Did you finish this week’s New York Times Metropolitan Diary puzzle yet? It’s a tricky and conceptual set of quizzes this week. Here is the answer key for the five puzzles it contains. Don’t cheat if you haven’t solved it yet!

1. Lonely woman drops thing in disgusting, dangerous spot, cannot get to thing, waits sadly for thing, no one will retrieve thing. Where is my thing, lonely woman has to wonder. It is right there, before me, and I cannot have it. Four days later, lonely woman returns to the site of the dropped thing, and it has been retrieved for her, and she smears it all over the keratinized stratified squamous epithelium of her face.

2. KIDS SAYS DARNDEST THING.

3. I OVERHEARD SOMETHING.

4. [Nonsensical; no answer.]

5. It’s sad being poor and/or old.

While the lackluster courtship rituals of the overclass may not be box-office gold these days, they do exert endless fascination for the proprietors of luxe magazine brands. Witness, for instance, Melanie Berliet’s Vanity Fair online testimonial, “Desperately Seeking Sugar Daddies.” The conceit of the confessional piece is to combine the writer’s impatience with her stalled day-job prospects with her willingness to undertake a “social experiment”-registering as an enterprising gold-digger at a dating site called “Seeking Arrangement” (“the elite sugar daddy site for mutually beneficial relationships”). Berliet makes a pro forma show of ethical introspection as she prepares her profile. Sure, she may be “walking the line between dating and prostitution,” but our twentysomething correspondent nimbly makes with the pop sociobiology.

The idea that mixing money and mating is inherently bad, I reasoned, was a fallacy based on our collective obsession with moralizing sex. . . . .It is only natural for males to target cues to fertility such as youth and beauty, and for females to be drawn to displays of resources. Why sneer at suspected gold diggers like Heather Mills or the late Anna Nicole Smith if they were merely following their evolutionary instincts?

Well, then. With this rationale-which Berliet puzzlingly deems a “progressive” line of thinking-out of the way, it’s on to setting the bait for the swanning plutocrat. The male clients of the service are supposed to muster a new worth of at least $10 million (women make up just one percent of the demand side of the operation, while the “sugar babies”-whom Berliet declines to break down by gender — make up two-thirds of the 420,000-member service), so the procedure devolves largely into posting a couple of photos and some open-ended characterizations hinting strongly of loucheness. “Open, amount negotiable,” is how Berliet describes what she’s looking for, figuring evidently on the basis of her hurriedly acquired devotion to evolutionary biology that all the Type-A testosterone floating around on the far side of her ISP connection will take care of the rest.

And sure enough, “Hank”-all the principals in Berliet’s yarn are pseudonymous, as is our correspondent herself over the course of her Seeking Arrangement career-turns up via a semiliterate text message: “i think i maybe waht you r looking for; read my profile and if you r interested drop me a line..you wont be disappointed.”

Since our correspondent is an aspiring writer, she finds Hank’s cavalier way with punctuation and orthography “suspicious,” but she soon overcomes her fastidiousness after consulting his profile, which fixes his net worth at between $100 million and $200 million, and reports that he’s prepared to devote 10 to 20 grand a month to sugar-baby maintenance. That sum, Berliet reckons, “would be enough to cover my living expenses and leave me with thousands in disposable income.”

So it’s off to Megu, for “perfectly cooked Kobe beef” and a quick discussion of prospective balance sheets. “If I want to go with my girlfriend to St. Barth’s for two weeks,” Hank starts in, “she’s not going to be left behind because she needs to write copy all day to make 500 bucks to pay her cable bill. A girl, if she’s going out a lot with me, cannot be wearing the same thing all the time, so of course I’ll buy her her Louboutins and Gucci handbags.”

Of course. But Hank also offers a caveat that sticks oddly in Berliet’s craw: “I don’t want to feel like I’m paying for her company, though. The less she asks for, the more she gets.” The fledgling sugar baby assents in principle, but holds back a glum judgment to herself: “It… struck me as hypocritical for a man to sign up to be a sugar daddy, put a dollar figure on his girlfriend budget, and then refuse to write checks.”

