It Is Far Away, It Is Hot, And It Is Not Named Mel Gibson

Phil Plait at Discover:

Astronomers have confirmed that an object in an image from 2008 — thought at the time to possibly be a direct image of a planet orbiting another star — is in fact a planet.

I’ll explain in a sec, but I want people to understand that this discovery is being touted as the first direct image of a planet around another star. It isn’t. Nor is it the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star. What this is is the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star taken using a ground-based telescope. While that may sound overly picky, it’s actually a significant achievement, and worth noting.

Rebecca Boyle at Popular Science:

“Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other,” says David Lafrenière of the University of Montreal and Center for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec.

The team also took the planet’s spectrum, measuring its temperature and composition. Now that they know it really does orbit this star, Lafrenière retroactively claims firstie on an exoplanet spectrum.

Other famous exoplanet photos have shown us blocked-out stars with fuzzy dots at their sides. This one shows the blazing star, too, putting in context that this is really a solar system.

The planet is also special because it challenges planetary scientists’ best planet-formation theories. It’s far from its star, about 300 times farther than Jupiter is from the sun. It would take the planet roughly 1,000 years to complete one orbit.

The unlikely locale of this alien world could be telling us that nature has more than one way of making planets,” says Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto, who co-authored a paper on the findings, recently accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal. “Or, it could be hinting at a violent youth when close encounters between newborn planets hurl some siblings out to the hinterlands.”

Denise Chow at SPACE.com:

The host star, which has an estimated mass of about 85 percent that of our sun, is located approximately 500 light-years away in a group of young stars called the Upper Scorpius Association that formed about 5 million years ago.

The planet has an estimated temperature of over 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,500 degrees Celsius). This makes the planet much hotter than Jupiter, which has an atmospheric cloud-top temperature of approximately minus 166 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 110 degrees Celsius).

The relatively young age of the system — our solar system is 4.6 billion years old — explains the high temperature of the planet, according to the researchers. [The Strangest Alien Planets]

The contraction of the planet under its own gravity during its formation quickly raised its temperature to thousands of degrees. But, once this contraction phase is over, the planet will slowly cool down by radiating infrared light. Within billions of years, the planet will eventually reach a temperature that is much more similar to that of Jupiter.

Robert Quigley at Geekosystem:

Why did the confirmation process take two years? Astronomers had to account for the possibility that the planet wasn’t actually orbiting 1RSX J160929.1-210524, but that it merely appeared to be doing so by chance. Space.com quotes the astronomer who led the research team involved as saying, “Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other.”

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

According to Radar Online, Mel Gibson, anti-Semitic star of What Women Want, yelled racist garbage at the embattled mother of his child. Anyway, speaking of radar, guess what scientists located via telescope today? Alien planet! Alien planet, everyone!

According to Space.com, designated non–Mel Gibson Internet safe haven, “[a] planet outside of our solar system, said to be the first ever directly photographed by telescopes on Earth, has been officially confirmed to be orbiting a sun-like star, according to follow-up observations.” The planet is around 2,700 degrees Farenheit, approximately the temperature in New York this past Monday. The Huffington Post reports that the planet is orbiting the star 1RXS 1609 and is part of a star cluster known as the Upper Scorpius Association. Now that you are more familiar with our new alien friend, let’s pick a name. We’ll humbly put forth the following for the consideration of the scientific community: Harold, Maisie, Mad Max, Jupiter II: 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Christ, and Planet Hollywood.

I’m Shocked, Shocked To Find Mean Things On This Twitter

David Kravets at Wired:

An anonymous blogger critical of Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett plans to challenge a grand jury subpoena ordering Twitter to reveal the blogger’s identity.

“It doesn’t really matter why we are criticizing him,” said ”Signor Ferrari,” one of the two Twitter users targeted in the subpoena from Corbett, who won the Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday. ”It’s our First Amendment right to criticize him no matter who we are,” said Signor Ferrar said in a telephone interview Wednesday. He uses that pen name on the CasablancaPA blog.

The bloggers received an e-mail from Twitter on Tuesday evening saying the micro-blogging service would respond to the subpoena (.pdf) in a week “unless we receive notice from you that a motion to quash the subpoena has been filed or that this matter has been otherwise resolved.”

