Love
in the fast lane

Rochester’s
singles scene is treacherous territory. Blind dates, personal ads, escort
services, Paradise Alley — they all have more cons than pros (and in some
cases, more convicts than professionals).

Enter QuickMatch Rochester, a new
dating service designed to help unattached people find someone to attach
themselves to without having to walk through the minefield known as the mating
game.

QuickMatch is like a game, but the
stakes are low. People looking for love, friendship, and/or business contacts
sign up in the age group of their choice (21 to 35, 30 to 45, etc.) and fork
over a fee ($30 to $40, a portion of which goes to a local non-profit or
charity). At QuickMatch’s monthly events — the first happens at 6:30 p.m. on
Monday, September 23, at Spot Coffee, 200 East Avenue — participants pow-wow
one-on-one with eight other members of their age group for exactly seven
minutes at a time.

During those encounters, and two
informal mingling sessions, singles are discouraged from giving out, or asking
for, certain personal information, like last names, places of employment,
social security numbers. After each seven-minute session, both people indicate
on their QuickMatch cards whether they’re interested in speaking with the other
person ever again.

If both indicate “yes,” QuickMatch
notifies the fledgling lovebirds by e-mail. “From that point on, whatever
happens is up to them,” says QuickMatch co-founder Ellie Stauffer, an
organizational development consultant from Fairport.

Part of the proceeds from the
September 23 event will benefit Life Line, the 24-hour crisis-intervention and
informational service slated to lose its county funding. (Ladies, beware if you
meet this guy: “Hi. I’m Jack. I work in government, but I also do commercials.
One ad encourages adults to fly out of town, and another discourages teens from
having sex while their folks are away.”)

For more info about QuickMatch, call
223-3795 or visit www.quickmatchrochester.com.

—
Chris Busby

Unhealthy
indicators

Was
anyone taken in by an op-ed on prescription
drugs the Democrat and Chronicle ran September 9?

In the piece, John R. Graham of the
Vancouver-based Fraser Institute made a frontal assault on the Canadian way of
keeping drug prices down. Up north, the government uses its bulk purchasing
power to negotiate good prices with drug companies; there’s also serious
encouragement of cheaper generic substitutes. Graham would throw everything to
the wolves of the marketplace.

Recent articles here and in other
publications show that Americans get big savings — something like 40 percent
— by buying their prescription drugs in Canada. Some people travel there to
stock up; others use Internet services. But somehow, Graham left the impression
that Canadians actually pay more than we do. “Canada,” he wrote, “spends a
larger share of its health expenditures on prescription drugs than the United
States does: 15.4 percent versus 11 percent, according to the latest figures.”

A half-truth, at best. Using data
from a couple years ago, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development pegged Canada’s per capita health spending at around $2,400 in US
dollars, and the US at well over $4,000. So which is greater, 15 percent of
$2,400 or 11 percent of $4,000? You do the math. (Canadians live longer than
Americans on average, too — a crucial indicator of the effectiveness of
health outlays.)

It’s useful to know the Fraser
Institute is the Canadian equivalent of the Cato Institute, the ubiquitous
libertarian-American think tank gunning for Social Security and other programs.

Peaceful
dissent

The
timing of the demonstration was just right.

Around 200 Rochesterians thronged
the sidewalk outside the Federal Building September 12 and said no to George W.
Bush’s planned war against Iraq. It
was the same day that Bush stood before the United Nations General Assembly and
— through a mesh of diplomatic language and speechwriters’ tricks —
personally declared war.

“We all came together on one common
ground to say stop the invasion,” says Jon Greenbaum, an organizer with Metro
Justice, the lead group behind the demo. Greenbaum notes that Bush’s UN
appearance might send the wrong message to Congress. “My concern,” he says, “is
that the UN [Security Council] will cave, and the Democrats will use this as a
fig leaf to hide behind.”

“This doctrine of pre-emptive attack
is in direct violation of the Constitution, and the best instincts of our
nation,” says a recent Metro Justice position paper. “The declaration of war is
so important that our Constitution placed it in the hands of Congress.”

Not that the group would easily
accept a war against Iraq if protocols were strictly followed. The position
paper lists many objections to such a war: its violence to the UN Charter’s
concept of legitimate self-defense, the inevitable civilian losses, political
reverberations throughout the Muslim world, damage to the US economy (mostly
through probable spikes in oil prices), and more.

Our
name in lights

Democrat
and Chronicle tech reporter Steve Orr mentioned City Newspaper in his column last week — and it’s not every day
the local daily drops our name.

Orr noted that
www.rochester-citynews.com is up and running; he also described Monroe County’s
upgraded website (www.monroecounty.gov) and dropped the name Jack Doyle. As Orr
said, it’s a “funny coincidence” that the two sites are debuting together,
since the county executive answers our criticisms by refusing to speak to us.

We’re happy for the plug, and under
the circumstances we don’t even mind the temporal link with Big Jack. But
Steve, how could you say our “perspective is usually interesting, albeit left-leaning…” [emphasis added]?
We think we’re interesting because of
our tilt.

On
the street

If
you’re looking for perceptive thumbnail portraits of life in Rochester, consult
Around
Our Way: Urban Youth Poetry, a new book-length collection of short
lyrics and haiku. This is no recitation of urban stereotypes; it’s about
hearts, dreams, relationships — real people in all their environments.

With support from the Arts and
Cultural Council for Greater Rochester and more than a dozen foundations and
government programs, the book came together under the supervision of Todd Beers
and James Robinson. But it’s a true grassroots collaboration; in all, 20 young
people took part — including manager JaNรฉe Allen and editors Chaundra Brooks
and Tyrell Cunningham — filling nearly 70 pages with their own creative work
and putting it into publishable form.

Around
Our Way is a book of insights as well as different outlooks. Listen to
Monica Jones on a subtle kind of discrimination: “There were rules. / The man
had to be / darker than the woman.” Or Charles Nesmith in an untitled poem: “My
sister forgets everything, / sometimes her name… She couldn’t tell the last
time it rained.” (Nesmith also supplied the book’s cover photo.) Or one glimpse
from a long series of unattributed “Street Haiku”: “no socks, no shoes — /
midday light — / tall girl walking.”

Beers, a poet who’s done many
community-oriented writing projects, says Around
Our Way is available at the Arts and Cultural Council office, Writers &
Books, and the Abundance Cooperative Market. For information, call the Arts and
Cultural Council, 473-2590.

This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2002.