We’ve been trying to come up with good romantic nicknames. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most of the lists lying around online are rather dull. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

• Chuckle-cheeks.
• Goose-bumps.
• Pookie-snooks.
• Poptart.
• Jiggles McJiggypants.
• Twinkle-toes.
• Nuzzle-nose.
• Snoopy.
• Poopy.
• Snugglepuss.
• Dumble-dear.
• Fox-trot.
• Sweetmeat.
• Happy-feet.
• Fishbreath (use only if you can say it lovingly enough to distract from its actual meaning).

We’ve obviously got a lot of work to do.

The good people at rinkworks.com have the following suggestion for making romantic pet names:

Mix up the syllables “pook,” “wee,” “hon,” “oop,” and “ums,” (never use the syllables “skuzz” or “elch”), rhyme a lot, and make liberal references to baked goods. […] “Sweetie Pumpkin Pookums” is a perfectly acceptable and effective pet name, as are “Moopsie Cutie,” “Hunny Wunny Cakes,” and, for the extravagant, “Snookie Wookum Weetie Bunny Pie.” (It may seem odd to novices that cooked rodents would be romantic, but they are.)

They’ve even provided a handy pet name generator to help you come up with a name for your… err… Wuggywoogledumpling.

It is a fairly well known fact that in any group of people, the odds of two of those people sharing the same birthday is a lot higher than you would expect.  Once the group size is over 60 or so it is practically guaranteed that some of them share birthdays.  The key to understand it: think of how many possible pairs of people there are in the group, rather than just the number of people.  Wikipedia has a good write-up of the math.  If you don’t believe it, you can see the effect graphically.

This is a case where binaversaries can act a little differently to regular birthdays.  The chances of people within a group sharing the same binaversary depends on the age distribution in that group; if they are all the same age then the situation is the same as for birthdays, otherwise the odds decrease according to how wide the distribution is.

In preparation for Valentine’s day, we’re expanding our romantic things to do online list. We’ve given some tips for finding unusual reasons to celebrate (including the fooaversary discussion from this blog). For example, for February 14th, why send a boring old Valentine’s greeting when you could send a card celebrating:

• The first trainload of oranges leaves Los Angeles (February 14, 1886)
• Edward Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, becomes the first member of the British royal family to ride in an automobile (February 14, 1896)
• Aretha Franklin tapes “RESPECT” (February 14, 1967)

(facts gathered from the History Channel and Scopesys sites).

Update: we’ve made some sample cards for these alternate valentines.