Bad Economy–Even the Hookers are Hurting

A year ago the world’s hookers were being pinched by their flush clientele.   Now the same prostitutes are feeling the pinch.  Life is a lot tougher out on the streets and in the bordellos of the world.   The economic downturn is hurting the world’s oldest profession.

In Prague, long known for its post-communist bohemian scene and plethora of prostittues, business is bad.   There aren’t enough tourists notes a recent article in the International Herald Tribune.    Not long ago, because of its low prices and high number of prostitutes, there were sex junkets to Prague, where businessmen could sow their wild oats for a carnal weekend.    But prices are up and money is tight.   Some still come to cheer themselves up and to forget about the global meltdown.   Just not as many as there was a while ago.

In Berlin, known for its bady night life,  the sex business is down by 20%.  As for the other cities of the world, one has to presume business is off as fewer men are paying to get off.   Perhaps sex is on the increase in dating and with partners.   But I doubt it.  Sex junkets are special.   It is the alternative to golf and other escapist weekends that men use to bond.   Sex junkets are for distraction.  Sex with spouses and partners require more focus.

As for the good ol’ United States, who knows what this economic downturn will mean, sex-wise.   As for the changing of administrations, from a conservative to a more liberal government, often that means added sexual congress.   But between all the people whose libidos are reduced by anti-depressants and the depressing state of the economy maybe there just isn’t the sex there used to be.  It may no longer be a matter matter of “just say no.”  Maybe no one wants to bother.
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The article indicates that the lousy economy discourages adultery.   No one could afford that expense of the illicit romance, the wining and dining and the ancillary upkeep.   When you can’t afford to go to dinner with your spouse or partner, it’s hard to justify spending money for the sole purpose of spreading the seed.   Even dating has tapered off, at least on the grand scale and the big splash.  You know the illusion of life would be if the two of you got together in a more serious fashion.   Now, with cheaper dating habits, you tend to see what you are getting.

Driving through one section of Long Beach, California, one eyes the hookers working the corners in other desperation, the disease it seems practically dripping off of them.   Not to pick on Long Beach, or even Sunset Boulevard, where a similar scenario plays out day and night.  I am quite sure most cities in this country have its streets where prostitutes ply their trade between heroin benders and sessions at the crack house.   One has to think while driving by that in this lousy economy the usual trade for this layer of girls is unemployed or really hurting for money.   Times must be really tough.

Crime must be up here and even among the upper class hookers.   On the upper level your pockets get rifled, while here the unsuspecting trick may be lured to a remote spot where he is set upon, beaten and robbed.   As for what the higher class call girls are doing, that’s hard to say.  Most are probably working.  Just not as much.

Well it goes to show that when times are tough, times are usually tough everywhere.   No one can escape the belt tightening operation.   Most are shocked it all came down so fast.   Talk about shock and awe.  It’s tough to feel libidinous when the world is collapsing all around you.   Tough to pay for sex.   Tough, even when it’s free.

Chains of Fools Feed on Each Other With Food to Go

Once upon a time you had independent restaurants that sold good food at modest prices.  You also had lousy, greasy spoons that sold bad food at modest prices.  So, enter the chain restaurant.   There was no gamble there.  You were treated to mediocre food at modest prices.  The video of the rats running all over a KFC /Taco Bell spring to mind as one of those major exceptions.

The wall-to-wall establishment of chain restaurants was kind of the middle of the road between the win-win and lose lose situation.   Restaurant chains could saturate the market with advertisements.   Branding was incredible.   You may not get the greatest of food, but at least it was consistent.   You could go into any Denny’s, Chili’s, House of Pancakes, Applebee’s, Olive Garden and get pretty much the same food as any other branch of the chain.  The menus were prepared from a central office.   Ingredients were the same and hardly varied.

You could go as a couple to any of the restaurant chains.  You could get Chinese Food at P.F. Chang’s or even the Panda Express.   You could get chicken, burgers, whatever, and you always knew that the food was prepared if not the way you wanted, then certainly the way you expected.   No surprises.

