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Love affairs are incomplete without pet names, one can say. It is a so common among lovers to call their sweethearts with nick names. And Prasanna and Sneha, K-towns latest love jodi, are no exception to this.

I would address Sneha with a lot of pet names. One among them is Kannamma. Because I like Bharathiyar poems and a lot. Also, there are other names for Sneha, like Pappu, Bebu and Pachchu. It depends on the mood, says Prasanna.

On how Sneha would call him, Prasanna says, She too is no inferior. Sneha has named me Kanna and Dada. I have saved her number as Pachchu in my mobile and she has saved my mobile number as Dada in her cell phone.

Saying that they would speak with each other at least once an hour, Prasanna, who is set to marry Sneha soon, adds: We miss each other a lot only during flight journeys. Because, we would be forced to stay away even without a phone call for hours together.

In the wake of the stunning announcement that the future Hall of Famer and Indianapolis Colts fixture Peyton Manning is heading to the Mile High City, I am once again filled with melancholy and find myself longing for the good old days in sports.

It used to be safe to purchase a poster, or dare I say jersey, of a particular player without the daunting specter of having those items rendered obsolete by the ugly phenomenon in professional sports that has transformed lifelong love affairs between fans and their idols into transitory dalliances marred by the ruthless, callous side of the business.

I can still recall fondly sitting on my bedroom floor as a kid, surrounded by a cluster of threadbare shoeboxes, each overflowing with baseball cards from a variety of years, overwhelmed at times by the sheer magnitude of my collection.

Although the volume of cards posed a real challenge for someone my age, it was always easy enough to eventually sort and organize my favorite players because every one of them had a placea home that was universally acknowledged.

Stan the Man was a redbird. Mantle and Maris wore pinstripes. Johnny Bench, Pete Rose and Joe Morgan belonged to the Big Red Machine. Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes and Ron Cey all bled Dodger blue, and Fenway Park was home to Yaz, Carlton Fisk and Jim Rice. Willie Stargell was only Pops in Pittsburgh, and Robin Yount was the face of the Brew Crew.

It just made sense.

Even as my beloved Mets blundered through the decade of the 70s, and some of my friends who were equally masochistic in their allegiance to the blue and orange tantalized each other with what if scenarios including players like Mike Schmidt and George Brett, I remained steadfast in my beliefs. Sure, players of that caliber would certainly have been a welcome addition to the feckless Metropolitans, but somewhere in my very core, I just knew that it was wrong.

The Magnetic Fields are still on the quest for romance.

Love at the Bottom of the Sea finds the band once again exploring the theme of failed love affairs using biting lyricism, thanks to leader and songwriter Stephin Merritt, but this time with added synth.

I have this vision that one day Illbesitting reading bedtime stories from MailOnlines sidebar to a child by Ikea lamplight. What happens to TOWIEs Sam Faiers when her tan peels, Mummy, when shes punished for her vanity? the child will ask, cuddling her Barack doll closer. Shh, darling, Illsay, closing my iPad 14. Well find out tomorrow.

Todays fairy tales are told by the tabloids. Our heroes are recovering prescription-painkiller addicts. Our heroines wear their cleavages like enlarged thyroid glands. Their lives are defined by their love affairs, but its rare that a male celebritys heartbroken loneliness gets the same gleeful sympathy as a female ones does. The kind of sympathy that involves digging for more evidence of pain as if tweezing for an ingrown hair. The kind of sympathy for which the concerned gasp was invented. The kind offered to Jennifer Aniston through all those post-Brad years, when her name carried the poor prefix whenever uttered by pundits. Poor Jen, cuckolded by Angelina Jolie, a woman who has thewordsexy running through her like Brighton rock. Poor childlessJen, who plays out the love shes lacking every month on the set of another soapy romcom.

