For Christmas 2002, a boy I was dating gave me ‘The Action Hero’s Handbook,’ and I was all, “Awww - he thinks I’m an action hero!” Then, for Christmas 2004, he gave me ‘The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Dating & Sex.’

And I was all… “Huh. Wonder what that means.”

Anyway, the two books are very funny and very wise, and surprisingly similar. But when you think about it, action heros are constantly dealing with rampant libidos, and the dating world is barely survivable unless you’re on par with James Bond, so - maybe not that surprising. Here are two summarized examples equally useful for someone on a date, or an action hero:

1. How to Perform the Vulcan Nerve Pinch
Step 1: Locate your opponent’s radial nerve.
Step 2: Press your thumb or index knuckle into the radial nerve. Alternatively,
Step 3: Locate the brachial plexus tie-in.
Step 4: Use either your thumb or index finger, as described in Step 2, to activate the brachial plexus tie-in.
Step 5: Apply pressure or a chop to the brachial plexus origin.

2. How to Fend Off a Pick-Up Artist
Step 1: Recognize the traits of a pick-up artist.
Step 2: Do not accept drinks.
Step 3: Keep personal information to yourself.
Step 4: Make it clear that you are not interested.
Step 5: Turn away and ignore him.
Step 6: Cause an ‘accident.’
Step 7: Apologize insincerely.

See what I mean? Other helpful dating survival tips are to be found in the Action Hero guide (How to stop a wedding, how to dirty dance, how to take a hit with a chair) just as action hero-type tips are found in the dating guide (How to escape from a bad date, how to determine the gender of your date, how to have sex in a small space). Honestly, they barely needed to bother publishing two separate books.

AAACK. (Uh, forewarned is forearmed: this is another girls-only post. Boys go home!)

OK, OK, OK, calm down. MONTHS to deal with this. But you know that slutty $400 BCBG Max Azria dress I wore to a wedding last July? Yeah, the one that I love madly that actually looks decent on me, even if it makes me look like a 48-GGG (or maybe because it makes me look like a 48-GGG?), with the cute twirly accents on the skirt and all that beading?

Well, I hauled it out of the closet today to see if it still fit me (it doesn’t, but anyway) and discovered TWO HUGE STAINS ON THE FRONT. One of them has white bits on it, which makes me think it’s maybe icing from the NINE PLATES OF DESSERT I had that night (I’m sorry I can’t stop shouting, I’m freaking out) and that means there’s a lot of grease and sugar in it and it’s set for SEVEN MONTHS in my closet and how do you get grease stains out of chiffon? The interweb doesn’t know. My mother doesn’t know. I seriously don’t want to risk anything to make the stains worse. And I have to wear this again for a… for a very major event happening in late April!

Thoughts? Ideas? Anecdotes? HELLLLLP!! And spread the word to your mothers!

(Just found this while digging through external hard drive)

In movie or cartoon vehicles, I have always been intrigued by two things: the ubiquity of the ‘eject’ and ‘self-destruct’ buttons. It was never the gadgetry that held my attention; I could get by fine without the rocket-launchers, machine guns, headlight lasers, smoke-nozzles, oil spigots, wheel spikes, mini-cooler. No, what I have always desired above all is an eject or self-destruct button. You wonder why people haven’t evolved either of them, the handy little things. Just think about it. You could put them where they weren’t too likely to go off on their own, like those bomb-release switches they have on fighter jets in movies that are covered by a little flip-up cap so that the bombardier doesn’t catch his sleeve on them and bomb the Pentagon or whatever. I picture being able to lift off maybe a… knuckle-bone or something, and press the human eject button. Suppose your boring Aunt Beulah comes over and starts to regale you with tales of, I don’t know, her root canal or something. You could eject out of there, assuming the room doesn’t have a reinforced ceiling, and run off to West Ed. But as for the self-destruct button. You know you can only use it once. I still think everyone should have one, absolutely everyone, just in case the enemy catches you – time, sickness, despondence, Russians – and you really need it. But then would you destroy yourself if you could, and if it were that easy. Who would? Who wouldn’t?

He actually went and did it.

Pardon me while I go weep in a corner for my frustrated ambitions.

Valentine’s Day is for suckers. “But Premee,” you ask, “other than Groundhog Day, how else can I enliven this miserable midget of a month?” “Well,” I would say, “there’s always Darwin Day!” Which is February 12th, and is a good day to get together with your friends and knock foxes on the head with geological hammers. Or, to read this adoring passage from Daniel Dennett’s ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,’ (try saying that five times fast).

“Did you ever hear of universal acid? This fantasy used to amuse me and some of my schoolboy friends - I have no idea whether we invented or inherited it, along with Spanish fly and saltpeter, as a part of underground youth culture. Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything has been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea - Darwin’s idea - bearing an unmistakeable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

“Darwin’s idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers - welcome or not - to questions in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn’t that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own “real” minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin’s idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.

“Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin’s idea ever since can be understood as a series of failed campaigns in the struggle to contain Darwin’s idea within some acceptably “safe” and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin’s idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming. They seem to be improved versions, not vulnerable to the refutations that defeated their predecessors, but are they sound extensions of the unquestionably sound Darwinian core idea, or might they, too, be perversions of it, and even more virulent, more dangerous, than the abuses of Darwin already refuted?”

Except for the redeye, I just love this picture, taken at the Druid Saturday night during Ryan’s birthday celebration and obviously after a few too many raised glasses. I don’t know what Dave thought he wanted to look like, but this surely wasn’t it… and Ryan is totally giving us his best Blue Steel. It’s like, they’re trying to communicate… but what are they trying to say?

Anyway, I hope everybody that attended had a better Sunday than I did (wrapped in a blanket shivering uncontrollably whilst groaning like a zombie, gulping water, and vacantly watching the Food Network with the worst headache of all time). Alcohol is the devil’s urine. You know it’s true.