A handsome man is sitting at an outdoor cafe when a sexy single lady approaches. With a flirty wink, she shoves a card into his french fries, and before he can say a word she's gone.

He examines the card. "Find me at Cheekd.com," it says, and it lists the woman's personalized code.

Lori Cheek is the card shover, and she loves this sassy new way of hooking up with hot men. The New York Times, of course, is on board with any wacky new trend, and they bookend their story with Lori's anecdotes.

Which, you know, might be slightly biased, since SHE OWNS THE FLIRTY CARD COMPANY.

I know the Times is desperate, but this confuses me. There are billions of idiots entrepreneurs creating "trendy" new websites every day. This doesn't mean any actual, thinking person would use them. In fact, the Times manages to find exactly one user for every hookup website they name. Mostly they just quote the owners saying how great their service is.

I hope they extend this kind of journalism to the rest of the paper. They can write about how nobody's chewing any more, say the folks at Jamba Juice. And all the really sexy people are orange, say the owners of ChernobaTan. And everybody's got their cats using the toilet, say the makers of Pussy Pee Perch.

Regardless, I'm steering clear. Like shaved chest hair and Magnolia Bakery, it's too Sex and the City for me. I don't want to meet anybody who drinks cosmos, or loves to shop, or whose idea of foreplay consists of nudging my crotch with pointy shoes. But mostly, I don't get what the need is here. "There are eight million singles in New York," the business plan must read. "Surely one or two percent must be too afraid to talk." Really, does anybody want to get involved with these people? It's like those "Missed Connections" personals ads in the paper. I've always thought they should be called "I Have To Say, You're Really Hot, Signed Too Shy To Speak Out Loud."

These dating cards, though, made me rethink my antipathy toward the latter. In fact, if somebody wants to create a competing trend from the "Missed Connections" column, I'm happy to provide a quote. "Originally I wasn't going to date him," says sexy swinger RomanHans, "but then I thought, hey, at least he's not like those bitches who stick things in your french fries."