But it seems far stranger for someone on the make, in what’s billed as nothing more than robust, evolutionarily satisfying display of male resources, to be decrying hypocrisy, or any other moral failing. Indeed, shouldn’t an aspiring sugar baby be gratified to have reeled in a prospect who doesn’t “want to feel like I’m paying for the company”? Just a cursory survey of the types who do want to feel that way should kill any indignant charge of hypocrisy taking shape in the sugar-baby brainpan. Why, Rush Limbaugh was just married yesterday, for God’s sake. And not to dwell on the most lurid sort of counterexample, but it was only last summer that Ryan Jenkins disqualified himself from the cast of “Megan Wants a Millionaire” in quite sobering fashion. All I’m saying is that a little genteel hypocrisy can itself serve some useful evolutionary purposes, in brute terms of individual and species survival.

Not so for our Melanie, though. After a listless makeout session at Hank’s lavish Manhattan spread, she bolts for the exit, deciding in fact that she “hated him”: “no amount of gifts or pampering could compensate for dealing with so controlling a person.”

The Hank encounter proved fairly typical of Berliet’s Seeking Arrangement outings. At another meet-up at the Soho Grand bar, she learns that a guy she calls Darrell lied about his age, his appearance and his physique-so who knows if he was actually worth $50 to $100 million? The only live one turns out to be an older gent she calls Charlie, who graces her with a “token” date favor of an iPod on their first meeting, and offers a refreshingly candid account of his recourse to Seeking Arrangement: “I can’t separate the fact that I have resources from who I am,” he said. “It’s part of me. And it’s something I have to offer twentysomethings.”

Now that’s the stuff. Over the next two hours, Berliet reports, “we truly clicked,” bantering about “everything from the challenge of monetizing an Internet business to how laughable it is that one of the biggest distributors of pornography in the U.S. is the devoutly Mormon Marriott family (thanks to the in-room entertainment they offer at their ubiquitous hotels).” Like many a twentysomething, Berliet seems to have a Holden Caulfield-style fixation with phoniness in all its many hypocritical guises. But she drops the ball when, during a later date’s unsentimental-seeming badinage about getting it on, Charlie asks her why she’s prepared to make the beast with two backs him, and all she can summon up is the curt reply, “Why not?” Again, not exactly the sort of outlook that the delicate business of courtesanship requires-as Charlie himself senses instantly, with an equally terse response of “Bad answer.”

Berliet decides that the unbidden shadow of moral scruple has invaded her cash-and-coitus emotional playground; as appealing as Charlie was in other ways, when it came to the, um, nuts-and-bolts prospect of a sexual liaison with the guy, “I couldn’t mask my apathy.” Subsequent dates with him fizzle out as Berliet frets about the “sexpectations” they bring. Indeed, even when she goes off the Seeking Arrangement circuit entirely, kismet puts an honest-to-god Forbes 400 billionaire in her amorous path-and again, nothing, even though, she concedes, she let “our romance drag on far longer than I would have had he not been a billionaire.” She seeks consolation, as all good freelance writers must, in the advice of an expert-namely, one Helen E. Fisher, whose “pioneering work has shown that love is not an emotion but a drive, and that what we experience as love triggers the brain’s reward system in much the same way cocaine does.”

From the bald display of dude-ish resources to a jolt of virtual cocaine: As moral evolution goes, Berliet’s saga traverses the distance from Mystery to Amy Winehouse. It’s also hard to see how this ready-made transposition of drives delivers the newly romantic-minded Berliet onto any safer dating grounds. Emma Bovary, after all, the restless bourgeois wife of a pharmacist, was fed on wan literary simulations of romantic transport and thereby became the protoype of the modern addictive personality who ended up killing herself with drugs. It may just be that pecuniary drives actually do corrode the key elements of human intimacy-and that the dogmatic insistence to the contrary is far less liberating than it is, well, hypocritical.

Chris Lehmann is open to your transactional offers.

Items Inmate Gavin Stanger Attempted To Smuggle Into Wenatchee, WA’s Chelan County Regional Justice Center Via His Rectum

• cigarette lighter
• rolling papers
• a golf-ball sized bag (“a good ounce”) of tobacco
• tattoo ink bottle
• eight tattoo needles
• one-inch smoking pipe
• small bag of pot

“I told you earlier about Reuters’ Jon Decker’s interest in having the White House Correspondents Association react to Helen Thomas’ controversial remarks regarding the Middle East. CNN’s Ed Henry has sent the following response to White House reporters, obtained by POLITICO:”

At long last, after embarrassing anyone stupid enough to make a joke comparing his sexual prowess to a 180-foot-tall, 333-ton rocket ship and then embed a live video feed so everyone could watch the thing sit idle on launch pad for FOUR HOURS while the engineers were, I don’t know, fumbling with a condom wrapper or something, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 finally (finally!) blasted into the air above Cape Canaveral at 2:45 Friday afternoon.