So gradually the chain restaurants moved in and the independent restaurants closed down.   Some of the independent restaurants, glorified in highway lore and local nostalgia, should have closed.   The chain restaurants were a blessing, sort of, as kitchen conditions were regulated to certain standards.  Well, sort of.   There are more than a few egregious exceptions.

Now while most of the chain restaurants, with the exception of venues like Ruth’s Chris and Houston’s, are not particularly aesthetic in their ambiance, what with same-same, bright colors and far too often screaming kids, they are still a good places to take a date, run in for a quick bite and run to a movie.   You may have forgotten what you ate ten minutes after eating it, but at least it won’t rumble in your stomach.   That is a major plus in this day and age.   And, if you are planning to have sex later that night, you will entertain less fear of the meal attacking you when you least expect it.

The cheapest viagra pills patients who get the gamma knife surgery done have a lot of scope to live further than six months of time. order viagra This is of course just speculation at this point. So, you can get it staying at home cialis 20mg no prescription easily. Men often measure their self-worth by their ability to stay strong, to protect & take care of their loved ones; so when they struggle at job, lose their job fall into drinking habit. low price cialis So now most of the modestly priced independent restaurants are gone.   The chains often find themselves with little or not competition.   So now they are not only are their advertising campaigns directed toward telling you what superb food they are serving.  Superb and in some cases a whole lot of it.   Great food.  Eat it cheap.  And eat more than you are supposed to.    You would think by the advertising you were treating yourself to fine dining.  No, you are not.

One most wonder if they threshold for fine dining has dropped so low that most chains are serving what constitutes good food.   One most wonder if sheer volume of food supersedes actual quality of food.  Silly me.   There is little to wonder there.

So now I hear commercials where chain restaurants like Chili’s are offering take out food.  They are turning their attentions to the lesser food venues, the fast food and drive-thru eateries.  You can now get the same meal you ate at your table with belief in its consistence if not its culinary delight, and drag it back home.   Forget the movie.  You aren’t going out anyway.  Not in this tough economy. That is why God created Pay-Per-View.

To hear the commercial they are, subtly speaking, in a heated duel with the types of fast food chains that actually serve crappy takeout with absolutely no expectation. Yes, the mid-prized chain restaurants are now challenging their lesser cousins for a piece of the low budget market share.   The battle is on and soon will rage.  It’s a bad economy out there and restaurants are hurting.  Every buck won over to your side is a buck well earned.   Any day I expect to see the brutally honest commercial, “My mediocre food is better than your mediocre food and it only costs a few bucks more.”

This should be an interesting battle for market share.  I am sure other mid-level chains will join in.  Conversely, the strategy is two fold.   They are not only chasing the drive-thru but the diner that used to frequent chic little bistros and storefronts where the food is pricey and avoidable when there is a different paradigm for date night.  Forget the candlelight.  When you are short on money and worried about your job, run down to the shopping plaza and pick up some food.

It is convenient.  As with the drive-thru’s, you can pull up to a Chili’s and just get it to go.  Order it over the phone, and they will give you an exact time when to come and pick it up.  Nice and hot.  In bags that remind you of the dining experience you either worked to avoid or just left behind.   Yum.

Lizzie Borden Killed Her Parents Here. Eat Hearty, But Don’t Feed the Ghosts

The house where Lizzie Borden may have killed her family is now a Bed and Breakfast lodge.   This sturdy wood frame house in sturdy Fall River, Massachusetts hardly looks like a celebrated murder scene, but then so few really do.   That is, until you look at them with the knowing eye.   Otherwise would you know the difference?   Would the people lodged in creepy, haunted houses really see and feel the ghosts if they didn’t know they were inside a creepy, haunted house?

Maybe.  I remember visiting one small town and finding one house particularly, in fact, unmistakeably creepy.  Nobody seemed to know anything about what may have happened there, neither my family nor the neighbors.  Okay.  False hunches.  I was just getting ready to leave.

As luck would have it the current owner of the house pulled up in the driveway.   Without much prodding  her confirmed my suspicions that foul play did indeed occur in that house.  A minister of some religious persuasion, deeply in debt, killed his wife for the insurance money.  He had pushed her down the stairs.  The house over the years was occupied by other people with new and different tragedies, from riches to rags to sagas of drugs and degradation.

