Wednesday linkfest

This is the place where I drop links that I've been collecting but haven't had time to write about while I've been trying to figure out my mother's taxes.

1. From the distaff side of the moronosphere, S.Weasel has a delightful tribute to Charlton Heston. Well, to his buttocks, anyway.

2. Speaking of the moronosphere, check doubleplusundead regularly for his daily roundups, called "around the moronosphere in 80 iq points." I think the Moron-in-Chief was responsible for that name.

3. Since it's tax time, I'd like to bring you this: "Woman Apologizes for Pitbull Attack on IRS Employee." (via TaxProf Blog)

4. Here's the barbecue guy who loves the NoKos. The FBI already knows about him, thanks to his dad. Really. Will there be a place for him as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration? And this: A coincidence?

5. Will you be more in love with your wife if she learns to play poker? This article says you will. It sounds totally asinine to me, because you play poker precisely to be alone with the boys, but there are some other tips for women that sound a little better than that.

6. If you live in Minnesota, your tax dollars are funding what may be a madrassa.

7. Ace writes about a post by a user at Obama's site attacking the Jews. A commenter finds the cached link after the post is taken down.

8. From the Department of Old: "Woman's Lawsuit Claims Bra Injured Her / Victoria's Secret Denies Claims." (via Ace's headlines last week)

9. From the Department of Not So New: Starbucks won't let you customize your card with "Laissez Faire" but will let you use "People Not Profits"? (via Volokh)

10. Child "maths" genius-ette becomes a call girl (with probably NSFW photo) (via Fark)

11. Get your ice cold Mets motivational poster, courtesy of Baseball Crank. Not that I've already given up on them -- that'll take another few days like yesterday.

Click here to read more . . .

Primary Tuesday linkfest

You may have heard that the Maryland primary was held today (as were the primaries in Virginia and the District of Columbia). I showed up at 7:00 in the morning as the polls opened. Why I bothered I'll never understand. It was down to a decision between my fourth and my fifth choices for the nomination. (I registered a protest vote by voting for my first, who was already out of the race.) But I did vote for the Mission Impossible guy to run against our Democratic congressman in November, and I voted for school board, too.

Although I declined it, the election judges foisted an "I voted" sticker on me. I tried to convince my 16-year-old son to wear it to school today, but he doesn't like his father's sense of humor.

Anyway, here's tonight's linkfest, starting with the political:

1. In last week's linkfest, I pointed you to a video of Obama supporters in a Luntz focus group being asked to name a single accomplishment for Obama. Today, we have the second installment in the same quest. Not as good as the first one, but one member tries to "pass," as if this were law school, and another says Obama's accomplishment was being the only black senator.

2. From a few days ago . . . Mickey Kaus: "Marion Barry to endorse Obama: Isn't there something Obama can do to stop this?"

3. The Republican Jewish Coalition begins an ad campaign that hits home for Jews on the most sensitive issue ever: "I Used To Be A Democrat." Truly hitting below the belt. At this rate, within no more than 50 years, the Republicans will increase their share of the Jewish vote to 30 percent.

4. The BBC: "With Valentine's Day around the corner, don't trust your instincts when it comes to selecting a mate." No, you should choose mathematically. Yes, mathematically. Or, to quote the Brits, you should use "maths." (In America, we can't even do math in the singular, let alone the plural.) Here is the formula, in case you were wondering:

Putting this into an equation, we could come up with the following (W=Witty, G=Aggressive, Ay=Your Attractiveness, AH=Her Attractiveness, R=Her "Amount" of Current Relationship; all variables from 1-10 with 10 being high):


You would, of course, have to evaluate the results on some type of scale, like the one here:

If ASK is less than zero you should lower your standards
If ASK is between zero and 1, you have exactly a snowball's chance in hell with her
If ASK is between 1 and 10, game on!
If ASK is greater than 10, consider her more attractive friend instead

(via Fark)

5. Don't hit the "Reply to All" button. And don't reply to a message where the settings are borked and any reply is treated AS IF it were "Reply to All." That's the lesson from a Department of Homeland Security contractor's experience, related in The Belmont Club. Bonus: The distribution list for this intelligence report somehow included a fellow in the defense industry of Iran. Yes, that Iran. (hat tip: fee simple)

6. If you've been dissatisfied with the current generation of composting toilets, I have good news for you: "The Next Generation of Composting Toilet Technology is Here." (hat tip: Son of the Right Hand) But if this toilet won't dispose of the dead bodies I have lying around, I'll just have to wait until the next generation after that.

