specialagency.net

GirlsGoingWild

So Wonkette has been doggedly following the story of Farrah Ashline, erstwhile proprietress of girlsgoingout.com. While looking for a picture of her on google, I stumbled across some more goods, in the form of 1999 postings to a DC employment bulletin board. Looks like she had some interesting business going on.

Here she's looking for "Entertainers, Models, Actors." The next day "Massage Business Seeks Professional Support" and "Lingerie Models, Dancers, Entertainers Sought." It wasn't until February that she required a "Bodyguard, Personal Assistant, Massage Business."

Good thing those prostitution charges in Albany didn't stick. That could have ruined her reputation.

UPDATE: Field Agent April has helped me out with the caption for this photo:
(L. to R.: someone, someone, someone, Farrah Ashline, someone, someone, someone)

The most impossible poll

Pollsters should just give up asking about gay marriage for the next few years. Enough already.

Yes, we know in 2004 that a majority of Americans opposes it, a sizable minority supports it, a sizable minority STRONGLY opposes it, but beyond that the intensity of feeling is difficult to measure.

The answers you get on this subject vary widely by wording. This is usually difficult to prove across polls, which is why we are fortunate that a recent poll asked the same exact question with two different phrasings.

These gems come from the CBS/NYT poll conducted late last week.

In response to,
"Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow marriage ONLY between a man and a woman?"

59% of respondents said "favor," 35% said "oppose", and the balance didn't know.

This seems like unusually bad news. Most polls show America evenly divided on the constitutional amendment. But fear not, because our pollsters asked the SAME people this question:

"Do you think defining marriage as a union only between a man and a woman is an important enough issue to be worth changing the Constitution for, or isn't it that kind of issue?"

38% thought it was worth changing the Constitution, while 56% said that this issue really does not belong there.

If I were a conservative and wanted to spin these results, the best I could come up with would be that 1 in 5 Americans opposes gay marriage enough to support an amendment, but they don't want to actually think about what that means.

Personally, I don't find it hard to come up with factors that can shave points off of the ideal anti-marriage question in big chunks to get us down from 59% to 38%. I would even grant that 38% understates support for the amendment. There may be some people who want gay marriage to go away but think homosexuality is so revolting that any reference would be the equivalent of a ketchup stain on our sacred documents. We can all find words and phrases in the first question that could sway people toward a conclusion they might not otherwise have reached.

But at this point, who cares? The Mom index is more entertaining.

Two sticks and some string.

I keep joining the knitting communities on those networking sites, the friendster and the tribe and the orkut. I'm not sure why. My knitting is such an on-again-off-again thing. I'll knit like mad for months, and then be completely uninterested for a while. Sometimes it's a big project that burns me out--senior year in college I made this adorable fair-isle sweater for a friend's toddler, and then I didn't knit anything for nearly two years. Right now I'm in an on-again phase, which means I've dragged out from the closet my big copy-paper box full of old yarn and a big thicket of needles. I'm working on an afghan, and I'm working on a scarf that looks like a sheep, and I keep fiddling with my double-pointeds and thinking I might like to try making a hat.

But even when I'm interested in knitting, I don't get a lot out of mailing lists or online groups. So I don't know why I keep joining them. But I clicked through to an Orkut discussion of stitch and bitch groups, because I keep thinking something like that would be fun (just like I keep thinking a book group would be fun--sometimes I feel like I need structured excuses to get out of the house). What I found in the discussion, though, is the completely hilarious idea of people being denied membership in knitting groups because they aren't serious enough knitters.

This is the dark and sinister consequence of knitting being trendy, you know. You might have thought that the existence of patterns for hand-knit thong swimsuits was the dark and sinister consequence, but no, that's not even it. It's the fact that people are getting high and mighty about the fact that they make scarves out of string.

(although I'll confess to a small bit of in-group glee after getting the "who died and made her lily chin?" joke.)