The clip really is pretty cool to watch, especially at the beginning, when a giant wasp attacks the video camera right before lift-off, and at the end, when the second stage detonation sends the nose cone (which is called “Dragon”) into orbit 255 miles in the sky-an event we see from the nose cone’s perspective. What’s more, the successful launch, which marks a big step toward a future when private companies will send missions to deliver cargo and even astronauts into space (and buy the moon or whatever), led to numerous reports of UFO sightings in eastern Australia, where people were startled to see a “a ‘huge revolving moon’ with a swirl in the middle, or an illuminated cloud moving high and fast above the horizon” just before dawn.

Here’s what it looked like there. (Very similar to the “vortex” UFO filmed over Norway in December).

There’s a big article in the Times this morning on the pressing issue of the moment: Computers Are They Making Us More Distracted And Etc.? (Clay “Nuh Uh” Shirky and Nicholas “Oh Yeah” Carr held forth on the same subject this weekend in the Journal.) Anyway, as all things must these days, the Times piece is accompanied online by two tests, one which measures your distractibility, the other of which sees how quickly you are able to switch between tasks. I took ’em both and kicked some serious ass even though I was actually reading the article in the print edition of the paper at the same time. I felt pretty good about myself for a second until I realized that here I was, reading the newspaper while taking a test on the Internet about whether or not “information addiction” is changing the way we process information, and you know what? Well played, you bastards. Well played indeed.

John Wooden, college basketball’s most successful coach ever, and the model of gentlemanly intelligence to a host of successors who mostly ignored his example, has died at the age of 99.

by Joe Berkowitz

This has happened too many times: you pretend not to know anything about some item of zeitgeisty detritus that you, in fact, know plenty about. Whatever subject your friends or coworkers are discussing-Ke$ha, Shia, Padma-it’s just too pedestrian, too downmarket, too… well, it’s actually not you! So, even though you’ve somehow managed to absorb numerous nuggets of information about whatever the silly pop thing is, you feign ignorance. Unfortunately, a true lack of awareness is difficult to fake, and everyone probably guessed you were bluffing anyway.

It’s a rule that the more aloof one is toward popular culture, the more noble and/or interesting one’s life pursuits must be. (After all, one’s life is the most noble and interesting when one does actually know nothing at all about pop culture.) And if by early June of 2010 you haven’t yet had a keen comprehension of Justin Bieber thrust upon you, then clearly you’ve got multiple fingers invested in multiple artistic pies and a dual-ended candle burning, etc. And that’s fine. Some people are legitimately too busy to risk distraction, so they purposefully tune out all of the continually emerging nonessential information. Such souls do exist, and you can tell who they are because when these people say they haven’t heard of, like, Twilight, the affectless disinterest in their eyes rings absolutely true. They’re not pretending; they just genuinely do not know or care.

On the other hand, most of us do have certain nonessential pleasures or even obsessions that require frequent nourishment. We’re open to receiving data from the various info-streams into whose paths we wander again and again each day, slaking our thirst for What’s Going On via the myriad glowing rectangles surrounding us always. We watch, we read, we listen, and in the process we pick up things we wish we hadn’t. For instance, anyone who got their gulf oil spill breaking news from CNN that first week would have unavoidably learned the exact state of Bret Michaels’ medical condition on a more-or-less hourly basis, whether they wanted to or not.

Of course it can be embarrassing to admit some of the things you have nonconsensually come to know! The mere fact of that accidental knowledge, once exposed, might suggest to others an interest that simply does not exist, potentially putting you in the awkward position of explaining the very roundabout way you learned who Lauren Conrad is dating. And since such explanations tend to come off as nakedly defensive, they end up producing the exact opposite of their intended effect-i.e. everyone now assumes you are The Hills super-fan numero uno. It’s much easier, then, to just pretend you’ve never heard of LC at all. Depending on the company you keep, it’s also, obviously, much cooler.