Inacurrent interviewshe muses on the mediasfascination with her womb. In the tabloids, she says, instead of beingabout alien babies and stuff, its my triplets, quadruplets, marriages, feuds. Like fairy tales, where the good and pure are always rewarded with marriage, stories about celebrities are written to alimited brief. So when Aniston started looking happy with the guy from Sex and the City, tabloids had to look for a new lonely heart. Who wouldve thought it would be… Prince Harry?

The front page of the Daily Mirror last week read, Harry: I Cant Find Love. Lonely Prince Opens His Heart – on American telly Harry hadspoken of his search for awife. Im not so much searching for someone to fulfil the role, he said, his ginger eyes twinkling like eternal wealth, but obviously, you know, findingsomeone that would be willing to take it on.

At which Endemols giant Cinderella Project lever was, Iimagine, thrust downwards to clicking point, and Elstree Studios swept clear of all detritus to make way for the construction of the best-lit ballroom-cum-beanbag area for after-show fantalk the world has ever seen. And lo, we had our new Poor Jen. Poor Harry, the spare to the heir, who longs to be normal, whose brother – while Harrys been chasing Newcastle blondes (copyright the Mail) around Mayfairs nightclubs – has found his soulmate.

As tabloid stories about tits on beaches muddle with tales of our lonely prince searching for his one true love, the lines between trash and trueness blur,pleasingly. Has the fairy tale come full circle? Have tabloid tales become so unbelievable they are turning into fables? Is this the moment when the stories we read in our childhoods crash through the fourth wall into the Mirror itself?

In which case, phew. As with receipts and anxieties, its helpful to have all your myths in one place, for ease of reaching. It could go two ways, of course. Theres the worry that, by seeping through the gaps in our media, fairy tales threaten to overwhelm us entirely. That the stories we were told in our snotty, porous childhoods are being reinforced by their repetition in the news, and that we will come to expect love at first sight and happy endings for blondes.

But more excitingly, perhaps the more we accept that Poor Harry and Jen are interchangeable, the more we will come to see that its allafiction. That the celebrity news we drink in daily is asartificial and moral-ladenand creative as the bedtime stories we onceheard nightly.

Cricketers love affairs have always been much talked about, but a most remarkable story has gone untold. It was the 1962 Caribbean tour, but Dilip Sardesais mind was in Baroda.

Every single day, he sat to write a letter to a seventeen-year-old girl he had fallen in love with. In Baroda, Nandini Pant anxiously waited for his letter and wrote back to him.

Since she was always scared that her parents would come to know, she convinced a clerk in the post office to hand over the letters directly to her. He agreed to help her and the letters continued in full flow. By the end of the three-month long tour, Dilip and Nandini had written 90 letters to each other!

Dilip had first met Nandini when she came to Mumbai for a holiday after her final school exams. She met Dilip in a group at the Berrys restaurant at Churchgate. After some months, Dilip played an inter-university match at Ahmedabad which was next to her school. They met again. A couple of months later, he was playing a Ranji Trophy match against Baroda where Nandini was studying at the MS University.

It was later that they started writing love letters. Says Nandini, Half of my love letters used to be spent in correcting Dilips English, but that love was very much there. The teacher in me was born then. When Nandini appeared for her final BA exam in Mumbai, Dilip would be at the centre everyday with a flask of coffee standing outside the hall.

Born in Goa, Dilip came down to Mumbai for college education. The standard of cricket in Goa was very low in the 50s and he was passionate about playing cricket. He was spotted by coach Manya Naik at the Wilson College.

Says Ajit Wadekar, Dilip was a very good batsman. When selectors asked me to take a call between Chandu Borde and Dilip for the final place in the team that went to West Indies in 1971, I picked Dilip without any hesitation.

He was a renaissance man of Indian cricket scoring those runs under tremendous pressure against the West Indies when regular batsmen were failing. But the best knock that we Mumbaikars watched was at the Brabourne stadium in 1965. Following on, after India were bundled out for 80 against New Zealand, he played some superb shots against the deadly fast bowling of Dick Motz and Bruce Taylor, while scoring an unbeaten 200.

