Dear Miss Lonelyhearts

I used to work with a guy who played bass in a local rock band, who one year were hired to play the City Paper's Valentine's Day party for singles. He decided that it would be a grand idea to use pick-up lines as between-song patter, so he spent most of a workday searching the interwebs for specialized lines. It was with genuine regret that he reported that the party was so depressing that not even the goth lines got any kind of crowd reaction. He and Dan the Nats Fan would have gotten on well, though; Dan started using his before-they-were-omnipresent PDA to collect bad lines from women he thought were cute (and, NB, he reports that the only line that worked was, "I collect bad pick-up lines. What's the worst you've ever heard?").

In that spirit, and as a thanks to all the people who've been telling me good online dating stories lately, here's a link to Geoffrey Chaucer's lines for use at the annual medieval studies conference in Kalamazoo. It is a fair thought to conjure on: "Art thou a disastrous poll tax? Bycause I feele a risynge comynge on," and "Shulle we maken the cindreblokke to synge?"