Just a note to all y'all, that I have successfully retrieved my Watson from the airport, and will probably not be blogging loads for a little while. I'm not dead, I'm just Sherpa-ing her around Boston. She also grew up in Arizona; if I just let her loose on the streets of Cambridge, I'm pretty sure we'd never see her again.

I was talking to someone a couple of days ago who asked why the US was involved in so damn many of these Air Crash Investigations things. The obvious answer is that it's a NatGeo series and most of their stuff is produced in the US -- I'm told the episodes with a British-accented narrator are re-dubs for airing in Europe, with or without subtitling. They don't profile a lot of cases that were investigated elsewhere because prior to the Soviet Union disintegrating, we had basically no documentation about what happened in Soviet airspace (to the point where even aircraft we recognized had NATO callsigns, because we didn't always know their proper model designations), and there are still big parts of the world where they don't tell us nutin' about nutin'. The principle reason we know anything about aviation incidents in Iran or China, in fact, is that they've bought a load of Tupolevs and Illushins, and the Russians responsible for supplying parts for those talk to us now.

The other answer is that the US is heavily involved in aviation, in all phases. There's a lot of international aviation law, somewhere between international maritime law and the Pirate Code in official status, that governs who does all the looking when a plane goes down. The formal governing code is administered by the ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, which belongs to the United Nations, and at least in theory is adhered to by all the member states thereof. The ICAO processes for investigations allow for participation of a number of parties in air crash investigations, including:

1. The state governing the airport where the flight took off;
2. The state governing the airport where the flight was supposed to land; 
3. The state governing the air traffic control center handling the flight at the time of the incident, if it was neither 1 nor 2;
4. The state(s) governing the specific plot(s) of land where all the pieces of the airplane ended up, if it wasn't 1, 2, or 3;
5. The state in which the aircraft was first manufactured;
6. The state in which the aircraft was registered;
7. The state in which the airline responsible for the aircraft's maintenance and the crew's training is based, if different from 6;
8. Representatives from the manufacturers of specific parts of the plane that may become suspect in the course of the investigation, regardless of where in the world they are, if they're none of the above;
9. Representatives from a state which had particularly important citizens on the flight in question;

...plus anyone else the people running the investigation opt to call when they don't know the answer, and the host asks them if they would like to Phone A Friend. 

In practice, the NTSB, the official investigative body in the US, fields a lot of requests. They qualify under #5 a significant amount of the time. Boeing, based in Washington State, has sold hulls to too many airlines in too many countries to enumerate here. Since they ate their major competitor McDonnell Douglas in 1997, they've also inherited responsibility for the upkeep on any of the latter's craft which are still certified airworthy. They're not much in demand as passenger liners anymore, but FedEx Air Cargo still has a fleet of DC-10s (upgraded with the later McDonnell Douglas glass cockpit modules, known colloquially now as "MD-10s") and MD-11s based in Atlanta that carry most of their airmail packages. In less affluent areas of the world, you still occasionally find someone running an air taxi service with a turboprop DC-8. A significant number of manufacturers building light general-aviation craft and small business jets, like Cessna and Learjet, are also US-based.

The NTSB isn't the only organization fielding these calls, either. Its French equivalent, the BEA (Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses) gets a significant part of the load for much the same reasons. Airbus, formally Airbus Industrie, is based in France, as are a number of companies that produced smaller jets as a portion of their output, like Dassault. The UK also comes in from time to time; they have not produced the most popular airframes for a good fifty years or so, but Rolls Royce still does a brisk trade in jet engines.

[The Brits were at the forefront of civil aviation post-WWII and continued research and development for many years, most famously working with the French to develop the Concorde. Doing everything first unfortunately also means doing everything wrong first, and public faith in British engineering was shaken when a couple of de Havilland Comets suffered from explosive decompression -- exactly what it sounds like -- in quick succession. The Comet was the first passenger jetliner with a cabin pressurized to the equivalent of about 10,000 ft above sea level whilst the actual plane was flying at altitude, and de Havilland didn't anticipate the extra strain this would put on the squared-off corners of all the windows. Prior to that, when you only had to worry about crew, you either flew unpressurized and didn't go above about 10,000 feet, or you gave the pilot supplemental oxygen and stayed under 25,000 feet. The Comet had an intended cruise ceiling of 42,000 feet, what would be FL420 today if anyone ever hung around up there, which only Concorde really did.

