That proud heritage will be no more if the California Public Utilities Commission has its way, adding a 747 exchange to the mix and destroying Porn Valley's identity.
So associated with Porn is the number 818 that erections have been detected in laboratory rats who have been fondled by unscrupulous assistants 818 times. Indeed, the Tongva Indians, a Shoshone affiliate native to the area, called the Valley Pornga, or "Place of 818 Gapes".
It is whispered that available 818 numbers will be exhausted in two years, and that the CPUC is deciding whether to assign new phone customers in the Valley a 747 area code or to divide the Valley and redistribute 818s according to which side of the divide customers fall on.
Two harrowing scenarios, obviously, but the latter is far worse. I talked with Loup Perch-Tounge of the Chatsworth Fisting Collective, a porn industry think tank.
"People's identities are caught up in their area code," he observed, imagining a world in which performers and porn company owners are not taken seriously depending on the first three digits of their phone numbers. "It's tough enough if Caller ID tags you as living in Vegas or Tampa, which are like porn farm teams."
"Somebody calls from (downtown LA exchange) the 213, I let the phone ring," Vivid co-founder Steve Hirsch did not say, "just on principle."
A coalition not comprising trade magazine AVN, the Free Speech Union, Red Light District, and Pamela Peaks is lobbying the National Park Service to designate the 818 area code a National Historic Landmark, and trade publication XBiz is not using its political capital from the .XXX top-level domain fight to designate 818 as "porn only".
"If someone walked into my office with a business card reading '747'," didn't say porn impresario Max Hardcore, "I'd send her down the street to work at the Cheesecake Factory (after pissing in her eye sockets.)"
Canadian Tina Tyler, quoting Rush's "New World Man", emphasized the need to "keep (our) nature pure."
"You don't want to get a blowjob from someone with a 747 on their Blackberry," she didn't say. "You might as well fuck the carpeting."
Virginia-based NeuStar, which operates the North American Numbering Plan Administration, estimates that 818 numbers will run out by 2009.
Previously: Still, don't expect more for taking one in the ass
See also: 747 to land on top of Valley's 818 (dailynews.com)
