Sunday, February 12, 2006

Valentines Day Preparations

If You’ve Waited Till Now—It’s TOO LATE!


This posting goes out to all of the Men in the world. Ladies, you can avert your eyes, hit your browser's "back" buttons, or if you insist you can read along because you might actually agree with me on this subject. Here goes...

I’ve noticed with amusement a couple of Valentine’s Day marketing trends this year that absolutely drive me crazy.

The first one is the bombardment that has occurred in my E-mail inbox of offers from Proflowers.com and FTD.com. “Last chance offer,” “order now for free delivery,” “order by midnight tonight for guaranteed delivery” scream the subject lines of the messages.

I simply hit the delete button and send them off into the oblivion of my internet wastebasket.

Sorry Proflowers and FTD, but I already have my Valentines Day plans made and they don’t include an $80 vase of roses.


The most obscenely blatant marketing campaign out there this year has to be the one being conducted on TV by the Vermont Teddy Bear Company.

Have you seen it?





You know the ad, the one with the three girls that look like strippers with pouting Botox-injected lips that squeal and squeak their way through opening a box containing a masked Love Bandit Bear in their office cubicle?



Meanwhile three of their fellow “office geek” male coworkers witness the scene and promptly dial the phone to order their own bears in order to obtain the attentions of their “stripper chick” co-workers.

Speaking of “geeks” and “nerds”, I’m sort of insulted that the Vermont Teddy Bear Company doesn’t have a bear called “computer nerd” or “rocket scientist” or "Georgia Tech Graduate", so I took the liberty of doing a little Photoshopping this evening and came up with this little guy.
Now THAT'S what I call a good looking Teddy Bear... cheesy toupe and all...

But seriously, my real message here--Guys--is the following:

If you’ve waited until Valentines Day to get your act together with your current wife, future ex-wife, girlfriend, or prospective “main squeeze” I say that you’re in big trouble and dropping eighty or a hundred bucks on some soon to be wilted flowers or a cheesy costumed bear is not going to get make up for 364 days of neglect.

You're in BIG TROUBLE.

And another thing...I learned years ago to avoid going out to dinner on Valentines Day because of having to deal with a human stampede of wild eyed guys like YOU and starry eyed women all clamoring to celebrate one “special day,” marketed and revered by the owners of Hallmark Cards and the Rose Grower’s Association of the World is a formula for DISASTER.

Unnnthhh Uhhhhhh, Count me out....Yes Sireeee.

I can’t and won’t deal with it.

Dinner out in a restaurant on Valentines Day is actually worse than dinner out in a restaurant on New Years Eve. The only thing guaranteed is that your favorite restaurant that normally provides excellent service and food will let you down and hurt your feelings, thereby wasting perfectly good wine and a hundred or so dollars.

Not to look like a cheapskate, but I like to avoid the rush and go out a day or two before or after Valentines Day and leave the dining seats open for all of the bad husbands and clueless single morons that have to do something in order to save their collective asses and relationships.

I'm smarter than that.

You aught to wish that you and your date were going to be dining at MY house this year on Valentines Day.

I'm making a nice salad with organic field greens covered with a dressing made with ANCIENT Basamic vinegar, cooking a big dish of my special Eggplant Parmesan with a spicy Italian Sausage tomato sauce, and then for desert--the "coup de grace"--the Italian desert called Tiramisu.

It’s a combination of Mascarpone Cheese, Whipped Crème, Coffee, Chocolate custard, Grand Marnier Liquor, and lady fingers…all molded together in a loaf pan and chilled. The good thing is that it has ZERO calories and fat grams (if no one sees you eat half a pan of it.)

Now get out there and figure out something last minute to do for Valentines Day that is original.

Yes YOU there...go...get going...NOW!!!

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