Salim Durrani, his contemporary and roomy, remembers him as a prankster. We were roomies all the time. After winning the second Test in the West Indies, I got a call in my room. A person spoke in a West Indian accent and said Mr Durrani, we are happy you won us the game. We are Indians staying here. We would like to meet you at the reception. I went down, but there was no one. I came to the room, changed and the phone rang again. Mr. Durrani where are you? We want to present you with a camera and a TV. We are near the swimming pool. I went down yet again to find nobody at the swimming pool. Just then someone tapped my shoulder. It was Dilip who was playing that prank, but I must say Dilip was a terrific batsman. In Bombay-Rajasthan encounters, he was brilliant.

To Dilip goes the credit of inventing the term Popatwadi. That was his label for a useless player or team. He would say Popatwadi hai.

After watching the first few overs of the West Indian bowling attack in the first Test of 1971 series, he shouted This is a Popatwadi attack. And he meant it. He attacked the Popatwadi bowling throughout the series and scored 642 runs in four Tests.

Dilip Sardesai passed away in 2007. And at the Gateway of India stood Nandini, throwing the thousands of love letters that they wrote to each other in the sea. The more overwhelming a person is, the greater is the loss felt at his departure. She must sorely miss the man and so does Mumbai cricket.

Its easy to fall in love with animals when theyre our pets. Most of us have had those love affairs, mostly with dogs or cats. We take them into our homes and lo and behold a bond is formed. Some bonds are better than others. The best one ends up as a member of the family and is the most wonderful pet we ever had.

A pet owners age, the timing, and the circumstances have a lot to do with it. Locals talked about the best pet they ever had, and it isnt always a dog or a cat.

Sixty years ago Ann DePalma of Antioch had a horse named Red. I was a teenager, and girls do love horses before their minds drift to boys, she laughed. I was the only one who rode him, and it always was bareback. He was wonderful.

I never let anyone else ride him.

Kandi Mariani of Brentwood has three cats, two dogs, a parrot and a horse. But shell never forget her first horse when she was 15. I always loved horses and my first one at age 15 was the star. We named him that, she said. Over the years Ive had better horses than Star, but theres nothing that can match the excitement of a girls first horse. Pets offer their owners so much pleasure. They give so much and expect so little.

Betsy is a 9-year-old Boxer. Shes the best for Julie Strausser of Discovery Bay. I had lost my only child and Betsy taught me to love again, she said. Ive had other dogs and loved them all. But Betsy was the right dog, with perfect personality and no aggression,

iexclFeliz Diacutea Del Amor Y La Amistad!

Theres a reason Spanish is the most widely spoken Romance language. After all, who else imbues nightly TV with such dramatic, tragic, sordid and enthralling stories of passion, star-crossed lovers, and innocence lost (and found)?

Lets be honest, nothing says romance like a scene where a couple finally embraces — after surviving the scheming aunt, death threats, kidnappings, ill-conceived love affairs, an avenging gardener, the requisite bastard child whos come back to claim his/her inheritance, the jealous cousin, and the other scheming aunt…

And more often than not, Enrique Iglesias is crooning away during the final scene. This is love. Love. LOVE!

DONT BELIEVE US? LET THE MAGIC OF VIDEO MELT YOUR RESISTANCE TO THE CHARMS OF LATIN LOVERS:
And, dont forget to vote for your favorite!

Explosive diarrhea?!!! Really? Turned out no, just an excuse to get away from me!… Though this was, admittedly, an unusual ending for a first date, the image of this handsome man feigning illness as he stumbled down the street clutching his stomach is for ever etched in my mind. (And what an ego booster!)

Far more endemic to Hanois young expat community than diarrhea, however, is the phobia of commitment, and two years into my stay here, I feel it fair to state that the dating scene is harder for women than it is for men. The expat woman holds little appeal for many of the expat men who only want local women, and apparently very little for the local men. The expat man who does date expat women, has few qualms of playing the field. Why stick to one woman when you can have (so) many…at the same time?

