Echo chamber

The Washington Post Pearls Before Breakfast 5 July 2012 "Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million."

Another poignant commentary on the unfortunate demands of modern life. On the other hand, recent double-blinded experiments from the University of Paris have shown that even professional violinists cannot tell apart the supposedly superlative aural qualities of multi-million dollar antique violins from modern instruments costing less than 1% of their price. Perhaps a perverse partnership ensues when subjectivism combines with conspicuous consumption?

Valentine's Day

Despite our liberated ideals and marriage-related statistics, there yet remains an ideal of monogamous love lasting forever like a De Beers cartel diamond. Many bird species are long renowned as symbols of lifelong devotion and have been traditionally popular in love iconography.

It is said that if you want monogamy, you should marry a swan.

However, modern research shows that many socially monogamous species nevertheless engage in extra-pair copulations, with DNA testing revealing, for example, that 1 in 6 black swan cygnets are not fathered by the resident male.

True devotion, then, is demonstrated in schistosomes and diplozoons. In the lives of these parasitic flatworms, males and females find each other "and the two shall become one flesh", the pair remaining physically locked in mating position for the rest of their lives.

Schistosoma mansoni

Diplozoon paradoxum

Lovebirds this Valentine's Day who are ready to enter a new level of commitment could consider one day becoming loveworms instead, exchanging "I ♥ You" for "I χ You."