Fun Online Polls: Valentine's Day & Buying from your landlord

The responses to The Stigler's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What did you get for Valentine's Day?

A card - 11 votes
Chocolates - 2 votes
An evening out - 3 votes
Champagne - 2 votes
Flowers - 0 votes
Sex - 9 votes
Other, please specify - 3 votes
Nothing - 58 votes

There were 79 voters, 58 got nothing and 21 got 30 items in total.

So now we know.
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Last year, our landlord decided to chuck us out and sell the house.

Being too lazy to move and having given up hope of there being a house price crash, we put in a cheeky offer which was accepted. So the thought experiment which helps us demolish a lot of "Killer Arguments Against LVT" is quite real in my case.

I was chatting about this to somebody at work and he told me he'd once bought from his landlord, and a longstanding YPP accomplice did it a year or two ago. So out of a very small and totally unrepresentative sample, that's three people.

So maybe it is quite common?

To find out, that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

Fun Online Poll: What did you get for Valentine's Day?

Suggested by The Stigler.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: St Valentine's Day spending & Land ownership

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll, results as follows:

How much did you spend on St Valentine's Day-related stuff this year?

Nothing - 67%
Up to £10 - 16%
£10 to £50 - 12%
More than £50 - 3%
OMG I forgot! So that's why my other half is sulking! - 1%
Other, please specify - 1%

I'm glad to see that only two of us forgot outright, and I am surprised that two-thirds of people get away with spending nothing (I'm in the "£10 to £50" bracket). Or maybe a lot of female readers took part, they can of course reliably getting away with spending nothing, and I doubt that most blokes would notice or even mind.
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M'learned colleague at work suggested I do a poll on which Middle Eastern despot will be deposed next, but that's going to end up too complicated, and AFAICS, all they do is hand over to another slightly-less-bad despot.

So this week's Fun Online Poll is just to see how many people have put any thought into the subject of what 'land ownership' really is and/or have been paying attention to my ramblings.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Harry Potter & Valentine's Day

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll. The results are:

If you were Harry Potter, with whom would you have liked to get hitched?

I have no idea who any of these people are - 52%
Hermione Grainger - 19%
Luna 'Loony' Lovegood - 13%
Parvati Patel - 5%
Ginny Weasley - 5%
Cho Chang - 4%
Other, please specify - 2%

So well done the 48% of you did have an idea, and well done to fictional characters Hermione Grainger (predictably enough) and Luna (who would be pleasantly surprised by this, if she existed).
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Seeing as today is St Valentine's Day, how about a St Valentine's Day-related Fun Online Poll?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Obligatory Valentine's Day rant

[As I have nothing new to say on the topic, I shall merely republish my post of exactly a year ago]

When I were a lad, the point of Valentine's Day cards was that if you really fancied somebody but were too shy to say it, you sent them a Valentine's Day card ('VD' card, for short?) but you weren't supposed to sign it, which is pretty pointless when you think about it.

Somehow, the whole 'tradition' has now been completely subverted and it's just another reason/excuse for buying champagne, chocolate, a greeting card and some flowers for your existing partner. Can anybody pin down when this happened? It must have been over the last twenty years or so.

Other important dates in history that I'd like to pin down...

1. When did we adopt the European tradition of having fireworks on New Year's Eve? That must have been in the late 1980s sometime.

2. When did rappers stop wearing baseball hats back to front and start wearing them the right way round? Some time in the 1990s, I'd guess.

3. When did people stop putting their qualifications on their business cards? I think I can pin that one down to 2001 or thereabouts.

Weston-super-Mare is like Saudi Arabia

Story One: A primary school in Weston-super-Mare has been criticised for banning Valentine cards to save pupils the "emotional trauma" of being rejected. Children at Ashcombe Primary School were stopped from exchanging cards because the head teacher said they were not emotionally mature enough to cope...

Story Two: A Saudi official says policemen are inspecting shops for red roses, heart-shaped products or gifts wrapped in red, and ordering storeowners to get rid of them... Saudi Arabia bans celebration of Western holidays such as Valentine's Day, named after a Christian saint said to have been martyred by the Romans in the 3rd Century.

Maybe I should invite Johann Hari or Yasmin Alibi-Brown to explain how brilliant it is that they are putting up a fight against Western consumerism and over-sexualisation of children, oppression of women etc?