Click here to read more . . .

OK, now it's OUR turn to throw up

Mrs. Attila and I were laughing but also feeling a little ill when she read me this article in the Thursday New York Times called "A Bundle of Joy Isn’t Enough?"

In a more innocent age, new mothers generally considered their babies to be the greatest gift imaginable. Today, they are likely to want some sort of tangible bonus as well.

This bonus goes by various names. Some call it the “baby mama gift.” Others refer to it as the “baby bauble.” But it’s most popularly known as the “push present.”

That’s “push” as in, “I the mother, having been through the wringer and pushed out this blessed event, hereby claim my reward.” Or “push” as in, “I’ve delivered something special and now I’m pushing you, my husband/boyfriend, to follow suit.”

What kind of gift? Well, anything peculiarly expensive, for starters. The guy in the photo gave his wife a sculpture. The guy at the beginning of the article gave his wife a pair of diamond earrings. Which is probably more of a hit with the woman than a sculpture. In fact, the jewelry industry has leapt into this on all fours: "In 2005 the Southeast-based jewelry chain Mayors marketed diamond earrings with the tag line, 'She delivered your first born; now give her twins.'"

Are you throwing up yet?

Well, at least there's one sensible person:

“This isn’t the time to give a $200 piece of jewelry,” said Rhonda Grote, president of ThinkThoughtful.com, an online gift consulting company in Bradenton, Fla. “I do not think that because a woman has had a baby she requires a Tiffany & Company item. She requires help, love and emotional support.”

Ms. Grote suggested that new fathers should instead consider performing domestic chores, hiring a cleaning service, or otherwise provide extra assistance for the new mother.

Either the husband is attuned to his wife's needs when she's pregnant, or he's not. If he isn't, an expensive present is insulting, because he's just buying her off to leave him alone.

As Ms. Grote says, the husband has to step in take the burden off his wife during her pregnancy and for some time afterwards. He's also got to show appreciation. But this is truly gross: "Michael Toback, a jewelry supplier in Manhattan’s diamond district, traces the practice to a new posture of assertiveness by women. 'You know, "Honey, you wanted this child as much as I did. So I want this,"' he said."

Click here to read more . . .

Another Wednesday linkfest

Some days are good days for drive-by links. Some days are bad days. Today was a good day.

1. If you really want to become a millionaire, don't bother following these rules. You'll become a millionaire in about 40 years, which doesn't really count if you adjust for inflation. Better advice: To become a millionaire, start with $2 million.

2. Why Heidi Klum fell for Seal. (via HotAir, with lots of comments) Hmmm, I wear bike shorts when I ride, and this never happens to me. Back at my high-school reunion, some people were talking about padded bras -- you know, the usual topic of conversation at high-school reunions -- and the gay "partner" of a classmate of mine explained to me that gay men often pad the areas that others are interested in. Not that this explains the Heidi Klum situation.

3. The math of teenage sex: "If you do the math—worthy of an SAT prep course, with fractions and large numbers—you'll find that early sex plus the Pill equals sexually transmitted disease and maybe even pregnancy."

4. There's something peculiarly Japanese about this: "Cell phone message warns train gropers." Huh? Well, read this: "The application flashes increasingly threatening messages in bold print on the phone's screen to show to the offender: 'Excuse me, did you just grope me?' 'Groping is a crime,' and finally, 'Shall we head to the police?'" The only thing more Japanese would be robots.

5. Does this campaign photo of the month remind you of this one -- I mean, the evil grin? (via HotAir, where Allah says, "Mitt should fire his advance team")

6. With the World Series finally underway, we have this year's best baseball injuries from Ken Levine (via Ace). Line of the day: "Somehow in June Washington reliever, Jesus Colome suffered an 'abscess on his right buttock'. The team's General Manager, Jim Bowden is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, 'We pray for his buttocks and his family.'" There's no link to the Post, but I've verified the Bowden quotation here. My own personal favorite baseball injury story was related in Lindsey Nelson's book from the mid-60s called "Backstage at the Mets." Grover Powell, a young left-handed pitcher who'd made a great splash for the abysmal Mets, injured his pitching arm while combing his hair. Casey Stengel quipped: "Greasy kid stuff."