And yet some people try too hard. Fashionable detachment carries that certain cachet, but only if this distance is organic and if you are not condescending about it. Some people cannot wait to inform you, for example, that they don’t own a TV, which is never not an annoying thing to hear, whatever your personal thoughts are about television. These folks miss the point entirely about what awareness and ignorance communicates.

Having seen Transformers 2: Revenge of the the Box Office doesn’t automatically mark you as “being way into Transformers 2” any more than reading the work of Marcel Proust marks you as “being a pretentious d-bag.” Does the Proust reader wear a natty brown ribbed sweater and absently pick at his patchy beard? Is the Transformers 2 viewer also necessarily super-psyched about J. Crew and gonzo pornography? No. Character judgments cannot be accurately made based on one’s aesthetic tastes alone. And likewise, the strategy of brushing off the “low brow” has no actual implications about what its deployer is really like (or really likes) on its own.

But people seem to think it does, so fashionable detachment has become the new version of name-dropping, except you’re known for what you say you don’t know. It becomes impossible to decipher who is authentically out of the loop, who just wants you to believe as much, and then, in the case of the latter-why?

In order to make sense out of all this, here are a few fashionably detached claims that people might make, and some methods for interpreting them:

“Modern Family? Isn’t that basically what most sitcoms are called?”

FD Level: Decidedly Low

Analysis: Between traditional networks, cable, Netflix Instant, Hulu and Youtube, there are so many shows available that it’s impossible to keep track, let alone watch them all. For the first time in television history, we are suffering from an overabundance of quality content. If someone hasn’t heard of Modern Family or whatever other new show is getting raves, they are more than likely telling the truth, and not conveying a Kill-Your-Television sense of militant non-conformism. Also, you can tell they’re not kidding around if they think its a 1970s BBC documentary.

“Who’s day off from what now?”

FD Level: Slightly Elevated

When anyone between the ages of 25 and 40 pleads ignorance to a beloved 80’s classic like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the reasons are fairly limited. One possibility is that the person’s parents believed in limiting the amount of television their children watched per week, and this very important film somehow never made it onto the docket. Another likely case is that a now-adult person expends most of their cinematic energy rabidly anticipating Takashi Miike’s next release, and hence looks upon commercial films as the folly of their youth, with all prior viewings summarily disavowed.

“Is ‘The Balloon Boy Hoax’ some kind of new dance move?”

FD Level: Elevated

Analysis: A professed lack of familiarity with any large-scale media spectacle of the last year could be a signal of one’s extremely fast-paced or outdoorsy job-working arrangements not at all conducive to communal gatherings around the pantry TV or laptop. Avid political junkies and even casual current events enthusiasts are probably not telling the truth, though, when they claim that a story like Balloon Boy eluded them. Rather, they are intimating an exclusive interest in actual hard news (whatever that is) and a total disdain of fluff.

“To what ‘situation’ are you referring?”

FD Level: Decidedly High

Analysis: The cast of Jersey Shore was among the most savvy to ever vomit on (and some would say onto) national television. They emerged fully formed as tabloid personalities, complete with nicknames and catchphrases. The true triumph of this very popular reality show was that during January of 2010, it was difficult to navigate the Internet, the TV or even just your office without a mental introduction to The Situation and Snooki. It was so difficult, in fact, that claiming unawareness even now comes across as dubious; an attempt to convey one’s contempt for the whole enterprise of reality television. There are few legitimate explanations for having never heard of these people.

“‘Gaga’ is a totally inappropriate name for a lady.”

FD Level: Off the Charts

Analysis: Nope. She’s inescapable; a fully galvanized phenomenon, and arguably the most popular performer on the planet right now. Most sentient beings have some opinion regarding Lady Gaga, and as weird as it is to believe, it would be ridiculous to claim otherwise. You’d have an easier time denying gravity.

We have all pretended not to know certain things before, and we all have certain gaps in our knowledge base that take others by surprise. While a comprehensive grasp on the nonessential information of the day may never be seen as a sign of genius (and for good reason), the lack of it, whether by design or otherwise, will never be seen that way either. As for ‘essential information,’ the jury is still out on what that even might be, let alone what a firm grasp on it conveys to others. People who don’t know the name of Obama’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court look neither coolly distant nor ill-informed-they just look like an alarmingly broad swath of Americans.

