kids, temporarily short perhaps but not well schooled  in the exigencies of street survival.    And I hate to think of the crashing revelation that settles on them the first time some lizard rolls up and says "hi sweetie, $20 for a #$%@ &^$?"

So, Like Nobody Ever Charges for it in DC?

Entertaining himself with the Caper in Cartagena, my friend Michael poses an unsettling choice: (a) do they think we are that dumb?  or (b) are they really that dumb?

Some of the agents, caught out, said that they knew the women were prostitutes, others are sticking to their story that they thought they were just women they had met in a bar.

What intrigues me is the hotel system. It appears to be a respectable hotel, patronized by diplomats and other government employees. The rule is that a guest may have a visitor, but the visitor has to leave her name and ID at the front desk, and she is expected to leave before 7 a.m. I understand perfectly well that ladies of the evening occasionally visit hotel rooms in the US, but I don't imagine that hotels up here are so adept at bureaucratizing the practice.

The situation came to light when one lady overstayed her 7 a.m. departure time, and the desk staff went to the hotel room. It then developed that she was ready to leave, but that the man she had been entertaining did not care to pay her. The man in question, it seems, thought she was a charming Colombian lady, no doubt intrigued at meeting an important Norteamericano government official, and they simply moved from the bar to the hotel room to carry on their encounter in more intimate circumstances. He was shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that she expected payment for what he thought was a mutually enjoyable evening.

And I'm thinking -- We hire intellectual giants like this guy to protect our president?

 Idle afterthought:  how many sex scandals erupt in a fight over the bill?

Maybe They Should Give Us a Pamphlet, To Remind us How

oταν δὲ δὴ οἶμαι αἵ τε γυναῖκες καὶ οἱ ἄνδρες τοῦ γεννᾶν ἐκβῶσι τὴν ἡλικίαν, ἀφήσομένπου ἐλευθέρους αὐτοὺς συγγίγνεσθαι [461ξ] ᾧ ἂν ἐθέλωσι, πλὴν θυγατρὶ καὶ μητρὶ καὶ ταῖς τῶν θυγατέρων παισὶ καὶ ταῖς ἄνωμητρός, καὶ γυναῖκας αὖ πλὴν ὑεῖ καὶ πατρὶ καὶ τοῖς τούτων εἰς τὸ κάτω καὶ ἐπὶ τὸ ἄνω... 

But when, I take it, the men and the women have passed the age of lawful procreation, we shall leave the men free to form such relations [461c] with whomsoever they please, except daughter and mother and their direct descendants and ascendants, and likewise the women, save with son and father, and so on ...

--Plato, Republic Book 5, 461b-c (Paul Shorey Trans.)

Everything You Already Know About Porn But were Too Coy to Own Up to

Natasha Vargas-Cooper's conspectus of the online porn landscape is about as thorough a survey as you are likely to get without the services of (tee hee) personal trainer, but she does lift my eyebrows with one factoid: only two thirds of all online porn watching is done by men.  That means fully one third is being being watched by--ah, what other choices are there?    I'm probably not informed enough to guess what all those non-men are doing hunkered down around the YuVuTu campfire.    Compulsion by boyfriends (Look at that honey!  Wouldn't that be fun?)?  Lezporn?  Or, considering the exhaustive nature of Vargas-Cooper's research, it may be the one-third-women figure comprises nothing more than Vargas-Cooper herself.

Afterthought:  Consider the index: The Atlantic certainly is banking on the proposition that sex sells, not so?