The subpoena follows a string of similar efforts to unmask anonymous writers, with mixed results. A Louisiana politician dropped a defamation suit Tuesday against 11 anonymous commenters on The Times-Picayune website after the outlet refused to release their identities. In August, however, Google unmasked the operator of the “Skanks in NYC” blog after being subpoenaed by an Australian model who claimed the site defamed her. And on Monday, a federal judge prevented Yahoo from revealing the identity of a message-board poster critical of USA Technologies.

While those efforts involved civil subpoenas, Corbett is apparently treating his online critics as potential criminals, using his power as the state’s top law enforcement official to issue a grand jury subpoena. The subpoena does not state what kind of crime the grand jury is investigating.

The subpoena to Twitter was dated May 6 and required Twitter to respond by May 14 with all identifying information it has on the Twitter accounts of bfbarbie andCasablancaPA, which is also Signor Ferrari’s handle on Twitter. The deadline had been extended, Signor Ferrari said.

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch:

The account @CasaBlancaPA, whose owner is identified as ‘Signor Ferrari’ (a criminal in the film Casablanca, played by Sydney Greenstreet) on Twitter, links to this blog in the bio section. The blog, hosted on Google’s Blogger service, is dedicated to “exposing the hypocrisy of Tom Corbett” according to its subtitle.

Some choice tweets that may have gotten the @CasaBlancaPA account owner in trouble:

– “Is it wrong to mix campaign work with taxpayer business? Apparently not when Tom Corbett does it bonusgate #pagovrace” (tweet, blog post)

– “Corbett erupts at campaign event; security tries to eject questioner #bonusgate #pagovrace” (tweet, blog post)

– “Quiz! Who sputters with indignation over failure to recuse from cases involving contributors? #bonusgate #pagovrace” (tweet, blog post)

In 2008, a lawsuit was filed by a former state employee against the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office that alleges public dollars were “illegally paid out to vendors” and contends wrongful termination. However, there have been no charges filed or evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Corbett.

We’re digging further into this.

Update: ‘Ferrari’ writes:

We believe this is more about the blog than the Tweets. We have not received notification of a subpoena to Blogger, so we really don’t know. We are seeking legal representation and plan to ask Twitter not to comply.

Although the subpoena was to appear last week, we believe Twitter asked for additional time because we received notification last night. We believe in the constitutionally-protected right of Americans to criticize public officials anonymously.

Update 2: Timothy Yip, Legal Counsel for Twitter issued this statement:

We protect and do not disclose user information except in limited circumstances. We notify a user, if we believe we are allowed to by law, when we receive any request for their information that we may be required to comply with. This policy is designed for maximum transparency and gives users an opportunity to object.

Robert Quigley at Geekosystem:

Even if Tom Corbett has the legal authority to do this, which is open to debate, it doesn’t seem as though it could possibly be a good idea. Whoever is behind the two accounts criticizing him, they have fairly tiny followings — which is likely to change now that they’re the subject of the wrath of the Attorney General’s office. It’s a classic case of Streisand Effect, and it’s all the more a head-scratcher for the relative tameness of the Tweets in question: You could do a lot worse in most corners of the political blogosphere.

Eugene Volokh:

The striking thing is that this is a subpoena to provide evidence in a criminal investigation. If it had been a subpoena related to a civil libel lawsuit, then either Twitter or the anonymous poster could try to quash the subpoena, and then the court would have to decide whether the plaintiff had, at least, a legally sufficient libel case (i.e., the statements were factual allegations and not opinions, and there was some reason to think the factual allegations were false). If the plaintiff did have such a case, then the plaintiff would indeed be able to discover the identity of the defendant, so he could know whom to sue, and so he could get further factual information relevant to the case (such as what the defendant knew about whether the statements were true or false). That’s the emerging rule in many states (though there are important variations in detail). There are no Pennsylvania appellate cases on the subject, but I expect that Pennsylvania courts will follow this rule, as several Pennsylvania trial courts in fact have.

But this is a grand jury subpoena, so presumably the theory is that the subpoenas are relevant to some criminal investigation. My sense is that one should be able to quash such a subpoena as well, if there is no legally sufficient basis for the investigation, or for the conclusion that the information would be relevant to the investigation. Yet that requires us to know what is being investigated. It can’t be an investigation of libel, since Pennsylvania doesn’t have a criminal libel statute. In principle, since some tweets from the relevant twitterers might be read as accusing Corbett of criminal misconduct, the twitterers’ identities might be relevant so they could be asked for further evidence of such misconduct. But I have no reason to think that Corbett is indeed being so investigated.