Many of my male friends have admitted to me that they know they would never be able to get away with such behavior at home but that its different here…. and unless they want to totally forgo male company, women here tend to turn a blind eye to such behavior, always hoping to meet the exception.

To be brutally frank, dating everywhere is practically obsolete, a formality used merely as a prelude to sex, with the emphasis on fun and rejection of those pesky commitments that a proper relationship entails.

In Vietnam, its even more extreme for expats: Hey, since it cant come to anything, why even pretend? Many expats say their time in Hanoi reminds them a lot of their university days: being in a city for a fixed amount of time, out to experiment with impunity, with no intention of being tied down in a serious relationship. Its the three Fs rule: Freedom, Fun and the other F word….

Its 5am, the music is blasting, and couples on the dance floor are crossing over into the realm of indecent behavior. The person with whom youve spent all night downing vodka tonics romantically slurs in your ear about getting out of here and with hazy vision and a polluted mind you trudge after them. The following morning you slip out, hail a taxi home, looking and feeling a little worse for wear. The scene above could describe any given night at university, but its also an accurate portrayal of a typical weekend night for many of the foreigners who have chosen to make Vietnam their temporary home.

Am I being unfair? Am I generalizing? Maybe. There are couples who have come over together or who meet here and have long standing, successful relationships. There are also couples who are in long distance relationships and stay the course (and in fact, the lack of viable options available here enhances the appeal of rekindling or starting a relationship with someone at home despite the obvious drawbacks and difficulties!) There is also constant attraction and hope.

Hope does spring eternal but bubbles inevitably burst and while living in the expat bubble, couples from different parts of the world can ignore reality and live for the moment. When its time for each to go home, what happens? Will the relationship be able to transition seamlessly into a new environment even if there is a consensus about whose environment it would be? Will it be Sydney or London? Paris or Singapore? Is it even worth the heartache? Do you leave the relationship behind, cherishing the memories? Do you romanticize that what you had was real and will live on where ever you are? Of course these factors arent unique, just more inevitable in expat formed relationships…. When we begin a relationship with someone at home, we assume that, despite other challenges, at least theres the security of them being in the same city as us.

And what about the Vietnamese women left behind by their foreign boyfriends? Did they truly believe the promises, the serious plans, the glittering future? Are their hearts broken immediately when their boyfriends leave or slowly, over time, when realization dawns that their love affairs, passionate as they might have been, were little more than a mirage? Do they manage to keep happy memories? This is not to suggest that all expat men are callous beasts who deliberately mislead innocent local women, only that distance and a different environment relax the rules and sometimes completely rewrite them.

While Ive decided that Hanoi may not be the best place for enduring love affairs, I have found it the perfect place to fall in love. In just over two years, I have fallen in love in so many ways. I have fallen in love with the culture of Vietnam, with the people and the food and the sights. Most importantly, Ive fallen in love with who Ive become and isnt that the most enduring? Thegreatest love of all?

Sports tabloids have in recent weeks speculated on love affairs between Texas Ranger Yu Darvish and porn actress Kirara Asuka and former golfer Miho Koga. Yet weekly tabloid Shukan Asahi Geino reports that his former team, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, are happy to have ended their marriage to the pitcher.

A member of management kept repeating that it would be best for the team if he left, and allegedly these sentiments are shared by many in management, says an individual associated with the Fighters.

The ace compiled an 18-7 record and a 1.44 ERA and a 276/36 K/BB ratio over 232 innings this past season with the Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball’s Pacific League. Yet, the hurler, who in January signed a six-year, $60 million deal with the Rangers, did not fit in with the team’s stance on the need for self-sacrifice.

Darvish became unbeatable in Japan, says the same individual, and he was saying that the only move he can make is to go to the Major Leagues. If that was in fact the case, he should have declared this outright, but he instead kept everything undecided for a month, thus causing a negative effect on the team.

