Rhodri Marsden asked Twitter for people’s worst Valentine’s Day experiences and stories of awful dates, and got back plenty of pithiness and pathos.

Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion of Underground Writing. Don’t miss the jaw-dropping synopsis of The Sheik.

The Death of the Cyberflâneur by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion (which this might even inspire me to read at last). His model of cyberflânerie seems to be old-skool blogging of the LinkMachineGo kind.

The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World. I don’t know about “most”, as it’s missing some wonderful bookshops I’ve seen myself, but there are certainly some impressive ones here.

It’s a Snap! by Henry and Aaron: probably the most amusing TAFE recruitment video ever. Made me homesick for Australia, and went some way to making up for that Gina Rinehart poem. Warning for the faint of heart: you might faint.

The competing claims for the Falklands. I’ve been trying to put my finger on what unsettles me about Argentina’s claims, and I think it’s the echoes of Indonesia’s stance towards East Timor and West Papua. But the parallels aren’t exact.

[All via Mefi: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.]

19 February 2012 · Weblog