So this looks like an interesting case; I hope Twitter does move to quash the subpoena, so we can get some better sense of whether the subpoena indeed has a legal basis. And if you have any further information you can share about the underlying investigation, please let me know. Thanks Steve Piercy for the pointer.

Jed Lewison at Daily Kos:

Corbett’s office hasn’t yet responded to inquires from TechCrunch or Smith to explain why on earth he’d subpoena Twitter to unearth the identity of his anonymous critics. Corbett will face Democratic nominee Dan Onorato, the chief executive of Allegheny County.

More Kravets at Wired:

Pennsylvania prosecutors are dropping their grand jury subpoena to Twitter demanding the identity of two account holders who used the microblogging service to criticize Attorney General Tom Corbett, a spokesman said Friday.

Corbett, the Republican candidate for governor, was seeking to unmask the account holders ahead of Friday’s sentencing of Brett Cott, whom Corbett targeted in a political corruption investigation.

Corbett wanted to know if Cott was the one anonymously disparaging Corbett and the ongoing probe, Corbett spokesman Kevin Harley said in a telephone interview. Prosecutors believed that linking Cott to one of the Twitter accounts criticizing Corbett would show the defendant had a bad attitude that should earn him a higher sentence, Harley said.

Harley said they wanted to unmask the account holders “to show the court Cott was demonstrating a lack of contrition and remorse.”

On Friday, Cott was handed up to five years in prison for his role in the political corruption scandal known as Bonusgate. Dauphin County Judge Richard Lewis said he did not consider any online criticism in his sentencing decision.

The grand jury subpoena targeted Twitter accounts CasablancaPA and bfBarbie. Both received an e-mail from Twitter on Tuesday saying the company would respond to the subpoena (.pdf) in a week “unless we receive notice from you that a motion to quash the subpoena has been filed or that this matter has been otherwise resolved.”

The subpoena demanded “all subscriber information” regarding the two Twitter accounts, including “name, address, contact information, creation date, creation Internet Protocol address, and any and all login Internet Protocol addresses.”

The two had enlisted Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union to fight the subpoena. They said it was an abuse of power by Corbett to use the power of a criminal grand jury to unmask his critics.

“It’s clear they were on a fishing expedition to see if these Twitter users were Cott,” Witold Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview. “That’s not only an abuse of the grand jury process but a real affront to political speech rights … The government just can’t go on fishing expeditions like that to unmask critics because it might be helpful on sentencing.”

UPDATE: Peter Suderman at Reason

Jay-Z’s Got 23 Points, But A B*&%h Ain’t One

CNN:

Attention scrabble players! Mattel, the company that produces the popular game, is changing the rules. It’s allowing you to score points by spelling out proper nouns.

A spokesperson told the BBC it will add a new dimension to the game by allowing an element of pop culture, which could attract a new, younger generation of players.

“This could cause a power shift between the generations, with those possessing a keen knowledge of the top 40 singles’ chart legitimately able to cite such high-scoring examples as singers N-Dubz (17 points) and Jay-Z (23 points),” the spokeswoman told the BBC.

Ariane Sherine at The Guardian:

That’s right: Sugababes, Toyota and Clearasil could soon be coming to a Scrabble board near you, if you’re the kind of deviant who embraces expedient marketing decisions. Throw out the dictionary! Replace it with Heat magazine! Why confine yourself to the mere 171,476 words in the OED?

“We believe that people who are already fans of the game will enjoy the changes,” fibbed a Mattel spokesperson, fully aware of the wrath and welcome publicity that would ensue. “They will also enable younger players and families to get involved.” Are these demographics allergic to uncapitalised words? Are they so in thrall to brands that they need to incorporate them into every second of their leisure time?

But why stop at proper nouns? Surely foreign words should no longer be verboten? If new Scrabble better accommodates the young, just imagine how Euro Scrabble could improve relations avec nos continental neighbours. Txtspk Scrabble would be next, in all languages including Esperanto, swiftly followed by Creative Scrabble, where you make up your own words. Dissent will not be tolerated: innovation can only advance our development, never hinder it. Those of us who claim to prefer the lexical beauty and simplicity of classic Scrabble clearly fear change, and are standing stubbornly in the way of progress.