Different groups, different stories

There are several immigrant groups whose national identities begin with fleeing oppression in the Old World for freedom in the New. The story I learned in Hebrew school is that Jewish immigrants left Russia to find religious freedom in the United States. Most people don't dwell on American history enough to think about what drove the actual decision to leave, and in the case of Russian Jews, it was that anti-Semitic laws and pogroms were making it difficult to live in Russia as a Jew, not to practice Judaism. It's a fine distinction but one that is easily lost.

My grandfather's family came to America because they couldn't make a living in Russia any more. My great-grandfather was a socialist, as were thousands of other immigrants. The Hebrew Schools that their great-grandchildren go to are rooted in Zionism, not Socialism, so we get a certain image of the past that may not be truthful to everyone.

The Irish are another group of immigrants that have a national story of government persecution and religious discrimination. A good way to divide immigrants to America is to separate those groups which included many people who eventually return to the home country from those groups that never looked back. I think this parallels the ideal of freedom as opposed to economic opportunity.

I dare someone to try to apply this to the Elian Gonzales case.

On a related note, Boston's Museum of Immigration, now sadly closed for lack of funding, was called Dreams of Freedom. I suppose that sounded more promising than Dreams of a Washing Machine.

A nation of immigrants.

As I've said many times before, the problem with leaving the radio on while I work is that occasionally it makes me angry. (The problem with leaving the radio off, on the other hand, is that I get restless when it's too quiet and I can't get any work done.)

Today the problem was a News Hour essay by Richard Rodriguez. The text isn't online yet, so I'm forced to reconstruct from memory, but I'm pretty sure that the phrase "Mexicans are our conscience" was involved somewhere.

The larger point, which is probably one worth making, is that there's something very complicated and a little messed up about this country's relationship to undocumented Mexican immigrants. That's fine. I could have done without the kind of floofy-patronizing-liberal statements about Mexicans and my conscience, but whatever. I'm not sure what a better way of getting at the point would have been.

What really got me, though, was the big finish, a series of dramatic statements about how the situation of undocumented Mexican workers should lead all of us to question the motivations of our own immigrant ancestors, who (as I believe he put it) may have been more interested in manufacturing jobs than in the Federalist Papers. Maybe, he says, maybe, and I know it's shocking to consider, but maybe past generations of immigrants also were looking for work. Just like the current ones!

So my question is, is this a case where I'm really out of touch with what most people think on this issue, or is this a case where an NPR/PBS commentator states something really obvious as though it were shocking because he or she can't imagine that the audience isn't stupid? Because they do that too sometimes.

I mean, I know that I've studied American history in a little more depth than your average American, but that's not where I get this particular knowledge from. I get this knowledge from my family. We've got all of the stories about why Great-Grandma Anna or Grandma and Grandpa Carini came to the United States, and not a one of them has to do with political freedoms or lofty ideals. They were poor in their home countries, and they thought they might not be poor in America. It's always seemed pretty straightforward to me.

Culinary illiteracy

Our cafeteria is advertising "vegetarian beef soup" today. I'm quite certain that this does not mean unBeef bouillon or some other substitute.

I went to the salad bar.

Someone to dance with.

Sometime in the next few months, maybe, Michael Penn's new album is coming. The Magnetic Fields have a new one coming too, in May. Everyone's with the clever titles these days: "Mr Hollywood Jr 1947" in the one case, "i" in the other. This is exciting news, these albums. It's not like either of them puts out new records very often.

Listen to me. "Records". I'm like an old lady. I had a very sharp moment of consumer lust last week, when I went with my friend Carina to shop for MP3 players. They're so cute! So cute. The consumer lust abated somewhat when it took her two hours to figure out how to transfer music from her computer to the player, but still. It's like the size of a tube of lipstick, weighs about as much, and holds six or eight hours' worth of music. I should pay more attention to consumer electronics gadgets--I had no idea they were so cute.