7. If you're a kid who lives in Boston, they want to teach you how to duck to protect yourself against gunfire. (via Fark)

8. You might not want to meet this Australian barmaid in a dark alley, although rumor has it that she's very entertaining in the bar. (via about a million sites)

9. Yiddish makes a comeback in Lithuania, as demonstrated by this syntax: "I feel a very rich person by knowing this language." (via Fark)

10. I just had my 100,000th visitor at Pillage Idiot this evening. Needless to say, it was someone who had been searching for images of the Thai transvestite pageant, which I wrote about two years ago. Somehow that seems appropriate.

Click here to read more . . .

Sunday linkfest

Man, I've got a whole bunch of links burning a hole in my pocket, and I just don't feel like writing an entire post about any of 'em. So here's my linkfest. Hope you enjoy these.

1. A "Mom Job"? Oy. You'll be pleased to know that even mothers of college-aged children are having this plastic surgery. "'I had been thin all my life until I had my son and then I got this pooch of overhanging fat on my abdomen that you can’t get rid of,' Ms. Birkland, 39, said. 'And your breasts become deflated sacks.'" Mind you, this is a woman with a 20-year-old son. She was about 19 when he was born, and now she's concerned with her looks -- and blaming him? I shouldn't be surprised about her. Get this line: "There is more pressure on mothers today to look young and sexy than on previous generations, she added. 'I don’t think it was an issue for my mother; your husband loved you no matter what,' said Ms. Birkland, who recently remarried." Personal to Ms. Birkland's new husband: If that's what she thinks, ditch her now; she'll only get "worse" looking.

2. An observatory on the roof of your house? Cool. "'The reason why people don’t use their telescopes is they are such a pain to haul out and set up,' said John Spack, 50, a certified public accountant who had a domed observatory built on top of an addition to his house in Chicago last year. 'Now, if I want to get up at 3 a.m. and look at something, I just open the shutter.'"

3. "Pro-semites" on JDate? When, some years ago, Irving Kristol said, "the danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them," he was right on the money. It turns out that something like 11% of members of JDate aren't Jewish but are interested in meeting Jews. Pollster Mark Penn writes in a new book "that 'the number one reason they [people he calls "pro-Semites"] gave for desiring a Jewish spouse was a sense of strong values, with nearly a third also admitting they were drawn to money, looks or a sense that Jews "treat their spouses better."'"

4. Vegans dating regular vegetarians. As a former "vegetarian" who actually ate dairy, eggs, and even fish, and the father of a former vegan who was actually serious about it until he had a revelation (that vegans are morons, or something like that) and is now a proud carnivore, I have to admit this line tickled me: "'I'm in a relationship with a murderer,' bemoans Carl, one of many vegans who wrote in to the 'Vegan Freak' podcast for romantic advice." My son was never like that when he was a vegan.

5. Speaking of vegetarians, if you work for Countrywide and you didn't get the memo, W.C. Varones got it for you. Heh!

6. Stupid pickup lines. I did like the final one, which is charmingly cheesy: "Well, here I am. What are your other two wishes?"

7. "There are signs that the global Islamic jihad movement is splitting apart." Discuss. (via protein wisdom)

8. WTF? I saw this bumper sticker on a car on the highway in Maryland: "God Bless The Whole World / No Exceptions." Yeah, I understand it now: God bless Johnny, and God bless Billy, and God bless Osama. Because, heck, we're no better than any of those guys who are trying to murder us.

9. Here's a concert I'm glad I missed: Beethoven's 9th, redone according to the "aural graffiti" that Gustav Mahler wrote on the score. Tim Page lays the smackdown on Leonard Slatkin: "Somebody should sit Leonard Slatkin down and explain to him, firmly but not without compassion, that Ludwig van Beethoven actually knew what he was doing when he composed his Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, and that the work he created needs no enhancement from Gustav Mahler or any of the other musicians who followed in his shadow."

10. Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard has an amusing review of Alan Greenspan's new book: "Alan Shrugged." ("Ayn," Alan would say, overcome by some Randian insight, "upon reading this, one tends to feel exhilarated!")

11. Columbia's newest friend, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has another insight: Move the damn Jews to Alaska. Seriously. (Via HotAir) He must have been reading the latest dreck from a Jewish writer suffering from Weltschmerz. Can you imagine the Jews in Alaska? All the Jewish geezers would sit around all afternoon saying things like this: "Oy, it's so cold here." "Moses got the desert, but we're stuck in this icebox."

