Pluralization We Can’t Believe In

The Grand Old Party has put out a series of email Valentine’s Day cards to celebrate tomorrow’s annual swap of greeting cards by couples. My girlfriend sent me the above one.

She knows me too well. It’s everything I love! Let’s see: Horrible political humor (with bonus points for a months-old reference), bitter politicians complaining about losing an election and, of course, an hilariously poor job at pluralization. Awesome, Republican Party. Simply awesome.

Finally, A Useful Valentine’s Day Gift

A friend sends along an email the Eagles sent to him this afternoon with the note, “Thank goodness i got this e-mail on monday afternoon at 4:23… I am saved!”

Here’s an offer to consider for a unique Valentine’s gift.

As a valued member of the Eagles family, you have the opportunity to take advantage of a special pre-sale ticket offer for the Kenny Chesney “Poets and Pirates Tour 2008″ at Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday, July 19.

Aww, I know what a bunch of Eagles fans are getting for their wives and girlfriends this year!

Update: I literally got this same email, 10 minutes later. After the jump, the flier attached to the email.

More »

Happy Valentine’s Day

Ahh, it’s Valentine’s Day, which is usually the day in my life when ex-girlfriends get engaged and I personally celebrate the anniversary of the first trainload of oranges leaving Los Angeles via the transcontinental railroad. (The year was 1886. Grover Cleveland was president for the first of two non-consecutive occasions. Modern field hockey had just been invented the previous month.)

I don’t think I’m bitter about Valentine’s Day. (This is in part due to being bitter 100 percent of the time about other things, natch.) I really only have happy memories from it, such as the time I got a card that read: “50 percent of people get laid on Valentine’s Day. The other 50 percent get a greeting card.” Now that’s my idea of a good day.

Here are some fun facts about Valentine’s Day:

• Not even the Catholic Church knows who St. Valentine is. There are three St. Valentines mentioned in early church writings, all with the feast day of Feb. 14.
• The actual Valentine’s Day was made up by Geoffrey Chaucer under the guise of an “ancient tradition” in a poem he wrote for Richard II.
• The church removed the feast day of St. Valentine in 1969 in order to get rid of saints considered to be more legend than fact.
• Since 2001, the Greeting Card Association has given an annual Esther Howland Award for Greeting Card Visionaries. This award was named after the smart woman who first came up with the idea in America to make a ton of money selling Valentine’s Day cards.

Despite all that, I’m still wearing red today. Hey, I still eat on Thanksgiving and I’ve been to the Betsy Ross House.

May your Valentine’s Day be full of love.

Puppy love [Flickr]

‘Temple News’ Sufficiently Preparing Future Journalists For Pathetic, Dateless Lives

An email sent out to the staff of Temple’s student newspaper, the Temple News:

From: [Temple News Editor]

Subject: Writers Meeting
To: [redacted]

Hi ya’ll,

The Temple News is holding a writers meeting at 7 p.m. on February 14th.

Sounds like journalists to me!

Temple News

Blogicized: Alien Iverson

• In case you were wondering, ESPN thinks Allen Iverson is from Mercury. Let’s hope Matt Cord starts announcing him as “a six-foot guard… from MERCURY!” in introductions at the Wachovia Center from now on. [The 700 Level]

• Much like he did in Philadelphia, Hugo Chávez has delivered his discounted oil to homes in Delaware. This is part of a new U.S. tactic to eventually have every citizen in America buy gas and oil from Chávez, therefore bankrupting Venezuela into democracy! [Delaware Watch]

• What you should have done for your Valentine’s Day date: heart-shaped pizza. Aww. [Asymptomatic]

• In the new Quinnipiac Poll, Ed Rendell got six touchdowns, six extra points and two field goals while Lynn Swann only got five touchdowns, four extra points and one two-point conversion. (He went for two late in a comeback attempt.) [America's Hometown]

One final moment of schadenfreude

And, finally, to close out this day of lonliness/love and keep with the theme I’ve been doing this afternoon, I present to you the final line of Stephanie Abrams’ report of Valentine’s Day:

The retail industry says the average consumer will spend roughly $100 on their sweetheart on Valentine’s Day.

Woohoo! Eat it, those in committed relationships! I’m buyin’ me a new pair of sneakers!

Love Is In The Air On Valentine’s Day [CBS 3]

Dating Delonte, An ESPN Original Series

As my Valentine’s Day of blogging creeps closer to the end, I realized I hadn’t yet answered my one nagging question I had today: What would former Saint Joseph’s guard Delonte West do for his perfect date?

We (the general public) really haven’t heard much from West since he left St. Joe’s a year early in 2004 and signed with the Boston Celtics after being drafted. Sure, he’s in town every once in a while, and he was in that fight once, I think, but that’s about it. West is just doin’ his thing, it seems, and so I wouldn’t be able to know.

Fortunately for me (and for you), ESPN.com Page 2’s Louise K. Cornetta interviewed West today and found out just what he’d do on his perfect V-Day date.

Among the highlights:

“Got to keep a little gangsta, you can’t be too soft. You can’t be in there playing some guy that’s crying, talking about don’t leave me and love me baby, wah wah and all that. So Jim Jones pumping and then from there, wind blowing through the hair, boom, we get straight to the point — we eat afterwards because I don’t want to kiss no onions. I don’t want to kiss you tasting like onions and steak and mushrooms and everything.” [...]

“From there, hopefully she’s got money because I hope Jaws gets her, boom, make sure she got me in the will, bank, I’m good. Oh well, shark got her! Jaws got her. Nah, we ain’t going there.” [...]

“Give her a kiss, tell her I enjoyed my night, let’s do it again. I don’t want her in a situation, because skinny-dipping, she’ll already be shaky about doing that if it’s an early date, but most likely she will [skinny-dip], but I don’t want to end up in one of those situations where you’re feeling the mood too much and you try to press the situation and you came all out your hook up.” [...]