IIRC, it was actually the transparent window protecting the radio antenna on the Comets that failed. If you ever wondered why the windows on airplanes have rounded corners, it's so the fuselage doesn't kerplode during cruise. If you ever wondered why the windows on trains have rounded corners, it's because many of the passenger cars age as slowly as airliners do, and were designed by people who were around in the '60s and '70s when jet planes were the epitome of coolness and speedy travel.]

The NTSB (and the BEA) are also often involved even when they don't qualify for any reason on the list, simply because they have a great deal of practice at this. We complain about the economy now, but we still have a lot of infrastructure and equipment lying around from back when we had cash and pre-approved credit cards coming out the ears, most of which is for hire if someone offers nicely to help with the per-diem. Some American companies and the US Navy -- although not the NTSB this time -- were involved in the investigation of Air France 447, simply because if you need to find something under ten thousand feet of water after its transponder batteries have run out, the three countries you would ask for deep-sea search and mapping equipment are the US, France, and Russia, and one of the three keeps most of its toys in the wrong ocean. Otherwise, nobody would have asked our opinion; it was a French plane flown by the French flag carrier, manufactured by a French company, leaving Rio de Janeiro for Paris, and scheduled to pass through Senegalese and Cape Verdean ATC on the way.

I'm also given to understand that the NTSB is unusually accessible for people who want to make documentaries about aviation incidents. It's accountable mainly to the public, and only secondarily to the air travel industry. Bureaucracy-wise it's unbeholden to the Federal Aviation Administration, who actually set down all the rules about what you can and cannot do in US airspace, and completely unconnected to the criminal justice system, except insofar as their official conclusions can be used as expert testimony in court. They are even less dependent on the manufacturers or the individual airlines and airport consortia. It's the closest practical thing to an independent investigations board -- they are officially, and largely unofficially, immune to interference from either the people they're investigating, or the people paying their salaries.

In practice, the FAA pays a lot of attention to their results, and much of the rest of the world pays attention to what the FAA says. The US is a huge part of the air travel industry for obvious reasons, and, although the FAA technically has no legal authority over other people's airplanes, they do dictate what kinds of certification you need to fly here. Sometimes an NTSB incident report results in what's called an "Airworthiness Directive", which is a piece of paper issued by the FAA that outlines in exactly what conditions one must keep one's aircraft if one wishes to continue operating out of a US airport. You can't legally force foreign nationals to comply with it, but you damn well can decree that anyone who lands here with a craft in violation of it will have said multi-million dollar aircraft effectively impounded wherever it is, because it until you fix it, it is not allowed to take off again.

The EU has also recently begun to notice that both it and its individual member states have the power to enforce the equivalent of an airworthiness directive by saying 'fix it or don't fly over us'. There were a few years where the European Union flatly refused to let anyone based in any part of Indonesia lob anything over their continent, on the grounds that they didn't think it was too fussy of them to insist that your planes should land in one piece at an aerodrome more often than not. Garuda Indonesia was the primary culprit there, out of a disastrous combination of poor maintenance and terrible crew training. Several accidents were caused by incredibly stupid human error, like the one where a 737 pilot tried to put the plane down going much too fast and without extending the flaps, blatantly ignoring both a series of cockpit alarms and a co-pilot that were telling him not to goddamn do that.

