I Love You, Let's Meet

Here’s the official announcement:

THE BROOKLYN RAIL PRESENTS RANTRHAPSODY #8
MARCH 18TH, FREDDY’S BACK ROOM, 6:00PM

This month marks the SECOND Brooklyn installment of our lovely, lively and literately non-fictional reading series. We return to the ever-cozy
Freddy’s Back Room (495 Dean St., at 6th Ave. in Brooklyn; near the Bergen 2, 3 and all the Atlantic/Pacific trains: 4,5,B,D,Q,N,R,W,M), where
admission is free, the beer is cheep and the crowd unruly. Please
join us for the edifying, amusing, anecdotal, analytical, political,
polemical, and poignant musings of the following angry and/or euphoric
writers:

Gabriel Thompson, author, There’s No Jose Here
Jean Railla, author, Get Crafty
Bill Batson, community activist, Develop Don’t Destroy
Doug Cordell, Playwright
Virginia Vitzhum, author, I Love You, Let’s Meet
An Xiao, poet, contributor to Tanka Fields
Sabine Heinlein, Rail Contributor

Online dating is a natural for Baghdad–you’ll get killed if you go outside, and even if your city wasn’t under siege, you’d need a chaperone to date.

There’s some great stuff in this exhaustive article, including the book title Men Are Pigs But We Love Bacon (me too!) and that bigmuscle.com “operates using the same business model as, say, National Public Radio or PBS.” This page of studs brought to you by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and viewers like you.

I certainly didn’t know gay-bar owners were “loudly complaining to the media about the encroachment on their turf” by online dating sites! I sure haven’t noticed tumbleweeds blowing through Chelsea or the West Village.

Foxy freelancer Katarina Andersson is splashing me all over Swedish media. As a typical monolingual American, I can only assume that the Aftonbladet article is as no-sun-for-months depressing as my English snippets in the radio piece.

I want to tell the Swedes, Hey, it’s not that bad! There are happy stories in my book too!

I don’t think I agree with this Canadian advice columnist’s answer to the 44-year-old virgin. Wouldn’t you want to know that before you met someone?

J-date opens the (back) door.

This story mostly bugged me — this woman’s site seems designed to render online dating even more shallow. Why bother with all those “long word-heavy profiles” when you can make a snap, hot-or-not judgment, based partly on whether the other girls thought a guy was cute? Way to lure the intelligent people, yesnomayb.com!

Also, why would a woman who’s bragging about her tech chops answer the question Do geeks Use your site? with an insistence that, Noooo, her clients are “professional, normal, and lovely”?

She’s not even first with the human TiVo she brags about; chemistry.com was starting to try to glean its customers’ preferences back in 2005. And even before that, match and nerve and others had added their amazon.com-like feature of “like this woman? Here are four more like her.”

On the other hand, thanks to Shiny Shiny (funny name for girl-geek site) for reminding me that it’s International Women’s Day. And in honor of that, I’m going to link to my friend Carolyn’s piece about Somalian ex-pat Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a heroically brave feminist. Certainly a case of strange bedfellows that she’s at a conservative think tank in DC now, but she’s putting women’s rights above religious rites, and we need more like her.

Cherie Currie of the Runaways is a chainsaw sculptor now, check it out.

You get Google Alerts on a topic, and you see how much “news,” especially when you have “blogs” and “news” checked, is the same report (or less) chopped up different ways.

So yeah, I posted about this where the boys are, where the girls are finding before. But I liked this story’s interpretation, which has the ring of a lazy, Dave Barry-esque Mars and Venus generalization that also happens to be true.

the dating powerhouse Match.com had 55 percent women visitors compared with 45 percent men, while Yahoo! personals showed slightly more men than women — 51 percent versus 49 percent — according to Hitwise.

“The more money and time involved in signing up to a dating site [Yahoo is free], the more the site would skew female,” Tancer says. “And, the more free pictures were available the more the site would skew male.”

He adds: “I think what the data shows us … is that women use online dating as an actual service for what it was intended.” Meanwhile “some male users are using dating sites more just to look at pictures of women.”

this may be one of the best uses of online dating I’ve ever heard of.

And finally a legitimate setting for that silly line in so many profiles: “Be willing to lie about how we met.”