The source continues to say that one coach said that the team does not need a player whose focus is on himself. While some players worshiped him, he seemed a bit pompous and isolated, believes the tabloid.

It is a concern that he is not showing a keen interest in what it means to be playing in MLB, and he is also lacking the attitude to learn, says a desk editor at a sports paper. Obviously, MLB does not believe it to be healthy example for young kids when Darvish arrived wearing a T-shirt promoting illicit drugs. Did he not know that the team’s clean-up hitter (Josh) Hamilton is struggling with drug problems? After getting that fat contract, you would think he would want to make friends with his teammates first.

Yet if he can dominate the American League, the critics will be silenced, says the tabloid.

Yoko Umeda, a US-based sports journalist, however, predicts a tough beginning for him, citing the difference between the balls used in MLB and NPB as a concern.

Even if he has been practicing with the MLB ball, a pitcher like him, who relies on a variety off-speed pitches, usually gets panicked with the difference humidity levels that exist across the US (Hideo) Nomo and (Kazuhiro) Sasaki struggled. It will depend on whether he can overcome that during the first four or five months.

Nonetheless, expectations are high for the rookie, who received the highest posting bid ($51.7 million) in history.

Yuichi Setsumaru, a sports announcer who covered the Rangers during their back-to-back AL Championship titles over the past two seasons, has strong faith that Darvish will fair well. Local writers were so excited to have him join the team after the repeat, believing he will only make them stronger and lead to a real dynasty.

The announcer views the Texas media’s reputation for being more friendly, as opposed to cities like New York or Los Angeles, as a plus for the pitcher. We know he is good, so I hope to see him showcase the strength of Japanese baseball. (KN)

Source: Darubisshu Yu wo nerau ‘Koga Miho vs Asuka Kirara’ ‘kono chiimu ni ha hairanai, Shukan Asahi Geino (Feb. 16)

Note: Brief extracts from Japanese vernacular media in the public domain that appear here were translated and summarized under the principle of “fair use.” Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy of the translations. However, we are not responsible for the veracity of their contents. The activities of individuals described herein should not be construed as “typical” behavior of Japanese people nor reflect the intention to portray the country in a negative manner. Our sole aim is to provide examples of various types of reading matter enjoyed by Japanese.

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KALAMAZOO–University Theatre at Western Michigan University presents the Midwest premiere of The Cure for Love March15-25 the Gilmore Theatre Complexs Williams Theatre.

• Purchase tickets online
  wmutheatre.com

Performance schedule
The Cure for Love at Williams Theatre

• Thursday, March 15, at 8 pm
• Friday, March 16, at 8 pm
• Saturday, March 17, at 8 pm
• Thursday, March 22, at 8 pm
• Friday, March 23, at 8 pm
• Saturday, March 24, at 8 pm
• Sunday, March 25, at 2 pm

Written by WMU faculty member Jay Berkow, this bawdy and flirty farce is adapted from the Alexander Dumas novel Fernande. It tells the comical story of a prestigious family trying to find a cure for love. Affairs abound and the characters find themselves up to their corset laces in chaosall in the name of love.

WMU theatre professor Jim Daniels directs the all-student cast, which includes Jody Burns, Susie Parr, Andi Foster, Sara Bower, Ethan Hedeen, Aleks Krapivkin and Brian Martin. This will be Daniels final production at WMU before he retires.

Tickets

Reserved seating for The Cure for Love at Williams Theatre is $20, $15 for senior citizens and WMU employees, $5 for WMU students and $10 for all other students. Tickets are available by calling (269)387-6222, online at wmutheatre.com, or by visiting the Gilmore Theatre Complex or Miller Auditorium ticket offices. Group discounts are available by calling (269)387-3227. An opening night reception sponsored by Oakwood Bistro will take place after the March15 performance.

For more information, contact Emily Duguay, University Theatre, at emily.duguay@wmich.edu or (269)387-6222.