Andrew Swift at Foreign Policy:

Finally my dream of using “Reykjavik” (30 base points), “Kyrgyzstan” (30 base points), and countless others (readers, feel free to chime in your favorites) has finally been realized. (Anticipate long arguments over the spelling of “Qaddafi.”)

Purists take heart, the classic version will still be available — but I won’t be playing with you.

(Note: there is only one “Z” available for play, but using a blank tile would still give a base score of 24 points for former-President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.)

**Update: It appears the new version will not be sold in North America, where Hasbro owns the rights to the game (Mattel owns the rights to Scrabble elsewhere in the world.) Perhaps someone should just make my dream come true, and create a (solely) international relations Scrabble edition?

Robert Quigley at Geekosystem:

I’m a fairly serious competitive Scrabble player (no, really), which is why I was seriously freaked out to read this morning that Mattel was changing the rules of the game for the first time in 62 years to allow proper nouns like “Jay-Z” and “Shakira” as playable words. The story has been enthusiastically picked up by British media outlets, including The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and BBC News.

This would be a nightmare for a number of reasons, not least of which would be deciding which nouns are “proper”: Which brands, celebrities, and acronyms are “big” enough that they warrant dictionary entries? Does “TomKat,” for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ annoyingly portmanteaued relationship, work? Is “Bennifer” still valid even though Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have since broken up? All of which raises another point: Scrabble as we know it would become really dumb.

Fortunately, we got in touch with a Mattel rep, and he confirmed that the rumors of a Scrabble rule change making the rounds in the British press are wildly overblown.

Philip Nelkon, a representative for Mattel and a legendary Scrabble player in his own right, told us that the proposed rule changes applied to a family-oriented new variant on the game, but that classic Scrabble would continue to exist as it currently does, with no changes to the rules or the dictionary.

[The British press] refers to a new edition of the classic game that introduces new twists on the classic rules. One of the new rules includes the opportunity for players to play proper nouns and there are others included such as playing a word backwards or stealing opponent’s tiles, introducing new dimensions of play. The new rules provide a great new opportunity for families to get involved in word play.

The new game will appear later in the year, the classic game will still be available and will not change.

Interestingly, despite all of the “outrage!” stories popping up about the largely made-up Scrabble rule change, some of the more photographically-memoried expert-level Scrabble players might actually welcome such a change, as it would give them more words to memorize and thus more tools with which to trounce their competition: With an expanded dictionary, there would be an expanded number of better optimum plays in many positions.

Jared Newman at Technologizer:

Here’s where technology comes in: Scrabble, or games like it, have become quite popular on computers and mobile devices. Scrabulous was one of the most popular games on Facebook before it was suspended amidst lawsuits from Hasbro and Mattel (the game eventually came back as Lexulous). One of my favorite iPhone apps is Words With Friends, another Scrabble clone that lets you play remotely with friends at your leisure, and it’s at least popular enough to have its own fan site.

So I reject the notion that Mattel needs to bend the rules in order to attract more players. The players are there, it’s just that Mattel hasn’t been able to capture them itself.

My hope is that Mattel’s rule change doesn’t creep into any online versions of Scrabble. Enforcing the proper use of proper nouns online would be difficult, and a computer-made set of rules would make it impossible for players to debate which words qualify and which are clearly made up.

Dave Levy at Mediaite:

I was being mildly generous with the laws of random chance related to tiles while steering clear of multipliers for scoring; I did observe some of the major rules of letter distribution from the English version as best as possible, though. This last rule has me heartbroken: With only 1 z in the standard, 100-tile game, there’s no way you could  end up with a pocket of ZZEINEB and turn “SKI” into Brzezinski (which would be a savage 152 point play on a triple-word score if it was humanly possible). There is still a lot more out there though, so let’s get this going.

Cable News Division

Mika Brzezinski may be out thanks to one too many Zs, but that doesn’t mean her other Morning Joe counterparts couldn’t help you out. With high letter frequency, GEIST could be a nice early play. Carrying a hand of  OORSUHG and you could turn the measly four-letter CARB into a bingo driven SCARBOROUGH. Willie will only get you 6 points, but Morning Joe himself could be good for a minimum of 69 without multipliers, which would be tough to avoid on a word that long.