“When we’re on the yacht eating, we’re going to have some Popeyes chicken. That’s for dinner. It’s to let her know, put a mental image on her mind, first and foremost, if you ain’t from the hood, you don’t like Popeyes chicken. Everyone there loves Popeyes chicken and the biscuits — phew.”

Man, I think I want to go on a date with Delonte West now.

Flowers, Popeye’s and romance [ESPN.com Page 2]

Blogicized: All Valentine’s Day Edition!

From the sappy to the sad to the, uhm, unintentionally hilarious, Philadelphia Will Do brings you the best and the worst of the blogs on this special, special day:

• “And a happy Valentine’s Day to you, too, Internet. You patiently listen to my inane ramblings, you keep me company when I can’t sleep, you don’t complain if I want to play games all night, you entertain me with stories from all over the world and you’re very easy to turn on.” [Sarcasmo's Corner]

• “[Y]ou know our valentines – our collective hearts belong to our eminent domain, bogus blight targeted merchants of Ardmore’s historic business district.” [Save Ardmore Coalition]

• “A box of chocolates. A fresh bouquet of long-stem roses. A peppering of buck shot right in the kisser. The ‘Stamps boys know that on a day like today, it isn’t just those three little words, but rather how you say them that truly matters.” [Badminton Stamps]

• “I love you all. I’ll protect you from harm. Marry me?” [The Trouble With Spikol]

• “Do I hear a collective sigh? Because I feel like I’m being programmed, and my programming say’s ‘Does NOT compute.’” [Cinema Maverick]

• “Every woman who plays quizzo this week will have at least one Valentine this year, as Johnny will be giving away Valentine’s to all female players (and Apollo Anton Ohno, if he shows up. What, I can’t appreciate another man’s hair?).” [Johnny Goodtimes]

• “Therein the quandary lies: the adult me is a Lloyd Dobler girl, but Jake Ryan brings me back to high school, freshman year sitting in the back of advanced Algebra pining after the unattainable junior lacrosse player with the hot mullet hairdo.” [Pink Lemonade Diva]

And, finally…

• “there ain’t nothin’ i love more than a good ole philly cheesesteak. my mind has locked away a clip from an old sitcom, ‘the fresh prince of bel air.’ aunt vivian comes home with a brown paper bag, and when an unfunny (although he tried damn hard) will smith asks what’s in it, she replies that she brought a philly cheesesteak home for him. his reply: that ain’t no philly cheesesteak.” (Not, technically, about Valentine’s Day, but close enough.) [Metroblogging Philadelphia]

Happy Valentine’s Day from all of those bloggers (er, I think), and Happy V-Day from me, too. Whether you’re at Penn-Princeton (or at St. Joe’s-Temple, for that matter) or Le Bec Fin, may you have a joyous evening. As always.

One ring to rule them all

Despite our occasional slip-up, I tend to think of we Americans as forward-thinking people. We’re America, the land of the immigrant! The land of the downtrodden being given a second chance, the melting pot, the mixing bowl! Equal rights for all!

Ha ha! Just kidding. We Americans are about as tolerant as everyone else in the world, which is to say: Not much at all. And speaking of equality, here’s a law you might not have known: In Pennsylvania, an engagement ring is the husband’s property until the marriage.

Sounds good, huh? The Inky reports that in a 4-3 ruling in 1999, the state supreme court set precedent while settling the dispute of a Western Pennsylvania couple. The decision said that the ring remains the possession of the person who gave it “even if the donor broke the engagement.”

And now a Philadelphia construction manager is being sued by her former fiance over a $35,000 ring he gave her — which she sold when he broke off the engagement.

Weird as to how to approach this one, since, well, it’s kind of unfair to the guy, since it is his ring, and it’s unfair that this woman is in hot water after a guy broke it off. (There’s more to the story, as well; the woman alleges her ex forced her to sell her other rings when he gave her the engagement rock. We’re going to need Solomon to figure this one out.)

I suppose this rule was made to stop women from taking rings and running off legally, but what’s to stop a man from holding threat of a breakup over his fiancee’s head? I tend to have a pretty low opinion of people, but is either scenario really all that typical?

Either way, this is true: Everyone takes engagement rings way too seriously. And, uhm, in Pennsylvania, whoever gives the engagement ring (i.e. the guy) has a serious advantage.

Jilted, then sued over ring [Inky]
Jan. 30: But what about dog on dog marriage?

A V-Day Special: Return of the hit parade

Way back in October I took note of one writer for Phillyist who happened to always mention in her weekly rants how some guy was hitting on her. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Quickly becoming my favorite game on the Internet: reading Jill Ivey’s Phillyist rants against vague or inanimate entities, and try to guess how long it takes her to make a reference to a guy hitting on her. The record is, like, 2 paragraphs.

And it went on like that for, uhm, two weeks or so. But like many things on this site, I eventually grew tired of it. And I forgot about it. (Also, she stopped writing about how she was hit on.) But PW intern James Houston has eagle eyes, apparently, and noticed this in a Daily Pennsylvanian column:

College senior Jill Ivey uses the escort service often, but she has had experiences with security guards who took friendly conversation a step too far.

Ivey told him, “I’m going to meet up with some girlfriends.”

“Girlfriends or girlfriends?” the guard asked.

When she responded, “A bunch of female friends,” the guard replied, “So, you’re straight?”

If you’re playing at home, it took five paragraphs in a column by someone else for Ms. Ivey to mention being hit on. If only my life was full of such admiration from the opposite sex.

Friday. [Trader] Joe Friday. [Phillyist]
Sexual comments need attention [Daily Pennsylvanian]