Quintuple Penultamour

Congrats to dictator555 on her recent engagement! This gives me an occasion to use a word recently coined on the Freakonomics blog:

The other night at a party, a conversation arose that required a word that didn’t seem to exist. Taking part in this conversation were several people who had each been the last person to date another person before that other person took up with his/her eventual spouse. Surely there is a word for this? We couldn’t think of one, so after some trial (and plenty of error), we made one up: “penultamour.”

According to Mr. Google, this word has never been uttered by humankind. It remained open to debate whether a penultamour should feel pride or shame at having served that role.

This is actually the fifth time that a woman I dated got engaged to the next man they dated. Even though that's less than a third of all the women I've dated, five still seems kind of high (and there are a handful of exes that I didn't keep in touch with, so in theory the number could be higher). I don't think it's a bad thing, it's just a curious statistic, but maybe I have a blind spot and there's some lesson I should learn from this? I dunno. I will also note that in four of the five cases, the eventual spouses were men I was friends with before I started dating the women, so maybe the lesson is that I am a good source of marriage-worthy friends?

Freak Shot

Hey, look, I got my name in The New York Times! Well, OK, a New York Times blog. I sent this picture to the Freakonomics blog (for their "Freak Shots" feature) back in July; when it didn't show up in the next few weeks I figured it didn't make the cut, but I guess they have a large backlog.



Now that gas prices have fallen it's not quite as relevant, but oh well. I actually stopped reading that blog recently in an attempt to cut down my Google Reader reading load—it was just a little too hit-or-miss and too high volume. But now I feel sort of ungrateful...