And another thing …

Worried that their city is fast becoming a prostitution center, Portland police recently staged “Forbidden Pleasures,” a sting operation in which 26 local men who responded to ads for “sensual massage” and tried negotiating prices for sexual favors were busted by undercover officers. The would-be johns are described as including some of the metropolis’ most prominent professional and business leaders, and with the public release of their names pending, among its most nervous. Those white collars can get awfully tight.

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The Netherlands, which has long had a more laissez-faire attitude regarding the world’s oldest profession, now has taken the final step toward legalization by making the country’s 25,000 sex workers subject to the same rules and regulations that govern other jobs, including eligibility for work-related disability payments. Those repetitive-motion injuries can be murder.

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Continuing a program started 26 years ago as an alternative to the spraying of

pesticides for mosquito control, the Wells Chamber of Commerce distributed 17,000 dragonflies to residents and businesses. By all accounts, the dragonflies do a great job eating the pesky blood-suckers but the need to replenish the predators by the thousands every year begs the question – what’s eating the dragonflies?

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Presque Isle’s Energy Atlantic is pulling the plug on its year-old PureGreen Energy, the state’s only program to sell only electricity produced by renewable sources, due to lack of interest – the company hoped to attract 1,000 customers but it peaked at 100 and now had dwindled to 40. The problem apparently was two-fold: PureGreen electricity costs about 1 cent more per kilowatt-hour than the regular kind; the marketing effort was targeted at the affluent coastal communities in the socially conscious southern part of the state. You don’t have to be conscious, socially or otherwise, to know that you don’t get affluent by throwing pennies away on kilowatts.

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It’s nice that Sissy Spacek came to Waterville last weekend to accept the Midlife Achievement Award at the Maine Film Festival and it’s really nice that the famous and talented actress says that, at 51, she’s not even thinking about retirement. We feel the need, however, to clarify a remark she made to the festival crowd that she wouldn’t tell anyone how beautiful Maine is because “we don’t want all the riffraff moving in.” Maine is heavily dependent upon the tourist trade, beauty is what it sells and we’re delighted to have the riffraff visit.

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The hoopla surround the launching of the Maine State Lottery’s new high-tech talking ticket machines faded quickly when hundreds of devices malfunctioned on opening day, leaving store owners with thousands of unsatisfied customers. Lottery officials say the glitch was soon corrected and swear the machines are working perfectly, but we remain skeptical – somebody won the $8.5 million jackpot last week and it wasn’t us.