But Lizzie Borden was another story.  She was the O.J. Simpson of her time, among the dozens of other celebrity killers.   Ironically, perhaps, Lizzie was not tried for the murder of her parents in California. Nevertheless, she was still acquitted.   She then became part of mythical American macabre.   There is a rhyme about her.  “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks.  And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”

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As to who actually committed, the murders, as with most of these high profile murder cases, theories abound.  It was everyone from the housekeeper to the towns people who didn’t at all like Andrew Borden.  Some think Lizzie killed him because financial disputes and property divisions.   That would be a motive.  It has certainly been one before.   Others believe Lizzie, the spinster, may have been a little too constrained and embroiled in family dissension.  She may have lashed out to save her sanity and her inheritance.

Today we would find a drug ridden and repressed Lizzie seeking to right the wrongs of an inhospitable environment, an oppressive father and abusive step-mother.  Who knows?  But today what remains of the story, aside fromthe legend itself, is the bed and breakfast and the ghosts who inhabit it along with the 10,000 people who pass through its doors each year.   Ghosts are reported to do what ghosts are best know for.   They poke and prod, open and close the draws, turn the lights on and off, move things around.  In short, they scare the hell out of most of us.   For a population that thinks of Pearl Harbor as ancient history, it is amazing how sex and murder can long endure.

Lizzie Borden died and left $30,000 to the animal shelter.   She left another $500 so that the cemetery could tend to her father’s grave in perpetuity.  Guilt or true love?   It’s hard to say.   Maybe a little of both.   The thing is, given the times, most people were perplexed and a legend was born.  Today, we know the story all too well.   The difference a hundred odd years can make.

When Your Mayor is Dressed in Drag

Stu Rasmussen used to be a guy.  Now Stu Rasmussen is best known as Carla Fong.   Stu as Carla wears plunging neckline dresses and mini-skirts.   Stu or Carla is sixty years old, so even on a good day and with movie star looks being sixty and wearing mini-skirts is a questionable strategy.   Especially when you look like Stu, who also happens to be mayor-elect of Silverton, Oregon.  Talk about “change.”

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Stu had been elected Silverton’s Mayor in 1988 and again in 1990.  He just won again.  Looking at his photos, augmented breasts and notable cleavage or not, Stu has radio looks.   Stu/Carlas photo reminds me of the quote now deceased  and noted author Truman Capote issued when appraising the now equally deceased and noted author, Jacqueline Susann.   Capote declared,  “she looks like a truck driver in drag.”

While Capote’s quote elicits certain emotions about Stu/Carla, I really don’t regard his image as the truck driver in drag.   He is more reminiscent of one of the more senior English actresses in one of the uptight, upright, Merchant-Ivory Victorian costume dramas.    Or he could be the gracious Earth Mother emanating from the Hippie Period of Stu’s generation.    But then again I don’t live in Silverton and see Stu on the street on a regular basis.  If I did, I may have other opinions.

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I will assume until better notified that Stu must find it tough to shop for the wardrobe he prefers in the tiny town of Silverton.   Shopping for high fashion in Portland is tough enough, yet alone Silverton.   In the past, for transgenders and drag queens alike, this would be a problem resolved only by scheduled trips to the larger cities.   Today, with the Internet, shopping for the heels, plunging necklines and minis is just a click or two away.   Thanks to ecommerce, even buying for the odd-sized is made easy.

As for the important stuff, Stu ran on the promise he would help stem the rapid growth in Silverton.  Perhaps his serving as the leader of the welcome wagon would serve to cause many potential transplants relocation to Silverton.   Not everyone is tolerant as we last saw in California’s recent proposition to ban gay marriage. But then, perhaps Stu will draw a crowd to the city.  You never know.

While I’m sure some are upset about the new mayor’s fashion statement, let us not forget that Stu was elected to office with an overwhelming 55% of the vote.   Politicians would kill for that margin.   Some have.   So it is understood that people in this former lumber town not only tolerate Stu, but they like him.   They not only like him, but they trust him.   Which is more than most citizens can say for their local elected officials.   And that says a lot.   About Stu.  And Silverton, the town where he serves as mayor.

