There was no reason in the world not to kill her, I must confess. Her constant littering of the hallways with dropped sentence fragments, the participles left dangling from her lips, the millions of infinitives she so carelessly split ... in the end, there was no other choice. So I chained her to a wall in the basement of our house on Amontillado Drive, and began the laborious process of immurement.

Later, in the upstairs sitting room, before a fire that cackled more than it crackled, I was visited by a dark and ominous metaphor. Shaped like a raven, the symbolism spoke to me, not in the comforting words of absolutism, but in ambiguities and uncertainties. I would have given anything to hear a solid "Nevermore!", but the most this raven could offer was a non-committal "Perhaps", and "It may be". It was so typical, I reflected ... so very "raven".

Why couldn't I at least be visited by a flying fowl hell-bent on giving an inflexible answer, instead of this, the Magic 8-Ball of birds? We argued for the better part of the evening, as I slogged my way through his torrent of non-answers: "Ask again later", "It may be so", "Reply hazy", and "Cannot tell".

It finally occurred to me why this was happening. Perhaps if my ex-lover had been called "Lenore", the raven would have something with which to rhyme, and maybe I would have received the coveted "Nevermore!"

Instead, I settled for a woman called "Nadine", and this left my haunting visitor with very few options:

Quoth the raven, "Caffeine."

Quoth the raven, "Marine."

Quoth the raven, "Saline."

Quoth the raven, "Sun-screen."

I'm not sorry for what followed. But even now, to this day, I sometimes think that I can hear the dead bird's heart, quietly thump-thumping away beneath the floorboards.

Here's a fun article by Vicki Santillano about eight famous songs that are badly misunderstood, the lyrics having been brutally wrenched from their context and happily sung by the hoi polloi who are blissfully ignorant of what the songs mean.

My favorite example was "Every Breath You Take", by The Police:

How many people foolishly chose this song for their first dance as newlyweds? I’m not sure why this song is misinterpreted so universally as a love song. Do people listen to lyrics? If someone says to you, “Every game you play, every night you stay, I’ll be watching you,” wouldn’t you be more than a little creeped out? I guess that’s the power of Sting—even his stalker anthems are considered romantic.

Read the whole article here.

I will add just one more example to her list: "No One's Gonna Love You", by Band of Horses. The repeated anthem, "No one's gonna love you more than I do", along with lines like "anything to make you smile", make it sound like a tender tribute to The One You Love. But when you listen to the other lyrics, "we are the ever-living ghost of what once was", or "the whole thing is tumbling down", you realize that the refrain - "No one's gonna love you more than I do" - is actually a sad goodbye to a love now lost, and the singer's conviction that his significant other will never find a love like his.

My Life Coach is so weird, but she's sooooo cute when she stops taking her meds. She's helped me through a lot of hard times with her complete dedication to Life Coaching me, always helping me see the bigger picture, aways forcing me to take a deeper look at ME and how un-Coached my Life is, and whenever I start to feel like life is getting to be WAY too much, I just picture her, making that heart symbol with her hand - EAYAH!

And then I go back to eating my own hair and touching people I don't know.

Seen on an actual billboard, right here in the headquarters of Grand Rapids:

"Affordable Bankruptcy."

Followed by a phone number.

Hm.

Sounds like the ending to a bad joke.

"My family is so poor ... "

"How poor are they?"

"They're so poor, they can't even afford bankruptcy!"

[peals of completely forced and unwarranted laughter here]

I love this city.

The results are in: Benjamin "The Bradley" "Pitt-bull" Button has soundly defeated Claus "Thomas" "Waiting for Xenu" "Cruise-man" von Stauffenberg at the box office.

A short clip of the fight, captured by a hidden camera, is circulating around the Internet:



Congratulations, Sir Button. Of all the cases in the world, yours is decidedly the curious ... -er ... couriousest ... most curiousified.