Sex and Crossword Puzzles

There are two free weeklies in Portland, the Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury. They both cover local and national news items, but they're really a vessel for what's going on in the city, activity-wise, just like every other city's weekly. I only occasionally pick them up because I'm not really a culture vulture or scenester (and I get enough information from the Portland Mercury blog on that front). However, if I do have time to glance through one of these papers, I'll grab the Willamette Week because it has an edge: a crossword puzzle. Often, this crossword puzzle is on or across the sex-line page:

Perhaps it's naive of me in this age of naked men and women being but a brief internet search away, but I like to think that there's some nerdy kid out there, wholly uninterested in sex but massively into crossword puzzles, who grabs the Willamette Week because, hey, free crossword, and slowly begins to notice the barely clothed women encouraging him to spend his parents' money on sex calls or go to a strip club. Eventually, he no longer grabs the weekly for the crossword, but the sex ads. He is a new man with new priorities. That's the sort of romantic coming of age story I can get behind.