Poland was involved in that, mind you. When the people who own LOT think you don't know how to manage an airline, you are obviously doing something wrong. I suppose you can't really blame LOT for running what amounted to regularly-scheduled hijackings during the Cold War, though -- they flew service to East Berlin, and it was the custom at the time to grant political asylum to the hijackers, the crew, and really anyone else on the plane who felt like asking for it, provided they landed the thing politely on the capitalist side of the Wall. You get the feeling that after the first couple of times, the hijackers just barged into the cockpit and went, "So... West Berlin today?" and the LOT pilot just shrugged and requested clearance from ATC.

I was at CVS the other day, and a lady near the front door handed me a sample of some sort of fancy "age-defying" cream. I'm not especially interested in it, as it's expensive by CVS standards and contains a lot of unnecessary glop in the base that my face won't appreciate, but I found the ingredients list rather interesting. It's essentially using sunscreen compounds for what Mog and I refer to as "the other use".

[Mog also speaks Japanese, at least to the extent that she didn't die while in Tokyo for a semester. The phrase on English-language instructions that's customarily rendered as "only to be used as directed" has a Japanese-language equivalent that literally translates to "not to be used for the other use". Moggie has taken this as a guiding principle of life, and uses things for the other use whenever possible.]

There are two kinds of sunscreens in the world: physical and chemical. Physical sunscreens work by reflecting UV light. Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide work like this, as does whatever clothing you're wearing. You can only use them in applications where you don't mind seeing the stuff -- titania is used a lot in SPF 15 foundation, since the idea of foundation is to cover your skin anyway, but zinc is mostly used by lifeguards who mind white noses less than they mind sunburns.

Chemical sunscreens work by absorbing UV photons into their chemical structure. Shelf-stable chemical structures don't usually have a lot of room for extra energy like that, so one of two things happens, after the new photon has finished shoving its way in. Either the substance undergoes some kind of chemical transformation, with the new influx of energy going towards breaking and reforming molecular bonds, or the substance kicks the energy back out in the form of other photons. Compounds that break down under UV are single-use only, and have to be continually reapplied as the reaction will proceed for as long as you're exposing them to ultraviolet light, but compounds that re-radiate the energy will continue to function until they decompose for some other environmental reason, or until you sweat them off, which makes them quite popular.

[Glow paint isn't always fussy about the sort of photons it takes in, either. Back in the bad old days of radiation science, they used to use radium salts as the source of photons to make a phosphorous pigment glow. You might be thinking this was a terrible idea, and you would be right. Radium is a gamma emitter, and as it turns out, gamma-level photons react with a lot of things, including humans, for whom they are rather unhealthy. Phosphorous was also not a walk in the park, as it liked to elbow calcium out of bones and cause all manner of structural problems there. More modern glow pigments use metallic salts that are much less toxic -- I mean, don't go eating the stuff, but it won't kill you with proximity.]

In many cases, the photons kicked back out are in the same part of the spectrum as the photons that went in. The best explanation I can get as to why metal is shiny is the same reason metal is conductive, which is that it looooves to meet and get to know new particles. In the case of electrons, they're welcomed right in and passed through the internal structure like a game of Hot Potato. In the case of photons, they're greeted warmly and then immediately given the boot. Casting visible light on metal makes it kick back a visible shine; casting invisible light on it, such as infrafred, makes it kick back energy in the IR part of the spectrum instead, i.e., heat.

In the case of sunscreens, the absorbed photons are in the UV part of the spectrum, but the emitted photons are not. That would defeat the purpose of sunscreen -- the whole point is to keep UV away from the skin, so something that took in UV energy and then re-emitted UV energy would be exactly what you don't want. The compounds they use in this "age-defying" stuff absorb UV from sunlight and then kick it back out as a faint visible glow. This is the exact same thing your "brightening" laundry detergent does, except your laundry soap has compounds meant to permanently stick to (dye) your clothes, and emit in a slightly bluer wavelength to counteract the natural yellowing that many fabrics undergo as a result of age and use.

