This is a test of whatever, and if I don’t take it down in time you’ll be wondering what I’m talking about. I’m reading the last line of a hilarious exchange on Craigslist for which I don’t have URL.*

It ought to be loud enough this time.

Pump (RSS)

Pump (MP3)

* As forwarded to me by the inestimable Fossil Darling:

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 – 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level? Here are my questions specifically:

Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms.

What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won’t hurt my feelings. Is there an age range I should be targeting (I’m 25)?

Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I’ve seen really ‘plain jane’ boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What’s the story there?

– Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows – lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY

Please hold your insults – I’m putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it. I wouldn’t be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn’t able to match them – in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.

It’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests 

PostingID: 432279810

THE ANSWER

Dear Pers-431649184:

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament. Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity…in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold…hence the rub…marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease.

In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage. Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as “articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful” as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way. Classic “pump and dump.” I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know.

The American knack for reinventing the procedural impediments of medieval Europe – how to keep anything from happening – never fails to force a little gasp. How could the land of the free and the home of the brave be the depot of the dumb? For eight days, according to William Yardley’s story in the Times, Tania Rider lay pinned in her Honda at the base of a ravine in a Seattle surburb after sliding off the road. For eight days, her husband, Tom, tried to enlist local authorities in a missing-person search. But rules and regulations vitiated his appeals. It was not until Mr Rider offered to present himself as a suspect, knowing that he was innocent of any guilt, that investigators paid attention. They turned on their cell-phone tracing thingies and eventually found his wife within five miles of a transmission tower. Her kidneys were failing, and there were a few broken bones, but youth and good health promised a solid recovery – assuming that Ms Rider will ever be able to overcome the horrible memory of lying helplessly and unhelped at the base of that ravine.  It’s true that the police cannot be expected to open investigations every time someone doesn’t make it home for dinner. Men presumably still tell their wives that they’re just going down to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes,  knowing in their hearts that they plan never to return. But hard and fast rules governing the opening of investigations are inappropriate. Police officers need to be better listeners; and I have no objection to helping them out with obligatory GPS transmitters on all vehicles. When a man comes into the precinct house to report that his wife and her car are missing, attention ought to be paid, because the guy is either telling the truth or he’s a murderer. Either way, it’s a big deal, and no time for parsing the rule book

Ho, my hearties! Don your foul-weather gear! Our shores are about to be swept by Hurricane Tania – not a weather system, but a Force Five Scandal, all the deadlier for appearing, at present, to be free of pecuniary drag. The sentimentality about “9/11” (a semi-mythical event, replete with more heroes than the Iliad, but with tenacious roots in fact) is about to clash with the too-long leashed hounds of critical thinking.

Until just the other day, Tania Head, one of the very few survivors from a tower at or just above the point where the jetliners struck, was the president of the Survivors’ Network. There is no sugggestion that she has done anything wrong (such as misappropriating funds – it’s not even clear how she has supported herself) in this office, but there is also no suggestion, beyond her own, that her story of what happened on the 78th floor of the South Tower bears an iota of truth.

In their Times story, “In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit,” David Dunlop and Serge F Kovalevski portray a woman who exploited the city’s psychological disarray to create a new identity for herself. Heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure, Ms Head’s story worked like an “open, sesame,” to give her entrée to a ring at the circus of grief that became our obligatory entertainment for a few months before it was decided by harder heads that it was time to “move on.”

Ms Head claims to have attended Stanford and Harvard, but her multiple CVs suggest a fabulist without benefit of university training. Eventually and inevitably, a couple of journalists got interested in trying to patch her anecdotes into a coherent quilt. They couldn’t. Let’s see if, say, Rudy can.

What is it with all these kiddies running around Manhattan – in flip-flops? I don’t see any sand; do you?

The last thing I want to do is disappoint my conservative detractors by failing to cluck over the demise of Jeffrey Carter Albrecht, the Texas rock keyboardist who was shot in the head the other day when he banged on a neighbor’s door. Actually, it was his girlfriend’s neighbor. Mr Albrecht had “assaulted” her, according to the Times, and she had locked him out of her house. It was actually late at night, not during the day. I suspect that alcohol was involved. Why else would Mr Albrecht have beaten on a stranger’s back door?

The decedent’s mother, Judith, said of the shooter – who was acting within his rights under Texas law – that she thought “he could have made another choice.” Another choice? But that’s Texas for you. Ladies, even moms, are too polite to say “a better choice.”

Had I been defending my castle against unknown door-pounders, I’d have issued a preliminary warning. Something about stepping back or I’ll be shooting. Perhaps that’s what the shooter thought he was doing when he aimed high. How could he know that Mr Albrecht was six-five?

You can be sure that the good old boys of Texas are still laughing about this one.

There’s a sad story in today’s Metro section, about New Jersey brothers who aren’t speaking to each other because they disagree about illegal immigration. Bryan Lonegan has long been an attorney representing people with immigration problems. His brother, Steve, has long been a very conservative businessman and politician. The brothers could deal with that. But when Steve, currently the mayor of Bogota, NJ, hopped on the anti-illegal immigration bandwagon – an issue that Bryan finds opportunistic at best – his brother objected.

Before, his conservatism was his business. Now he’s on my turf.

Shades of Antigone.