12. And you just can't miss this last one, but don't listen to it at work, unless you can close a door behind you: Don't try that satire s--- in f---in' New Yawk. (Bad language alert.)

Click here to read more . . .

Friday linkfest

I don't really know what to do with these stories, given my August doldrums, so I'm putting them in a linkfest.

1. Public service announcement: If you're a police officer having a tryst at the office on work time, make sure to keep your radio earpiece in. In England, an officer who claimed he was "always poised and ready to respond to an emergency because he had his earpiece in" was acquitted of misconduct in a public office. (hat tip: fee simple)

2. You've heard of gay cars. Well, none of those make this list of cars and what they supposedly say about their owners' love style. (This actually has to be one of the stupidest things I've read in a long time.)

3. Paging Harvey Mansfield: The return of manliness, now known as "retrosexuality." But since it seems to involve hair implants for one's chest, count me out. That sounds painful. On the other hand, this sounds good for me and some other MOTs: "some surgeons say that men are also asserting their manliness through rhinoplasty, or nose jobs, asking for a more pronounced proboscis."

4. The latest in technology: Kosher vending machines. More precisely, a "glatt kosher vending machine that can shoot out a hot knish," as if this were some kind of useful Jewish contribution to American culture. Cuteness component: "The vending machines are called Hot Nosh 24/6." Get it? 24/6? Although the machine is not actually shut off on Shabbat, which is more grist for Noah Feldman's next article. And from the "who cares?" department: This is being financed by "Ruby Azrak, a street clothing magnate who launched Russell Simmons's Phat Farm line," who also "runs the House of Dereon, the clothing line of the singer Beyoncé." (UPDATE: I forgot to include the link to the company's website. You can see some of their press coverage there, too.)

Click here to read more . . .

Oy, another linkfest

I'm between two short vacation and things aren't allowing me to work on one longish post, so here's another linkfest. No, no, no. Don't thank me.

1. A man uses an internet florist to send his mistress some flowers and asks that the florist not to send him a receipt, which they do, and his wife sees it. (hat tip: fee simple) As they say over at Fark, hilarity ensues.

2. A followup on the story mentioned in yesterday's linkfest about an alliance between jihadis and Mexican drug gangs. (via HotAir)

3. Does the camera at the dressing room make my butt look fat? (via Mary Katharine Ham) Bonus: A video. Super-bonus: The key shot is here:


4. Tip to women from the NY Times: Eat red meat on your first date to make a good impression on your MAN. (via Alarming News) And fetch him a beer while you're at it. A commenter at Alarming News points out that Sloane Crosley, interviewed in the Times article, wrote a piece for the Village Voice that began, "White girls with big asses, man." Just sayin'.

5. Apparently, NASA has revised downward its temperature data, at least for the United States, because of a Y2K bug. Ace discusses. Also read the post at HotAir and the long post at Coyote Blog. What people naturally are puzzled about is why some of the scientists in this area won't release their data. From Ace: "The bug was discovered by someone who took the time to reverse-engineer Hansen's flawed algorithm...."

6. "Hashem saved me," says a former Yeshiva student in Minnesota who survived the bridge collapse. Dude, if I were you, I'd be asking myself why Hashem hurled me off the bridge in the first place.

Originally, I was sure this item was a hoax. The name of the young man is Roman Koyrakh. That's one external and one internal enemy of the Jews. Korach, who led the rebellion against Moses in the wilderness, died when God opened up the earth, which swallowed him up along with his followers. Hmmmm.

But I was wrong, I think. There is a guy named Roman Koyrakh in the Minneapolis area. (Check the middle photo on page 12 of this pdf.) Sure, he doesn't look like a yeshiva bachur there, but that's a 3-year-old photo, and maybe he's become frum.

Click here to read more . . .

The three-year itch?

I find surveys on marriage (via HotAir) extremely irritating, probably because I'm a big proponent of marriage and the surveys tend to convert description into prescription. Marriages are dicey these days? Well, times have changed and that's just how things are going to be.

Also: Do we really have to know that "new research suggests that the spark may fizzle within only three years?" Even Dr. Ruth says, "How dangerous it is to say something like that . . . . From now on, everyone who's getting married will say it will last three years and then I will have to look for someone else." And the "duh" moment definitely is this: "the Pew survey concluded that 'by providing an alternative to marriage, cohabitation for some appears to diminish rather than strengthen the impulse to legally marry.'"