It also has much the same effect as the blur filter so popular on the old Star Trek series, which is that when everything looks like it's glowing slightly, it's a lot harder to pick out pores and wrinkles. The top layer of your skin is slightly translucent to begin with, and has some diffusion effect on the light reflected off your face, but how much varies with your pigmentation, your age, the moisture content of the air and your epidermis, the surface texture of your skin, the angle of incidence, whatever else you've painted on your face, the phase of the moon, etc.

I've not bothered looking much at the Airbus A380, other than that one time the engine went kerplooie on a Qantas flight. ("Uncontained engine failure" is Engineer for "something broke and chunks of the compressor blades shot out through the engine cowling in all directions". It hit a bunch of important aircraft parts and threw debris into the other engines, but missed the passengers, and the plane landed safely back in Singapore.) I'm unlikely to run into one any time soon, as no US operators have ordered any. Every time I fly, I get stuffed into an A330, the 1998 Toyota Corolla of airliners. They're everywhere and they work, but they're a million years old, they're not all that big, they don't look very glamorous, and you'll never impress your date with one.

I'm kind of sorry now that I didn't. This thing looks fucking astounding.

Airplanes have to get going pretty fast to get off the ground. The reason liftoff is so loud is that the engines are generally running at or close to 100% power while you're streaming along the runway, so that the airplane will hit what's called V_2min -- the lowest velocity at which pointing the nose upwards will make the thing safely leave the ground -- before you run out of tarmac. (V₁ is the 'point of no return', i.e., the velocity at which you have to punch it and finish your take off, because you no longer have enough pavement left to safely stop.) They go pretty fast once in the air, too, but watching most things take off is like watching runners in the 100m dash. You have just under two miles of runway to get a jumbo jet from stopped to about 190 mph so you can get airborne. The acceleration is massive.

The A380 is enormous. It has two full decks and carries about 500 people when fully booked. Average take off speed is about 160 mph, and while you wouldn't think that 30 mph would make all that much of a difference, combined with the relative lack of engine noise, it makes the craft downright eerie. If other airliners look like they're taking off at a dead sprint, then this thing looks like it lifts off at a vague jog.


A380 Minimum Velocity Takeoff -- this is actually a tail-strike test, where they attempt takeoff at such a low velocity that in order to get off the ground they have to yank the nose up so hard they drag the underbelly of the aircraft on the tarmac. Not recommended in normal operation, but allowed in a dire emergency, and very impressive nonetheless.


A380 Arctic Takeoff Test -- cold air is denser than hot air and generally improves the takeoff characteristics, from a strictly engine-and-lift oriented perspective. They're also going somewhat faster, and not trying to whack the fuselage on the ground this time.

No one has had occasion to try to glide an A380, at least not yet, but informal flight sim tests suggest it's got a lift-to-drag ratio somewhere between 16 and 20:1. I wouldn't be surprised. The airplane is positively gargantuan, but the wingspan is even more so than the passenger/cargo compartment. It wants to stay in the air so badly that you float it down sideways in a crosswind.


Crosswind landing test in Brest -- plus a crosswind takeoff, where the pilot floats up crab-wise as well. Looks like it's also a contaminated runway test (where "contaminated" means "wet, icy, or otherwise covered in something that won't behave like pavement for braking purposes"). The little jet that lands first and very wobbly is a prototype Falcon model from Dassault. They make small luxury tri-jets with pointy noses and those characteristic little flick-ups at the ends of the wings. Falcons are reportedly nice little critters to fly, with a surprisingly long range and an operational ceiling of about 50,000 ft, which actually puts them above a lot of jetliners in a pinch. Dassault also makes fancy fighter jets, which probably surprises no one. Better footage of an Icelandic certification flight that won't let me embed.

I've also seen a lot of people complain that this thing looks like a Beluga whale on wings. No, that's the Short 360 -- equally accurately described as "a pregnant minivan with its arms out". The A380 certainly looks different. Other airliners, the less-stubby Boeings especially, tend to look as though the fuselage is being carried with its weight slung in a cradle, as if an enormous hand had got the plane by the wingtips and the passenger compartment is just hanging in between them. (Here's a B787 Dreamliner demo for comparison.) It's not an optical illusion, the wings actually do flex upwards in flight; they're supposed to, because if they were too stiff to move, they'd break. The underside of the A380's wings curve the other way, giving it a faintly Art Deco-ish arched appearance. It looks more like it's sitting on an antigravity platter than being swung through the air.