Anyone who hasn’t yet awakened to the realization that Rudy Giuliani would make a worse president than W has been – impossible as that might seem – ought to have a look at Stephen Schlesinger’s review of the Giuliani foreign–policy statement.

From the current London Review of Books, the following hilarious paragraph from John Lanchester’s review of The Blair Years: Extracts From the Alistair Campbell Diaries:

One of Campbell’s foci is ‘TB’s terrible sense of style, e.g. the awful pullover he wore on his walk with Bush and the dreadful creation he wore on the plane’. This becomes a running gag. ‘TB was wearing Nicole Farhi shoes, ludicrous-looking lilac-coloured pyjama-style trousers and a blue smock. After GB left, I said he looked like Austin Powers. He said you are the second person today who’s said that.’ The next day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was just jealous – how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly homoerotic about the governmental milieu described here, full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all coming to blows (Mandelson v. Campbell in the course of an argument about whether Blair should wear a tie), bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things about each other behind each others’ backs, and ruthlessly doing each other down while secretly knowing that they are mutually dependent. Anyone being sent to a girls’ boarding school would do well to prepare by reading The Blair Years. The cover photo is part of this, Blair looking up at Campbell with an expression of submissive yearning that verges on the pornographic.

The idea of a parent giving a thirteen year-old girl a copy of The Blair Years is asphyxiatingly funny.

What is it about the American psyche that hates maintenance? Is it the reminder that we’re still where we were? We haven’t moved on to some fresh paradise, haven’t built sparkling new cities in the middle of nowhere? Samuel L Schwartz, New York’s chief engineer for four years twenty years ago writes an understandably impatient Op-Ed piece today. “Catch Me, I’m Falling,” about how much money we would save if we took care of our bridges instead of waiting for them to crack. Not to mention lives.

Rather than lubricating the bearing plates that allow the Williamsburg Bridge to slide back and forth with changes in temperature and loads, we let the bearing plates jam, which cracked the concrete pedestal the span sat on. Twice a year we needed to stop traffic, jack the bridge up and slide the pedestal back in place. Instead of coating the bridge’s steel, we allowed it to become nearly paper-thin. This required the replacement of beams, which made the repairs eligible for federal funds, instead of merely a paint job with city money.

And what is a story about the whiff of corruption, coming from programs for studying abroad, doing on the front page?

Comes now an ill-written account of the work of economic historian Gregory Clark. Nicholas Wade’s “In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence” is one of the gobbledy-gookiest things that I’ve read in the Times in a long time, but it’s typical of the paper’s ability to make hash of new ideas. The first paragraph recites the passage of some (mostly Western) cultures from “abject poverty” to “amazing affluence” via “the industrial revolution” – a revolution that has never been satisfactorily explained. (Why did it happen where and when it did?) Here is the second paragraph:

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers for both questions.

Suffice it to say that Dr Clark theorizes that Malthusian pressures on the English population led to genetic changes favoring the nonviolence, self-discipline, and ability to save that characterize the middle classes. It’s an interesting idea, and quite possibly correct. But Mr Wade’s second paragraph is so deadly that few readers will get far enough to form an opinion. Who cares about scholars spending twenty years in the archives? Give us the sexy bit: human evolution, which most people seem to think of as having ceased, proceeds as we speak! 

Five thousand years, ago, scientists say, everyone was lactose-intolerant.  Adults could not digest milk. Then God created Denmark and Holland. It didn’t take long for Man to invent Ice Cream.

Maybe this is the problem with newspapers: where a magazine such as The New Yorker would write up Dr Clark’s ideas, the Times is more interested in the academic debate surrounding them. The debate is “news.” Everyone seems to agree that Dr Clark has made some rock-solid findings, but not everyone agrees with his interpretation. The Times projects the debate about that interpretation, which may be lively enough to insiders, ahead of the interpretation itself. General readers who are unfamiliar with Dr Clark’s theories, however, are unlikely to care about the debate. 

Reading The New York Times this morning was very strange. The paper is now a column narrower than it was yesterday (and forever before). The Times says that it’s a purely pragmatic move that will have no effect upon content, but that’s manifestly impossible. The paper certainly isn’t going to reduce its ad space. I’m not really complaining, though. The Times has lost so much of my respect in the past seven years that I consider dropping it at least once a week. “The paper of record” – hah!

There’s an interesting editorial about language: is it a uniquely human thing, or can animals talk, too? All right, what’s interesting is that the Times is editorializing about what seems to me to be a totally religious issue, where “religious” means “believing that human beings are not animals.”

In a new book called “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally catalogs the complex debate over language and includes one particularly revealing experiment in which scientists put two male apes who knew sign language together. One might have expected these guys to start grousing about their keepers, to wonder at beings that are all thumbs and actually seem to enjoy giving away bananas. But, no, they started madly signing at each other, a manual shouting match, and in the end, neither appeared to actually listen to the other.

So, are two creatures actually conversing if they’re both talking and nobody is listening? Where does talking-without-listening put one in the animal brain chain?

Let’s see, talking without listening. Many wives can think of someone who might qualify. Teenagers do, easily. And parents of teenagers. Also, a lot of successful politicians and talk show hosts.

Whoever wrote the editorial left out Woody Allen’s movies. Have you ever noticed how rarely his characters listen to one another?

The narrower broadsheets are really unsettling.