Ages ago, when St. Hallmark created Valentine’s Day, I’m sure he intended it to be a celebration of love and appreciation. Unfortunately, modern times have convoluted this original and liberating message. Being in a romantic relationship is no indication of how full someone’s life is, but contemporary Valentine’s Day has made the 14^th of February for couples only. Here is a list of few things to do if you find yourself alone on Valentine’s Day:

1. Emotionally eat. This is how all the best people deal with overwhelming emotions that are completely self-manufactured. Hang out with Ben & Jerry—they understand and so does double chocolate chuck. There is nothing that goes better with pie than another pie. Spoil yourself, you deserve it. That bathrobe is looking a little tight. Undo that belt and get yourself another bowl. Good.

2. Watch the saddest movie you can find. Suggestions: Requiem for a Dream, Sophie’s Choice or Schindler’s List. In fact—just turn off all your lights and make it a day-long marathon.

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Misheard lyrics, sometimes known as mondegreens are near homophones which confuse but can be amusing at the same time. The term ‘mondegreen’ was coined in an article by Sylvia Wright in an article published by Harpers in 1954 and comes from the fourth line of Percy’s Reliques that her mother used to recite to her. The stanza should say

“They hae slain the Earl O’ Moray, and Laid him on the green.”

Dropping Phat Beats Old School

However, Wright thought both the earl and a Lady Mondegreen had both been murdered.

The best thing about mondegreens is that they are so often better than the original lyric or line. When I was a child I thought Michael Jackson went to the post office to buy himself a fizzy drink.

“Get down to the post office, don’t drop ‘til you get a pop!” whereas, rather incredibly, the real lyric is “keep on with the force don’t stop, don’t stop ‘til you get enough.”

Because we learn language not only by listening but contextualising and (usually) looking at the mouth of our interlocutor pop songs and poetry lend themselves very well to misunderstanding. Pop songs have little or no context and poetry tends to use language strangely in order to make use of rhyme, metre and rhythm.

There are of course anti-mondegreens, Steve Miller, in his song The Joker invented ‘pompatus’ because he couldn’t think of anything else that would fit, creating the line “Some people call me Maurice, ‘cos I speak of the pompatus of love.”

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It was about six years ago now that that office Christmas party changed forever. For generations before 2000 the Christmas office party was an opportunity to get drunk with people you spend 200 days a year with yet rarely speak to, play out the finale of an office melodrama, kiss (or more, possibly involving a photocopier) the girl from accounts/guy from marketing and then wake up in the morning with a lingering sense of inexplicable regret which lasts not longer than twice the length of the hangover.

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My best friend who I never see (she lives in LA, I live in the UK) sent me a metallic purple mug in the mail one day, it glittered like a Christmas bauble and was near double size, holding nearly a pint of coffee. Of course it’s ruined now. I live in a shared house with a bunch of people to whom the dishwasher is known as “The Magic Washing Up Cupboard” so I guess they didn’t understand the legend printed on the bottom of the mug ‘do not place in dishwasher’ and went ahead and did exactly that.

My once glittering mug is now bland and grizzled with a few specks of metallic paint still clinging to it in heroic defiance. I don’t know who did it and they’re never going to own up. It’s just one of those things you have to put up with living in shared housing; cheap accommodation, no lack of company and all your nice stuff knackered.

When I was younger I had a particularly creative bent and one of the things I used to like to make was modelling clay lighter covers. The clay was a product called Fimo, you make your creation and then fire it in the oven so it goes hard. The covers I made came in the form of monsters, I’d make them for friends as they were cheap and every one was individual. I guess they were a good idea too because I heard about some-one who had tried to copy the idea, unfortunately it hadn’t occurred to them that they would need to take the monster off of the lighter before they fired it. They’d only been making one at the time so the explosion wasn’t so big, just a very loud bang and a terrible smell of burning plastic.

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Guys, they know how to keep their women happy and no mistake! So you’ve been together a while, you’re happy with one another and because you’re in a stable relationship you let your guard down a bit, I’m not saying you slob out but maybe you pick up a few pounds here and there but you’re still shaving and putting on make-up; you’re hardly an embarrassment.

Not so fast, my Rubenesque cake-chaser! In a poll taken of 72,000 people across the States found that nearly half of the men, 48%, said they would ditch their girlfriend if she put on weight. And you thought he loved you for your mind!

Ladies, on the other hand, are far more loyal. Only 20% of them would kick their man to the kerb if he started showing signs of the porcine. But perhaps she should consider ditching the ballast for other reasons anyway. His attitude for example!

The poll revealed that while men are likely to lie about the number of sexual partners they had had, (because every-one loves a stud right?) the boot doesn’t fit the other foot; 42% of men said that they would consider a woman ‘sexually promiscuous’ if she had slept with 10 or more men. When women were classing men as sexually promiscuous they thought that more than twenty was probably too many.

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Image by lalunablanca via Flickr

Not only is America suffering from an economic crisis, it’s caught in a vicious cycle, too, caused by the banks that helped fuel the crisis.

After the bottoms fell out of the bank vaults in 2008, because banks approved bad mortgage loans that brokerage firms then sold to their customers as credit default swaps, the banks became tightwads, making it difficult for small businesses and conscientious bill paying Americans to borrow money, thus creating a worse economic crisis and a tidal wave of debt.

To wrap this up in a lovely decorative package, since many banks approved bad loans back in 2008 due to their greed, we, the taxpayers, who had to bail them out, can’t get a loan from the banks we bailed out because the banks are afraid to approve loans to people who loaned them money in the first place. Whew! That was exhausting.

So, the banks got out of debt and are collecting interest on our money, while, we, taxpayers, who had to choke up cash for the loans, are accumulating further debt.

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Superheroes, although totally fictional characters are regarded as deity-like figures among their loyal armies of fans, they ooze effortless style and a devil-may-care attitude that is only amplified if they also happen to habitually wear sunglasses. The mysterious aura that a pair of cool shades affords their wearer is one that no other item of clothing or accessory can achieve. A person’s eyes are said to be the portal to their soul, communicating thought and emotion better than the spoken word ever could, sunglasses mask this and add to the ruthless image of whichever crime fighter happens to don them. Here are a few of the coolest film heroes ever to whack on a pair of shades:

Neo

Neo is the geeky computer hacker that gets drawn in to the mind-boggling world of the matrix where anything is possible. In the film, the reclusive anxious workaholic is transformed into a super hero that can dodge bullets, fight off hoards of ‘agents’ and even fly. He suitably choices to wear a long black trench coat and mean looking wrap around sunglasses – geek chic at it’s height.

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