Be glad, oh patrons of the world's oldest profession: Nevada's politicians decided against a tax on prostitution, because the more tax the brothels pay, the more influence they have as a genuine business. Because, y'know, there's nothing businesslike about a transaction for services that involves an exchange of money.

Up next on a very special Lancelot Link: A young chimpanzee girl is forced into prostitution, only to be paid in Baconators for her...oh, wait - female chimps in the wild do accept payment of meat for sex, no coercion or violence involved. Now, next time you want to have some hot chimpy sex, you won't have to date her for a month or two before she puts out - bring some Braunschweiger and you won't have to rent that hotel room for the whole night.

Will abolishing prostitution stop human trafficking? Of course not, says "Foreign Policy in Focus", who recognizes that, although obvious, traffickers are doing something illegal - trafficking - and the trafficking is what needs to be stopped through efforts to, you know, stop trafficking rather than using it as an excuse to stop prostitution. The best results can be had by supporting the legal sex workers, so that there's no market for such illegal tomfoolery, and making it easy to monitor who's doing what. FPIF does a good job of pointing out the stupid and contradictory "evidence" used by the abolitionists, who demonize pretty much everyone involved and make absurd accusations like how nearly all Amsterdam hookers are the victims of white slavery.

Craig's List, who had previously said they'd cut down on prostitution ads, still holds the title "single largest source of prostitution". In Chicago, at least, according to a Cook County sheriff, who has noticed, first-hand, that the place to go to find a hooker is Craigslist. Looks like "your mom" is falling further as the correct answer to the question: "where do I find a hooker?", but Craigslist is nowhere near as funny.

I had no idea: the Oscar usually goes to the stripper, or the prostitute, or the sexually-flawed female character. According to the article, it gives women a chance to really act, to fill a complex and nuanced role, which might tell you something about most of the women's roles. The stripper/hooker roles, though, are often positive, sympathetic roles, which is something the Oscars might have, but the real world seems to ignore.

As I mentioned yesterday, a writer is hanging out at the Chicken Ranch, putting up series of blog posts depicting his adventures. For now, they can be seen here, although the author hasn't tagged everything quite the same, so also check his main page -- it would have been nice if the writer created a 'tag' for just this story, so they could all be on one page without any others. My only other recommendation: if you're writing for a blog, don't be so newspapery; shorter, more trivial blog posts in between the more meaty posts act like pull-quotes or sidebars, be! cause people like that stuff. The fun of an article on hookers ordering in Subway because of a power outage holds so much more potential than his dry, facutal article.

Richard Abowitz of the LA Times is going undercover: living at the Chicken Ranch, one of Las Vegas' nearby legal brothels, in hopes of uncovering just what legalized prostitution means. This appears to be the first in a series of poorly-linked, unedited-rough-draft blog posts, because that's what the kids like to read these days, right? Hopefully it won't be hard to keep an eye on his articles; I'd like to hear what he's got to say, if it's not too buried in blog crap.