Facebook: The New Face of the World's Oldest Profession

Crankyjewishguy (CJG) often blogs about news stories he's read that involve professors and academics and the interesting, but often, shall we say, dubious research they pursue, but CJG really isn't sure what to make of this story. According to MSNBC.com, a Columbia University professor named Sudhir Venkatesh, whom CJG presumes is not Jewish, "spent a year gaining the trust of and tracking 290 prostitutes in New York to study the 'contrasts between old-world prostitutes and new-age sex workers.'" Wow, and they pay him for that?

CJG thought that by "old-world" it meant he was doing a historical comparison between, say, the Spanish prostitutes of Columbus's time and those of modern times, but that's apparently not the case. What he's studying is those who solicit business the old-fashioned way, by standing on dark corners in short skirts and low-cut tops and looking extremely available, for example, and those who are using Facebook, Craigslist and other new media to grow their business so to speak. In fact, according to Professor Venkatesh, 83% of the prostitutes he surveyed have a Facebook page which means CJG is going to be going back to his list of Facebook friends this afternoon and scrutinizing it very closely.

The new face of the world's oldest profession.

According to the good professor, in this day and age "no self-respecting cosmopolitan man looking for an evening of companionship is going to lean out his car window and call out to a woman at a traffic light." Right. If he's "self-respecting" he's going to troll the sex ads on Craigslist from the comfort of his own den while his wife and kids are upstairs sleeping. And the rise of new technology, says the professor, has made the trade "less risky and more lucrative," so much so that it has attracted "some middle-class women seeking quick tax-free income." Whoa! Good thing this guy doesn't work for H&R Block! CJG is pretty sure that the Internal Revenue Code does not exempt income earned from illegal activity from taxation (in fact, he just looked it up and he's right), though he's equally sure few actually declare it on their returns. Sorry, professor, tax free income is what you get from municipal bonds and certain mutual funds, not from turning tricks. Better stick to your field of expertise.

This is how today's discerning, cosmopolitan man arranges to pay for sex.

Parallel Universes: CJG Asks, Why Can't They Be Perpendicular?

A few days ago, crankyjewishguy's (CJG) friend, Bill, texted him from Florida, where he was on a bender with a bunch of middle aged guys, to see if CJG could pick him up the next day at Logan Airport in Boston. Bill assumed that because CJG is a writer he could easily drop everything and come pick him up because for a writer "everything" means typing a few paragraphs in the morning and then going to Starbucks for seven hours to have a mocha and a nap. Bill happens to be right about that, but the real question is why Bill, who is supposedly one of CJG's best friends, or so he thought until Bill texted him from Florida and CJG realized he was not with Bill in Florida but staring at three feet of snow that needed to be shoveled, didn't invite him for all the fun and games. Anyway, since Bill's entire work schedule consists of teaching three one-hour spin classes each week, the tables have been turned because this morning, in about twenty minutes as a matter of fact, Bill is coming to pick up CJG and drive him to Logan Airport because CJG is on his way to visit his brother in Boca where the five day forecast is calling for sunshine, temperatures in the mid-70s, and thousands of Jewish people in their upper 80s driving ten miles an hour.

Which brings us to today's topic: cosmology. While CJG was idling in front of the American Airlines terminal waiting for Bill last week, he was listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She was interviewing Brian Greene, an astrophysicist from Columbia University about his new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.  Greene is a kind of latter day Carl Sagan, adept at putting abstract concepts into easy to understand terms, except that as CJG listened he realized that though the analogies sounded nice and simple, the concepts were so mind boggling that he thought his head was going to explode.

Space: the final frontier. Or is it?

It seems to CJG that the reason concepts such as multiple universes and bending the time-space continuum are so hard to grasp is that most of us still haven't mastered the cable remote. Now we're supposed to wrap our heads around the idea that there may be many universes layered, Greene suggests, one on top of the other like so many slices of bread in which everything that's happening right now in our universe is happening in all these other universes, too. Actually, that last part was kind of comforting because it meant that there were, oh, maybe another ten or ten trillion cranky jewish guys listening to the same interview. If only we could call each other and form a support group. Then again, maybe all of us have the same cell phone number, too, in which case we'd just keep getting busy signals or be leaving messages for ourselves.

Anyway, the explanation for these carbon copy universes has something to do with the mathematical limitations of the ways in which matter can arrange itself so that eventually matter runs out of options and starts repeating itself, just like Rush Limbaugh. But, even if that's true, CJG isn't buying the notion that just because he's sitting in a Volvo listening to NPR at Logan Airport his counterparts in parallel universes are doing exactly the same thing. Even if we concede the existence of these parallel universes, why did cranky jewish guy in Universe #17, for example, also have to buy a used 2001 Volvo? And is his left tail light out, too? Is that state trooper also telling him to circle around? (By the way, do you understand the implications of all this for Starbucks' profits?) You see, this is where these geniuses who seem to be good at explaining all this arcane stuff fall down in CJG's humble opinion. For the sake of making what they are saying remotely accessible to those of us with just above average human brains, they say things that clearly can't be true because CJG knows for a fact that only in this universe could there possibly be a place like Boca Raton.

The one and only.