It also looks like Airbus has gone with a smoother-looking set of control surfaces. You don't actually need a completely contiguous wing, as long as you can get contiguous air flow across it. Since more surface area means more lift at a lower speed, this means that most airliners deploy full flaps (the moving bits at the back edge) when slowing down to land. If you happen to be sitting amidships at a window in a 737, you can watch the trailing edge of the wing come apart with a solid, hydraulic SSSHTHK noise as you descend for landing. (This, like the wing flapping bit, makes people who already hate airplanes freak the fuck out right as you arrive, and is why I try always to get the window seat if I'm travelling with someone more neurotic than myself.) The Dreamliner is less self-disassembling than previous planes, but there's still no obvious structural support underneath what look like big metal panels about to fall off the wing. Airbus craft generally have small nacelle-y things that the flaps slide over top of instead.

I've started watching Air Crash Investigations again. You'd think these things would terrify me, but I find them fascinating. Given the sheer amount of flying people on this planet do, and how improbable the machines they do it in, I find it rather comforting that major incidents are so rare that I've already heard of most of the ones they dug up to put on TV.

If I didn't have such faith in airplanes, living anywhere near Boston would drive me bonkers. Depending on the wind, one of the standard departures doglegs from Logan goes right over Medford. They don't go over alarmingly low -- over populated areas, over FL100, I believe is the general rule set by the FAA, mostly for noise reasons -- but every so often someone executes a go-around in a heavy, and you can see the livery on the plane's underbelly.

I'm also given to understand that one of the reasons the locals are not impressed by Revere Beach is because jets keep whizzing by overhead. Logan has two runways long enough to land a loaded transoceanic 747-400 or A380; the glide slope from the north to 4R/22L goes right along the shoreline. You get a pretty good view of takeoffs and landings going the other way from Castle Island, to the south.

Nosing around on the internet, I'm surprised by how few accidents and incidents -- NTSB-speak for "plane wrecks" -- Logan has. (Two of the 9/11 planes took off from Boston, but I don't count that; that's a failure of humanity right there, not of piloting, ATC, or equipment.) I wondered if perhaps the reports were sparse because they listed anything that cleared the coastline as "crashed in the ocean", but they don't seem to. Several of the reports say the plane went into Massachusetts Bay, which is right off the end of the runway, in the very literal and mildly alarming sense that the only thing underneath the wheels of your arriving flight is water right up until the moment you thump onto the tarmac.

Every few years someone does something ill-advised and whacks into another plane while taxiing or busts their gear in an emergency landing, but I can't find a hull loss with fatalities since a DC-10 failed to take off and sluiced sideways into Boston Harbor in 1982. There was an alarming near-miss in 2005, where an Aer Lingus Airbus and a US Airways 737 had inadvertently been given clearance for takeoff on intersecting runways (the 737 pilot ducked, basically, and delayed his takeoff for another thousand meters or so to run under the Aer Lingus jet), but otherwise the nearest thing to a horrifying tragedy was EgyptAir 990 in 1999, which was neither departing from nor landing at Logan, but happened to go down in international waters somewhere off the coast of Nantucket.

That's pretty good, considering Logan is in the top 20 airports in the US for passengers, and top 10 for cargo. During peak hours, they have flights leaving only a couple minutes apart -- just long enough so that nobody is taking off into anyone else's wake. The giant roil of hot air you get behind a jumbo jet is called "wake turbulence", and it's a known hazard of crowded airspace. Trying to fly through it is uncomfortably bumpy at best; at worst, if you have dodgy rudder control for some reason, it might mean you hit the ground much sooner and much faster than you intended.

