Personal Dork Assistant

Good and Bad

A great set of articles in this week's New York Times Magazine. The story about the sexual slavery of young (as in 10-13 years young!) women is the kind of thing that makes me want to crawl into bed and hide under the covers. It's not just that these girls are being raped and tortured daily for years on end. It's the vast machinery that takes, processes, and exploits them so damn efficiently. Everyone from Russian Mafia, Mexican street thugs, to American professionals who are paying 100 times markup for the sloppy seconds of said thugs. The fact that the girls are young, scared, and psychologically broken is actually a selling point for the johns.

Most of the girls on Santo Tomas would have sex with 20 to 30 men a day; they would do this seven days a week usually for weeks but sometimes for months before they were ''ready'' for the United States. If they refused, they would be beaten and sometimes killed. They would be told that if they tried to escape, one of their family members, who usually had no idea where they were, would be beaten or killed. Working at the brutalizing pace of 20 men per day, a girl could earn her captors as much as $2,000 a week. In the U.S., that same girl could bring in perhaps $30,000 per week.

The article doesn't even pretend to offer any hope or solutions to the problem, so intractible it seems. And the reporter only followed the Mexico-American axis with mentions of Eastern Europe. Let's not even get into the sort of stuff going on in Asia. It seemed like every day in Taiwan there would be a new case of smuggled mainland women in the news. Of course, the cameras only chase after the women, not the people behind the operation or the paying customers.

Norah Jones' PR-flack must be hopping mad that her softball profile got stuck in the same issue with the grim main article. I don't care how talented and humble you are, it's hard not to seem like a spoiled bitch in comparison to those poor girls.

The apartment is hardly haute, either: walking around the first floor, you can see just how little time Jones has had for anything extramusical. There's a piano, Alexander's ceiling-high double bass, silos of CD's, audiogeek equipment that Alexander bought off eBay, but no newspapers, no art, no real decor, except the silver foil Christmas decoration that Jones's mother pinned to the ceiling. The room does have a distinct temperature: all the music, from a Ray Charles box set to a John Prine LP to the current Blur CD to the Thorens turntable and speakers with tubes, even the books -- David Sedaris, Sylvia Plath, ''Vanity Fair'' -- are set to the same cultural thermostat, about 44 degrees F.

Seems like an awesome lady, but the thought of "too cool for school" does come to mind.

I'd be all over the Treo 600, too, if I could get Sprint reception at home. A camera-PDA-phone is obviously sexy to a gadget-guy like me, but the article perfectly captures the wider appeal of the uber-device.

If conspicuous consumption is about showing off an item that's needlessly expensive (a $6,000 shower curtain that doesn't keep water off the bathroom floor any better than the one from Kmart), the promise of a gadget like the Treo 600 takes this idea in a different direction: it implies almost limitless functionality, practicality and maybe even a certain technical wizardry on the part of the owner. (Surely there's some skill involved in tracking down and installing the third-party applications that make this little bundle live up to its full potential, right?) This is conspicuous utility.

I am totally down with the "conspicuous utility" thing, paying the premium for things that just work better, e.g. Powerbook, iPod, and Tivo. The latest example, as part of my quest to make the home theater workable by mom, is the Home Theater Master MX700 remote control. Sure it's a $170 remote, but it was a good eBay deal considering that it retails for $300, and it is the most programmable hard-button remote available, thanks to the PC-link and software. Sure, I gave the Pronto a shot, but the B/W screen just doesn't have enough contrast, and the all-touchscreen interface isn't as couch-potato-friendly as the classic button-clicker format. It's annoying to see people buy a pile of hot-shot HT equipment, and then complain about how their wives can't handle it. Well, that's because there's ten remotes on the table and a zillion steps involved in turning on the TV and receiver, and switching both components to the correct inputs, etc. before a picture will even show up on the screen. On the other hand, they probably have a life.