We are pleased to announce the winner of our first annual Worst Love Poetry Ever contest! This year’s honoree is Mr. Alexander Heist of Musty Fold, Manitoba, Canada, who wrote the following suite of haiku for his ex-girlfriend Anna Mae: Read on

Many of my fellow bloggers seem to have some difficulty discussing the weather. Part of the problem is that they are from all over the map. Some are in Minnesota, where it actually gets cold now and again. Some are in the middle of freakin’ Canada, for God’s sake, where it’s cold all year except for July 19th, from noon to 2 p.m., when it gets above freezing. Some are in North Carolina, where people think it’s cold, but it really isn’t. And then others live where it doesn’t get cold at all, like Florida and, to judge from some of your blogs, hell. And sweet Jesus, some of you live on the wrong side of the world where you say it’s summer now. What’s with that?!?

Another problem is that while most of the bloggers I read understand basic temperature scales, some of you insist on living in strange foreign countries like Canada and New Zealand and using weird units of measurement, whereby “zero” is not actually all that cold. I would think living in Saskatchewan or wherever you wouldn’t need to exaggerate, but whatever.

And then there are nouveau-Yankees who, having lived their entire lives in the sunny South, suddenly find themselves faced with strange new weather they know not how to describe. Just how cold is it, really?

To solve this problem of communication I have, as a public service, developed a complete taxonomy of cold, which I’m calling the Cornelius Scale. Read on

You’re baby corn! Cute and vaguely phallic, people find you irresistable at first, only gradually realizing that you are void of nutrition and turn limp at the slightest application of dressing. Read on

So now somebody who doesn’t eat much meat, who is vegetarian-ish, but not entirely, can proudly claim to be a flexitarian. The American Dialect Society says it’s a Very Useful Word. At least now I know what I am, if it isn’t embarrassing to say so. But I figure, why stop there? As long as we’re inventing words… Read on