Some of the incidents they profile over the course of the series are just mind-boggling. Boeing airliners are particularly tough bastards -- you might have guessed that if I mentioned that all of their airliners through the 767 models share a basic frame design with an equivalent model produced for the US Air Force. (Most of them are troop transports and mid-air refueling tankers, although the 737 variant was used as a navigation trainer, and Air Force One is a heavily-refitted 747.) I would not be surprised if the issues they've had with the Triple Seven and the Dreamliner came about partly because they weren't required to bang on them until they met military spec. The USAF is not very patient with people who dither over seat pitch while failing to notice that their batteries are on fire.

A 747, as it turns out, has a glide profile of about 16:1, meaning that it'll go about 16 feet forward for every foot it falls, with all engines shut down. This is shit for a purpose-built unpowered craft, but fantastic for something that weighs 400,000 lbs when completely empty -- it's about equivalent to a hang glider. Lucky for British Airways 009, which ran into a cloud of fine volcanic ash south of Java and had all four engines flame out while the cabin filled with what they thought at the time was sulfurous smoke. They had to make an instrument landing in perfectly clear weather at Jakarta, as the cockpit windows had all been sandblasted into uselessness. The 767 now known as the Gimli Glider got about 12:1, but the pilot was intentionally sideslipping the plane in order to get himself down low enough for a landing.

(Actually, the plane isn't known as anything anymore; she's in the boneyard at Mojave, where old aircraft are sent away to die. Google Maps has a clear satellite photo here. You're looking for a 767-233, an almost perfectly square plane -- length 159ft, wingspan 156ft -- with a slender fuselage and one engine slung under each wing. If you want her, she's apparently still there, minus her Air Canada uniform, on sale for a cool $3 million.)

Boeing planes are also fairly nimble for their size. The general consensus is that you could barrel roll all of them without stalling -- although I don't think anyone has tried it since Tex Johnston rolled a prototype 707 in 1955 during a sales demo, twice, and was most emphatically told to never do that again -- and probably loop all but the biggest ones. Pilots tend to avoid banking steeply mostly because drink carts and carry-on luggage don't respond well to being turned over sideways. The most extreme survivable incident I know of for a loaded 747 is China Airlines 006, which, due to a panoply of cumulative fuck-ups and sleep deprivation, ended up briefly flying at a 90° bank and pulled about 5g off the coast of California before the pilots woke up enough to right her and land rightthefucknow in San Francisco. They broke the landing gear, lost big chunks of the tail, and bent the wings several inches out of true, but after repairs the airframe went on to fly for more than a decade afterwards.

It's also possible, though distinctly not fun, to bring an airliner in for a deadstick landing, which is the kindest possible term for a landing in which your airplane is so broken you have lost all available control surfaces, and no longer have any way to steer. I don't know if it's true with the newer models, but I'm given to understand that the Boeings are less abominable than the Airbuses for this -- Airbus planes in the past have been heavy on the beeping gizmos end of the spectrum, whereas Boeing hung onto physical linkage systems as long as they could. Deadstick landings often result in what are called "hull-loss incidents" (i.e., plane is in so many crumpled pieces it's written off as scrap) but the odd one has gone miraculously well. TACA 110 lost all engines to rain and hail far in excess of design specs, and the pilot managed to not only put her down on a wet, grassy levee in Louisiana with no loss of life, but also with no major injuries, no damage to the airframe, and in such excellent shape that, after some engine work, the investigation team was able to taxi out and take off again from a nearby roadway. Amusingly, the makeshift runway was there in the first place because the pilot had managed to land on a plot of land belonging to the Michoud Assembly Facility, near New Orleans -- it belongs to NASA, and the paved roads were used for getting external fuel tanks for the Space Shuttles out of the plant and on their way to the Kennedy Space Center.

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - "The Disappearing Scientists"

The Adventures of Sam Spade - "Subject: Edith Hamilton"

Box 13 - "Mexican Maze"

"What you need," says one of my friends, "is a patron. In the Renaissance sense."

