Tag Archives: Valentines Day

It is indeed the season when Heck Of A Guy posts pertaining to Valentine’s Day or romance in general become especially popular.  According to the web stats, these are among the current favorites:

1. The Leverage Of Love – 10 Things That Are 10 Times More Fun With A Sweetheart

This list has only one inclusion criteria, that the gratification produced by performing the activity with a sweetheart is (at least) ten times greater than if done alone or with a non-sweetheart sort of individual, and one exclusion criterion, that the activities are not ephemeral or conceptual (so, no fair listing “falling in love”). In addition, this list does not include exclusively romantic activities (so, there are no items such as “holding hands,” “gazing into one another’s eyes,” “having wild monkey sex on a picnic table at a roadside park,” even though those activities are indeed 10 times more fun with a sweetheart) because that would be way too easy.

These two examples are illustrative:

#1. Reading the Sunday papers in bed¹

#8. Attending weddings, especially weddings of people to whom the social  connection is just close enough to obligate attendance

2. This Is How A Love Story Began

This is the first chapter in a series of posts that tells the unlikely story of how Julie, my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, and I fell in love and – two husbands, one wife, and two or three careers later – spent an outrageously wonderful 20 years together until she died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding.²

3. Anti-Valentine’s Day – 1st Commercial Holiday Based On Opposition To A Commercial Holiday

Yep, my cynical take on a cynical response to Valentine’s Day has proven surprisingly popular throughout this pre-Valentine’s Day period.

4. More Of Giles Brindley

Las Vegas, 1983

More Of Giles Brindley is an introduction for and gateway to Giles Brindley – Extreme Show & Tell, a post which is the internet’s most comprehensive exposition on Professor Giles Brindley and Dr Brindley’s presentation at the 1983 Las Vegas meeting of the American Urological Association.

This was not your usual soporific PowerPoint lecture.

The central vignette of the post, which, remember, takes place in Las Vegas during an international medical society annual meeting, features (1) a farcical episode in which physicians and their spouses, dressed in formal attire, are beset with shock and awe by the sight of an exposed penis, (2) an important advance in basic physiology and the treatment of erectile dysfunction, and (3) a contribution to a major cultural shift.

Credit Due Department: The valentine atop this post is from Valentine’s Cards

1. Among the always-read and always-savored sections of the Sunday papers were horoscopes (in which we didn’t believe), Dear Abby (whose advice we never heeded), Goren on Bridge ( a game I have never played), the column on coin collecting (a hobby of mine as recently as the three weeks following my tenth birthday), and all the comics (including those such as Funky Winkerbean,  Gil Thorp, and Family Circus, for which there exists mathematical proof of incompatibility with humor, drama, or human interest beyond a macabre curiosity about why they were allowed to exist) [↩]
2. Julie was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance (See Julie FAQ) as well as several of her short stories and other pieces. Most of Julie’s fully edited and buffed literary efforts are already available under the category, Julie’s Published. Julie’s Unpublished comprises a group of pieces I’ve found on her computer or in her office that range from workshop exercises to story fragments to projects set aside to finish at a later day to work that appears, at least to me, to be fully as polished and effective as her published stories. [↩]