= 6

= 69 (with Bingo)

Let’s stay on the 24-hour nets for our next one: picking between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow? The Scrabble board says the MSNBC host is going to slightly more productive for your scoring needs, but as Beck would point out, you’d have to get more handouts from the bank after you play Rachel’s name for only one additional point. And he just doesn’t understand why he’s the only one pointing that out.

= 13

= 12

Late Night TV Division

Team Leno or Team Conan? The math says that Conan will get you a slight advantage, especially in the 18-34 demographic. However, massively appropriately, David Letterman takes care of both them quite easily in the game of Scrabble. If LET or MAN are on the board, it won’t take significant luck to get the tiles you need to make a quick strike on your opponent.

= 4

= 7

= 11

Bad Pop Culture Reference Section

Some great news for everyone who got a chance to read Rachel Sklar’s excellent breakdown of the Release the Kraken meme: ZEUS beats BIEBER in the Scrabble test. If that’s not good news from the universe, I don’t know what is.

= 13

= 10

dd

Soon, Steve Jobs Will Come Out With iArteries And We’ll Be Able To Eat This For Breakfast, Lunch And Dinner

Chris Morran at The Consumerist:

Last August, we wrote about the “Double Down,” a mysteriously tempting (and potentialy lethal) new food item being tested by KFC. For those coming late to the story, it’s bacon and cheese sandwiched between two pieces of fried chicken. And now, many months later, I’ll finally be able to get my hands on one.

KFC announced the decision to go live with the Double Down yesterday, but we weren’t sure they weren’t playing a April Fools gag. But no, they truly are going nationwide with the delicacy on April 12.

The KFC Countdown Clock

Allah Pundit:

They tested it last year in Nebraska and Rhode Island, just on the exceedingly remote chance that it wouldn’t be received well. As it is, they’re lucky other states didn’t see black markets spring up (content warning). Now that we’ve reached this point, with breadless lard bombs freely available to American adults, there’s really only one frontier left to cross. And that day is coming soon too, my friends.

Exit question: Is this the final, irrefutable reason not to buy an iPad? (Exit answer: Not if you’re already a beta male.)

Robert Quigley at Geekosystem:

Today, KFC announced that the Double Down Sandwich — which consists of bacon and cheese sandwiched between two pieces of fried chicken — is going to be available nationwide starting on April 12th. Below, our thoughts on what the KFC Double Down Sandwich means to us — and why it infantilizes the sandwich as we know it. Read this article for further context.

Danny O’Brien does a very good job of explaining why I’m completely uninterested in buying a KFC Double Down Sandwich — it really feels like the second coming of the Famous Bowl “revolution” in which “nutrition” people proclaimed that they were going to remake food by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products.

The model of interaction with the KFC Double Down Sandwich is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

I think that the press has been all over the Double Down Sandwich because KFC puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them it’s OK to eat a sandwich which consists of bacon and cheese sandwiched between two pieces of fried chicken.

Sandwiches come and sandwiches go. The KFC Double Down Sandwich you buy today will be human waste in a day or two. But buying a KFC Double Down Sandwich for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that it’s OK to eat a sandwich which consists of bacon and cheese sandwiched between two pieces of fried chicken.

With apologies to Cory Doctorow, who we kid and who made us think, and inspiration from TechCrunch.

Rebecca Marx at The Village Voice:

Hey, America! Why pay one angel’s hair of attention to what Michelle Obama, Jamie Oliver, and those killjoys at the American Heart Association are telling you when KFC keeps giving us moist, crunchy ways to kill ourselves, one bite at a time? There are now a little more than nine days left until the world’s most loyal consumer of factory-farmed chickens rolls out its already fabled new Double-Down Sandwich, which, by encasing bacon, cheese, and “Colonel’s sauce” between two slabs of deep-fried poultry, promises to double up your daily fat, calorie, and sodium consumption. KFC’s site helpfully posted both a countdown clock and nutritional content on its website, which is a little like being given the chance to see exactly when and how you’ll die. With any luck, the primary ingredient in the Colonel’s sauce is Lipitor.

John Cole:

This is excellent news for… cardiologists.

UPDATE: Emily Bryson York at AdAge

UPDATE #2: Ezra Klein

Don Suber

UPDATE #3: James Joyner

This Time, Anonymous Wasn’t Joe Klein

Here’s her blog, Belle De Jour.