Joe Berkowitz is an assistant editor and freelance writer living in New York City

by Charlie

Oh my Gawd. They did it again! The fucking N.A.A.C.P., ruining everything for us normal, un-advanced blacks that just want to live out our lives in relative obscurity and maybe even blend in occasionally (THERE. I SAID IT). Here it is: Barry’s getting all kinds of shit because he’s an automaton and his operating system won’t allow him to show any anger/woefulness/sympathy regarding the BP oil spill (which is making all animals black), so the organized blacks are trying to raise the attention of the negative WHITE media. With what, you ask? A Hallmark card, natch!

First of all, when you’re accusing a fucking HALLMARK card of being racist you know that you’ve reached an all time low. Why? Well, let me point something out in case you missed it: IT’S A MOTHERFUCKING CARD! Okay, sure, it’s one of those doohickey, fancy (read: annoying as all hell) cards that “talk” but it’s a card nevertheless. Furthermore, the racist characters making these offensive remarks happen to be green and pink, rendering the whole black/white “racist” conundrum void.

Race-baiting parents of recent college grads heard the following when they opened their very racist graduation card with racist blue and pink spokespersons from racist cartoon/animation land:

“Hey world, we are officially putting you on notice….And you black holes — you’re so ominous! And you planets? Watch your back!”

Somehow, in the crazy galaxy N.A.A.C.P. member Leon Jenkins inhabits, “holes” and “whores” are synonymous and perhaps Rod Serling is the reincarnation of Nostradamus and actually everything in the Twilight Zone WILL come to pass… eventually… when we all live in a world where everyone’s skin is blue and pink?

According to ABC’s retelling of Hallmark’s claims: “The card’s theme is the solar system and emphasizes the power of the grad to take over the universe, even energy-absorbing black holes. The card company says the card speaks about the power the grad will wield.” Which, ha ha ha. Yeah right. Good luck trying to find a job, you suckers! Too bad your mom (is SHE the BLACK HOLE?) already converted your old bedroom into her beading and needlepoint headquarters!

“The intent here is to say that this graduate is not afraid of anything,” explained Hallmark personage Steve Doyal. Were Mr. Doyal a black man, I’m sure this would have been chalked up to some unfortunate misunderstanding. Instead, Hallmark pulled the card from the shelf after the Los Angeles chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. claimed the languuge was offensive. It’s a pretty pathetic victory. What, “take that you anthropomorphized, funny-looking cat bastards! We’ll show you who’s boss”? (Hangs head in embarrassment.) It’s a shame to think this is the kind of attention the N.A.A.C.P. wants to stir up when, let’s face it, there are more complicated, urgent racial injustices that need to be addressed.

Serious-like: Dear black men, don’t go on national television and say something is “very demeaning to African-American women.” I don’t know who put you up to that Mr. Jenkins, but I’m guessing it was a much smarter, African-American woman who had something more important to worry about that didn’t involve barbs from our NEW FRIENDS HOOPS AND YOYO.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I am all FOR the black agenda and especially for black women getting their propers, but I find this sort of muckraking completely nutso. Keep fighting the good fight but keep in mind that, when a greeting card calls me a black whore and tells me I need to watch my back, I’m pretty sure I can handle it.

Charlie is the pen name of a young professional woman in New York City who-I’m sorry, what the fuck did you just call me?

While the vast majority of the general public only tunes in to watch the Belmont Stakes if there’s a chance that they might see the winning of the Triple Crown, it is still a race beloved by traditionalists, compulsive gamblers, and fetishists who find themselves aroused by tiny men beating a horse with a stick around a mile-and-a-half oval. Whatever the reasons they watch the race, viewers will notice something different this year: the horses are going to ride the jockeys. Kidding! They’re changing some song or something.

In his massive hit “Empire State of Mind,” Jay-Z raps that he’s “the new Sinatra.” And it turns out he wasn’t joking.

During Saturday’s 142nd running of the Belmont Stakes, “Empire” will be played as the horses are brought out onto the race track, replacing Sinatra’s classic “New York, New York,” according to a spokesperson for the New York Racing Association.

“[It’s] the quintessential 21st century theme song for New York City,” an NYRA official told The Associated Press.

The song, with its commonly misunderstood lyrics, is indeed this new generation’s “New York, New York,” pre-packaged cliches and all. I hope it doesn’t scare the old people who still go to horse races.