Paper Monitor
14:37 UK time, Monday, 13 February 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Today is not a good day for people in the world of features.
There's a fair amount of news around but a shadow lurks over their counterparts in the featureszone. It's Valentine's Day tomorrow.
Surely, you say, this is a fertile time for features. Well, no, not really.
Since (judging by a quick squiz on Wikipedia) Valentine's Day has been going 600 years there's really not much more to say.
Paper Monitor occasionally overhears features ingénues pitching Valentine's ideas to gnarled features editors. The response is usually not pretty - "no", "computer says no", "never, never, never" etc
But many papers still plough on - both on the day and on the 13th. So today the Sun has "How to prepare for Valentine's Date".
It's a rather practical thing about eating and exercise rather than anything more soulsearching. It's all about having some dark chocolate and a handful of nuts.
Paper Monitor would prefer "in case of romantic crisis, break glass and remove emergency cat" or "you're born alone and you die alone".
The Guardian's G2 goes the other way with no Valentine stuff.
It has a couple of nice things - a lovely set of pictures of wholly unnecessary quotation marks in signs, and then .
It starts off with a section about Dinner for One - a sketch that plays on New Year's Eve in Germany every year. Readers of this parish are already well .
In fact, Dinner for One is so well known that the comments field at the bottom of the Guardian online piece gets a bit hostile.
But it must be said the feature - or edited book extract to be more accurate - does a pretty good job of opening out into wider differences between British and German comedy.
It talks about the prevalence of comedy in the UK and the popularity of a totally deadpan delivery.
Of course, the commenters think it's churning up old stereotypes about Germans loving slapstick while sophisticated British people prefer verbal humour.
Anyway, at least it's not about Valentine's.
The 