This is probably true, but unfortunately I was born in the wrong time for it to happen. On the flip-side, I get to wear trousers and have access to medical care more sophisticated than leeches and quicksilver. Overall, I think I've come out ahead.

The idea also makes me quite nervous. Like most other modern women, the closest I've come to having experience with "I'll lay out money so that you can flit about doing awesome things" is exchanging beauty and charm for comestibles, i.e., paying attention to some dude who wants to buy me dinner. If I could actually get anyone to understand that this is what is going on, I'd be fine with it -- modeling is essentially exchanging my presence and ability to not be terrified by cameras for money and/or credit, after all. Modeling, however skeezy people occasionally try to get, is a recognized commercial occupation, and as such I have legal and social backup if I need to enforce the business aspect. There's not much anyone can do if I decide I've had enough and inform whoever hired me that my job is done now, and they need to cough up my money/portfolio prints just prior to going the fuck away.

Exchanging money for company is murkier. It is a technically legit business, and is the 100% legal service advertised by "escort" agencies. (I believe that regulation-wise, it falls in the same negotiable area as personal assistants and non-medical companions for the elderly.) Unfortunately, it's so often a cover for prostitution that it's difficult if not impossible to actually work at escorting without the customers expecting you to put out at the end of the night. Jobs that genuinely involve standing around, looking attractive and making conversation, are referred to as "hostessing", they advertise for models in the same places I get work from artists, and still sometimes serve as a cover for expensive hookers. Depending on assignment, even the non-hooking ones may fall under the umbrella of "sex work", as strippers, phone sex operators, and professional dominatrices do.

And if they're not erotic in nature, they pay for shit. Business-wise, in that context, your wits are worth nothing, and you're considered a warm body with a pulse that might be able to take tickets without fucking something up. Waiting tables pays more, because then you have to also be able to carry things without spilling them.

It is even riskier doing things like that in a non-business setting. Customers do get pissed at sex workers, for one reason or another, but it's relatively uncommon for them to take something personally. They lose their temper for the same reasons people lose their temper at customer service peons, which is that they think it's your job to kowtow and you're not doing it well enough. If you take up being Holly Golightly as a part-time job, it is well-nigh impossible to convince anyone you pay attention to that you're not falling head-over-heels in love with them. You can outright tell them that you're talking to them because they bought you something, but they never believe they're not playing the Richard Gere character in a remake of Pretty Woman. It's rather akin to taking a one-time job to install someone's business network, and having them hope against hope that you're just sitting there waiting for them to call at 3am, begging you to fix whatever their porn browsing broke on their home PC, except that people are rarely if ever killed in a jealous rage over technical support.

(For the record, I've never managed to see all of the movie Breakfast At Tiffany's. I'm given to understand it ends in the traditional movie fashion, with the leads paired up for a happily-ever-after. I have read the book, however, in which Holly fucks off to South America because she's mixed up in a murder trial, and the protagonist is left with some bewildering memories and Holly's irresponsibly-released cat. Capote was not good at happy endings.)

It also very quickly gets insulting. People expect your undivided attention while they're buying you things, and for you to be available for some indefinite time afterwards. It implies that your company is worth so much less than the price of the "date" that you end the evening indebted to them. And that isn't even getting into the entitlement issues that surround what people tend to think you owe them, which is an entirely different kettle of very dangerous fish.

I'll accept getting into clubs and getting comped drinks by the bartender because I'm wearing a push-up bra and a very short skirt. That's strictly business, with clubs -- it's unofficial payment for being a shop-window mannequin, essentially, because the more attention-getting the women are inside your establishment, the more hopeful men will line up outside and hemorrhage money once you let them in. Once you start accepting drinks from individual people, though, it can get hairy in a hurry.

So I'm very, very wary of accepting random money just for being me. It's not that I don't think I'm awesome, it's that I can't guarantee that I'll stay awesome in the way the patron wants, or at a constant rate, and I'm accustomed to people getting royally peeved at me when I deviate from expectations.