But this survey is redeemed, in part, by the fact that the study was written by two professors named (and I'm not making this up) Musick and Bumpass. As Dave Barry would say, that would be a good name for a rock band.

Click here to read more . . .

Bachelor Number 2

A friend of mine who clerked for one of the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sent me a link to this short video clip of Alex Kozinski, currently a judge on the Ninth Circuit, then appearing as a young bachelor on The Dating Game. Someone should track down the woman to get her impressions.

Click here to read more . . .

Intelli-dating

The Washington Post has announced that the latest trend for the young and hip is to go to hear lectures on their dates: "It's a chance to impress a mate, or a potential date, by flexing a body part that has lost ground in recent years to biceps and pecs -- the brain." Or as one hipster was quoted as saying, "Maybe we'll agree, maybe we won't. But at least we're getting inside each other's heads."

Frankly, I'm not buying any of that. If you're a hipster chick, don't buy it, either. He's not trying to get into your head; it's your pants he wants to get into.

But if, as the Post insists, "gray matter is the new black of the hip social scene," then I guess the future Mrs. Attila and I were hip before being hip was cool.

Unlike the hipsters profiled by the Post, we didn't go to vapid lectures on the latest left-wing fad. When we started dating, it was the big "nuclear freeze" summer, and there was plenty of malignant vapidity to go around. We skipped it completely.

Our first date, 25 years ago this month, was at a young musicians' competition at the 92nd Street Y. I don't remember our second and third dates, but our fourth was a "summer sing," where we and about 150 others sight-read Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Our fifth was a Mostly Mozart concert, which featured the mostly non-Mozart Schumann's piano quintet.

So, looking back, I guess I must have been major-league hip, not that I (or anyone else) knew it at the time.

It was a full five months before I took her to a Mets game.

Click here to read more . . .

Linkfest of mutant relationships

I think I've said this before, but what I don't like about the Windows Live Beta version of Hotmail is that you end up with a portal that has a bunch of links on it, mostly having to do with relationships and celebrities. So when life gives you lemons, you have to make lemonade.

1. We'll start off with the good news. One of the links I found today was to an article about the best blind dates. But the article was awfully unsatisfying, because the people involved were pretty (how do I say this?) shallow. The first story was about the woman's surprise in finding that the guy her grandmother wanted her to go out with was "drop-dead gorgeous." Wow! A lifetime of happiness always turns on whether your spouse is gorgeous. Just ask the Hollywood cele-babes.

The bad news comes from a parallel article on bad dates. Most articles I've read about bad dates are at least funny. This was pretty pathetic:

“I hadn’t been on a date in a while, so when my friend agreed to set me up with a friend of hers, I really didn’t ask her much more about him than his name and age. Well, once I got to the restaurant, I realized that the guy was an ex-boyfriend of mine! It had been a few years since we dated, but the breakup was pretty bad, and we definitely hadn’t kept in touch or remained friends. It was totally awkward—so much so that we didn’t even have a laugh about it. It was clear that neither of us wanted to continue with the date, so we just sort of said ‘See ya later’ and went our separate ways.”

– Kara, 28, Centreville, VA

2. If this young couple had been downloading p*rnography on public-library computers, the American Library Association would have defended them to the death. Unfortunately for the couple, they decided to act it out in the stacks. "'Because of the vigilance of the library staff, they were seen by library staff and the police were notified,' [Sgt.] Johns said." The same librarians who protect the public's fundamental right to view p*rnography on tax-supported computers turned these wretches in. Bonus: The town's name is Woodstock. Illinois, though; not New York.

3. Imagine this: You run a yeshiva in Bedford Hills, a tony community in Westchester County, New York, and you rent the house next door to some chick, who turns out to be running "a place 'where submissives and slaves are immersed in training.'" Somehow, this response is only marginally adequate: "'It's against our religion. It's against the Bible. We've never even heard of such a thing,' said a man who gave his name only as Samuel and said he was a rabbi at the school."

4. Now imagine something a little different: You're the woman who runs a supposedly high-class escort operation -- excuse me, a "high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior" -- and your assets have been seized by the IRS. You're trying to raise money for your legal team, so what do you do? You announce that you're going to sell "the entire 46 pounds of detailed and itemized phone records for the 13-year period." (hat tip: fee simple)

Her attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said that prices have yet to be set for the data. “We don’t actually know that yet,” he said, “because we haven’t finished mining the data to identify the individuals. Obviously if Bill Clinton’s on the list that’s a different matter than you know, somebody nobody’s ever heard of before.”

