(2007-12-07) Egg Dar

We were at dinner the other night with a gay guy ("not that there's anything wrong with that"), and he noted

• he can smell when a woman is menstruating

• pretty much all the other gay guys he knows can also detect that

• straight men can't because they're too repressed.

Semi-random associations

• I remember reading bits of G Gordon Liddy's MonkeyHandlers novel in a used-book store, and the protagonist ex-SpecialForces dude had this "skill"

• a recent study shows that strippers/lap-dancers make more money than usual when they're ovulating (and less-than-usual when menstruating). Though the cause is unclear: Miller links the wage fluctuations to changes in body odor, waist-to-hip ratio, and facial features. Despite operating at the upper limits of flirtatiousness already, he says there may also be subtle shifts in their behavior-"how they talk and move when enticing a customer to buy a dance, and how they perform the dance itself."