At Wal-Mart You Can Shop Till You Drop

By now most of the known world has read in the New York Daily News or elsewhere about the tragedy  at a Long Island Wal-Mart, where an employer died after being trampled by a couple of hundred people.   Apparently, he made the mistake of trying to hold them back and paid the price with his life.   Other people were also injured and there was a controversial report that a pregnant woman miscarried.

If this episode wasn’t so tragic we could find it funny.   There have been numerous comedy scenes in television episodes and feature films, comic strips, even, where overzealous shoppers trample each other in search of the ultimate bargain.   The old comic strip, “Dagwood,” comes to mind.   The artist had regular strips depicting women fighting each other, playing tug-of-war for bargain goods.

But the fact is it is pretty tragic.  It is also very telling.   It is telling on different levels.  On one hand we can view this as a reflection of the  bad economy where the need to save money has driven people to wait outside the doors of a department store for it’s special opening at 5:AM.   Some stores even had special midnight openings.   For a country that goes to bed after the Jay Leno or David Letterman monologue, it says something about the need to find a bargain.

It also says quite a lot about consumerism.   I have to wonder, what are people doing out there at five A.M.?  How much can you really care about buying something that you would stand there like cattle waiting for the doors to open so you could fight you way under fluorescent lighting to get something for your wife and kids, girlfriend, whatever?  What does this really say about us, and the fact we cannot cure that disease, that we are consumer addicts.

Seventy percent of this economy if built on consumerism.  We buy stuff.   We buy a lot of stuff we don’t even need.  We buy stuff to impress our friends.   We buy dumb stuff, and in good economic times we pay a lot of money for overpriced, status seeking stuff that has the requisite branding.   We don’t save; we spend.  We buy.  We don’t buy things that last, most of the time, anyway, we buy instead things that are fashionable.   Things that we buy are built to be obsolete.   We even buy quality cars that were built to last and trade them in because we are bored with them.

We are so obsessed with buy, apparently,we don’t mind elbowing and even trampling a few people to buy more stuff.  Okay, so it’s the holiday.  It is a holiday in the worst economy in perhaps 100 years, and here we are buying.   Hang out Santa Claus and a few pretty lights, and we kick into buying mode like so many Pavlovian Dogs.
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Of course others have a different take on the incident at Wal-Mart.   Some are blaming the greedy retailers for having the temerity to open their doors in the wee hours of the morning.   At least for me it is a wee hour of the morning.   Some are more racist in tone and issue forth deplorable comments that the writers don’t even bother couching in more acceptable, or polite, racist content.   Pretty amazing.

As for the consumerism itself, it would seem a bit obsessive to be buffeted around by crowds at pre-dawn hours, waiting for a store’s doors to open.  I would think you have to be nuts, but then there were so many standing there, they couldn’t all be crazy.  Just sick.   Sick with what, I’m not sure.   And if not sick, not real logical.

The fact when the stores are stuck with unsold merchandise, say three weeks from now, they will practically be giving it away.   You can waltz in, make a better deal, and walk out without fear of getting trampled.  Or if you are really smart you can wait until after the holiday when they may be paying you to take this stuff out of the store.   You could buy on line and save gas and sanity, life and limb.  Or you can be really, really smart and be more discriminating and not get so caught up in shopping it becomes a major distraction.

Whatever you do for the holidays, this is certainly not the way to do it.  If you are that bored with your life, and your life is that stale that mobbing the front of a store, in cold weather yet, seems like a good idea, perhaps you should seriously consider ceasing to populate the earth any further.   We really don’t need more people, and we certainly don’t need more shoppers.

You may see the light.  Or the only lights that may penetrate the huddled masses are the twinkly lights of Holiday Season.   I would say Christmas, but it really has little to do anymore with the birth of Christ, Winter Solstice or whatever else you celebrate.   It is about you and how much you can shop.   It is about shopping, and not really so much about the giving.   You shop till you drop.  Or kill someone.

No matter how you see this, there is one thing you definitely won’t see standing in the middle of a department store, either at 5 A.M. or any other time where getting frazzled and frustrated is considered part of the experience.   Definitely one thing you won’t see.   Me.