Larry Rohter in NYT:

The debate over the authorship and authenticity of the books and blog posts that eventually became the Showtime series “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” — criticized for supposedly glamorizing prostitution — seems to be over. A British scientist, Brooke Magnanti, told The Sunday Times in London that she was “Belle de Jour,” the escort whose sexual experiences were recounted in the blog and in three books. Ms. Magnanti, who works as a child health researcher at the University of Bristol in England, said she started in the sex trade in 2003, when she was finishing her Ph.D, and continued for more than a year. She explained that she had decided to go public now because she feared an ex-boyfriend was about to expose her. She added on her blog that she was relieved “to be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the skeptics and doubters.”

James Joyner:

She claims to have earned £300 a night, which I find baffling on a number of levels.   And says that her blog “will continue for a bit – I’d like her to have a happy ending.”  Which is an amusing double entendre, whether intentional or otherwise.

Her “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” blog was controversial, since it depicted prostitution as glamorous.  Since the blogger was pseudonymous,many speculated that it was a work of fiction, with some claiming the author was a man.  Presuming Magnanti’s claim to authorship is genuine, it’ll be interesting to see what the reactions are.

Robert Quigley at Mediate:

As (Mediaite site designer) Rex Sorgatz points out, Belle de Jour’s blog never became quite the phenomenon in the US that it is in the UK, and so the response to the news thus far has come primarily from British outlets. The zingiest stateside one-liner, by the way, has to be Foster Kamer’s headline, ”Anonymous Call Girl Author Belle de Jour Outed as ‘Slutty Scientist’ Costume Incarnate.”

The traditional outlets beat the tabloids to the punch on this one, so most of what’s come out so far has been fact-based, restrained, and, if not entirely sex-positive, sex neutral. India Knight had been a critic of Belle de Jour for glamorizing prostitution, but while her exclusive doesn’t let Magnanti off the hook, she strikes a balance. The BBC largely reports through quotes from the Times piece and press statements; The Guardian takes the interesting tack of responding with a sympathetic column by an outed sex blogger, Zoe Margolis.

Once they play catch-up, the British tabloid response of the next few days (months?) should be something. Already, the “ex-boyfriend with a big mouth” seems poised to make a comeback; apparently, he is an Army officer about to be deployed to Afghanistan, and wants Magnanti back. The Sun has already eagerly coined “net tart.” The restraint and lack of judgment displayed both in the first round of media reports and by the people in Magnanti’s life really are remarkable, but when the tabloids enter the picture, odds are things will get a lot muddier.

Tracy Corrigan at The Telegraph:

Here’s a life plan for any young, bright girls who are worried about the impact of the recession. Work hard at school and go to university. If things get a bit sticky financially – who wants to pile up a load of student debt? – maybe turn a trick or two. Then write a blog about it and become  a multi-media phenomenon. Result: you’ll be pretty, rich, happy and successful. What more could a girl ask for?

This is the story so far, according to Dr Brooke Magnanti, the former prostitute/Belle de Jour blogger/research scientist who revealed her identity at the weekend. Everything is great. Her colleagues are really understanding. And the latest development is that she’s told her mother and guess what: “My mother is being fully supportive and says she’s ’not one to judge’.”

Does the plot remind you of anything? With a minor twist, it’s the movie Pretty Woman, a ghastly Julia Roberts vehicle the moral of which  seemed to be that prostitution is a great way to meet the man of your dreams and live happily ever after. (Belle has a career instead – how modern.)

I thought Pretty Woman was a horribly cynical Hollywood treatment of prostitution. But there is something more deeply unnerving about Belle, and that is her unrelenting chirpiness. Even the Julia Roberts heroine seemed to have had a tough background and was not an entirely happy hooker. Belle, it turns out, was a really clever girl, with a great career ahead of her and it has all gone swimmingly .

It seems this sanitised, glamorised, picture of posh prostitution is supposed to make us think, well, really, what’s the harm? It is possible that Belle has emerged from her experiences without incurring psychological or physical damage. But it’s  no excuse for projecting prostitution as a rather fun, pragmatic passtime for smart girls.

Most prostitute’s stories are of course rather less pretty than Belle’s. I recently heard a former prostitute explain on the radio that many prostitutes are drug addicts not only because they work to finance their habits, but also because they need to medicate themselves in order to be able to ply their trade.

My problem with Belle is not so much that she chose to turn to prostitution, just because she didn’t want to do a job that was boring and poorly paid, but that she then chose to promote it as a cool career option.