But, he said, chances are good that some interesting names will pop up. “Statistically, if you have 10,000 people, and given the structure of this particular service, these weren’t people beckoning from car windows,” he said. “The escorts only responded to four- and five-star hotels or private residences. And so the landlines will show up on the private residences real quickly.”

This story was posted at a gossip blog at the site of the new paper Politico.com, and if you want some sophomoric humor, try reading the comments.

5. Now, this last item is only barely related, but I'll throw it in for fun. Did you realize that you can "marry [your] ideal person" or "g[e]t pregnant" if you follow the advice of a Japanese self-help book called "Cleaning the toilet to attract luck"? Sounds like a nefarious plot by the women of the world to get the men to undertake this hideous task. But actually, it's not. "'I've always cleaned my toilet every day, so it never really gets dirty,' [a woman who edited a toilet book] said. 'At least it's easy that way and it probably helps keep my family healthy,' she said." So the Japanese toilets may be clean, but they still won't teach their kids to use them.

Click here to read more . . .

Valentine's Day linkfest

For me, every day is Valentine's Day, but for you less romantic souls, here's my roundup of love-related articles:

1. Remember that bogus article in the New York Times about how a majority of women are now unmarried? The one that tried to show how low the institution of marriage has sunk by citing figures that included 15-year-old unmarried "women"? The one that lumped together with teens and other never-married women people like my mother, who's unmarried now because she was widowed after 55 years of marriage? I discussed it here.

You may or may not have noticed that on Sunday, the New York Times's public editor, Byron Calame, did a number on it. Brutal. (via Hot Air)

2. Among the other gratuitous changes I'm making in blog-related matters, I "upgraded" from standard hotmail to Windows Live Mail. Why I did this I don't really know. Standard hotmail may be pretty lame. It doesn't format very well, for example. But Windows Live Mail seems like bloatware, loading painfully slowly, despite my fast connection. And when you get there, MS dropped the one useful feature of standard hotmail -- the listing of messages from your contacts. Worse, you enter to a portal chock full of useless articles . . . which I'm going to link to here.

First, about a week ago, there was a link to an article advising women how to make their move (on a man). The tips are pathetic, and I won't bother to quote them. Then, another link was to an article advising men how to ask her out. Best advice to men: "At the dog park: 'My hound is too shy to ask your pup for a date, so I’ll speak up instead. Care to grab a biscuit and a latté?'" I'm willing to make fun of this, but face it: I don't speak from great experience; as I've mentioned in the past, I went pretty much overnight from being socially retarded to finding the woman of my dreams.

At least, there was a section for "faith-based" dating. One article in that section is called "Will God provide a partner?" On the surface, it sounds a little like this joke. Not that I should joke about it, considering my own story is as close as possible to having God provide me with a partner.

3. On Sunday, the editor of the Modern Love column in the New York Times's Sunday Styles section had a column of his own discussing some of the many submissions he's received. The most depressing thing about it was a section called "How to Get Married While Remaining Single." Here's his summary:

Hardly a week passes when I don’t hear from someone stewing about the anticipated gains and losses of marriage: how to handle the last name, the loss of personal space and identity, the permanent end to sex with others, the problematic vocabulary (“wife,” “husband,” “until death”), the merging of finances and religions, the issue of marrying when gays can’t, the questionable necessity of marriage in the first place.

Maybe marriage has gone to hell, after all. On the other hand, maybe it's just the self-absorbed twits who read and want to write for the Modern Love column.

4. Last year, I quoted a Miss Manners column on Valentine's Day. This year's Miss Manners column has another amusing question and answer. The question concerns the pressing issue of how a woman should tell a man she likes that he kisses like a diseased squid. OK, she doesn't say exactly that; she's more polite: "What is the best way to go about telling this potential future mate that he does not please me when he kisses me, and the best way to remedy the situation?" Miss Manners responds: "Honesty is a perfectly horrid policy if it means telling a gentleman that his kisses are unappealing. He is not likely to inflict them on you again. What you can do is to assume a mischievous look and whisper, 'May I show you how I want to kiss you?' He will then be only too happy to allow you to give instructions and demonstrate what you mean."

5. There's an unbelievable wealth of crappy or depressing stuff published at this time of the year, but I'm sure you've found most of it yourself. I couldn't even bring myself to read it.

Click here to read more . . .