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Every rogue state on the planet would love to get its hands on my grandmother’s recipe. I would not like to think what would happen if Saddam got the chocolate sauce. If I have anything to say about it, he’s not getting squat.

If that makes me seem arrogant, or like the chocolate-sauce-police of the globe, I’m sorry. But the fact is, I have the recipe and you don’t. Be reasonable. If you really think about it, none of us wants to live in a world where anybody with enough pluck can go ahead and make my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. That would be highly destabilizing, and additionally, would suck.

I’m not definitively saying there’s evaporated milk in it, but Iraq appears to be trying to get their hands on this unique ingredient. There is no other known use for canned, evaporated milk than my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. Can you name another use for it? No. Who else buys it except me? No one. Until now. Iraq’s apparent interest in evaporated milk is very troubling indeed.

A similar product, sweetened condensed milk, is innocuous. I’m not giving away any state secrets here when I say it has no application in the making of my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. Lots of delicious, though conventional, recipes call for it. A tablespoon mixed into a hot cup of tea is delightful, and no cause for alarm whatsoever.

It would be ridiculous to deny that sugar, cocoa, and butter are in my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. They are. And they are easily obtained everywhere, though not necessarily in the correct proportions or of the required quality. This is one of the tradeoffs of a free society. I would not like to eat dry toast just to make sure no one else got my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. For better or worse, our current laws allow just about anyone to buy these ingredients over the counter, as long as they look like credible shoppers.

Thanks to unscrupulous relationships in the past with Russia and the CIA, Saddam already has access to cheesecake and sherbet. We’d have to be pretty naive to believe that he doesn’t have a cupboard full of sauces, glazes, chutneys, and nut-toppings as well. Confetti sprinkles, for example, are distributed evenly throughout the globe, as they should be.

But this chocolate sauce stays in the family. It is not Iraq’s fault that it didn’t develop this chocolate sauce, and I don’t blame them for wanting it.  It is a terrible responsibility, and one that I do not take lightly at all. With a heavy heart, I reflect on the awesome fact that my grandmother’s chocolate sauce exists at all. It would be so much easier if we could turn back the clock, and pretend she never created it.

Don’t get any ideas about raiding my recipe box. I have committed it to memory, and destroyed the original. Also, I must urge you not to try to duplicate my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. It has evolved into a very exacting science which cannot be easily transferred. For example, if the sauce has just a dash of vanilla extract in it—and I’m not saying it does—well, what the hell kind of measurement is a “dash” anyway? Let’s just say that disaster has so far been averted. But when you get a hundred million Iraqis mucking around with double boilers (which, by the way, are NOT used in making the sauce), it would only be a matter of time. Is it worth the risk?

People of Iraq: Do not fear me or hate me because of my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. Be grateful that it’s in such good hands. If it’s any consolation to you, Turkey has been trying to duplicate my wife’s cranberry sauce for decades, and Chile—let’s not even go there.

There were five people at my wedding: Me, my husband, two witnesses, and the minister—our roommate Eugene.

Eugene is a minister of the Universal Life Church, a group that supports freedom of religion and says they will ordain anyone. It takes three minutes and can be done over the Internet. But the website warns, “This is a serious matter and should not be used to play jokes on your friends. In our experience, people become very upset to find themselves ordained without their permission. It is not worth broken friendships, so just don’t do it please.” Because ordainment is so easy, and because there are no ritual requirements dictated by the state, the same process makes it virtually possible to marry people without their knowledge.

After being ordained, Eugene ordered a Universal Life Church ID card for $12. He brought the card to city hall and paid $5 to be officially registered in Ramsey County to perform weddings and other religious ceremonies. A week later, he married us in our dining room in a silent Buddhist ceremony, which was his idea. My husband and I entered the room between the two witnesses and bowed to Eugene. Eugene poured a glass of wine. We each drank from it, then bowed to each other. The ceremony was over; all that remained was to sign the paperwork.

Eugene’s friend Samantha has already married three couples. She became a minister of the ULC to help out some friends who wanted to get married but didn’t have the money to pay a real judge or minister. Her most recent wedding took place in the couple’s kitchen with the bride’s parents on speakerphone from Seattle. At her second wedding, which took place in a park in front of a large group of friends and family, she recited a speech she memorized 30 minutes beforehand, and then the couple jumped over a broom.

Samantha had some legal troubles before her first wedding. She brought in a printed email from the Universal Life Church to verify that she was an ordained minister, but this was insufficient proof for the county. She ordered a certificate from the church, which would arrive signed but blank, so she would have to fill her own name in, but it didn’t arrive in time for the wedding. She finally took a picture of the certificate from the ULC’s handbook, enlarged it at the copy store where she worked, and put her name on that one. The county accepted it. That afternoon she signed her first marriage certificate, in the presence of the bride and two witnesses. The husband was not there, but apparently he had consented beforehand, because he never contested the slightly questionable wedding. Whether he realizes it or not, he and his wife are legally married in the state of Minnesota.—Katherine Glover

If you weren’t at Sylvie Nides and Sampson Burke’s golden anniversary party this past September, you missed the event of the year, maybe even of the decade. After all, how often do you get the chance to see two dogs renewing wedding vows under a chuppah?

Jane Nides, Sylvie’s mom and a medical marketing representative, was the matchmaker who brought the panting couple together 50 dog-years ago. She got the idea for the wedding after she heard about a fundraiser called Dog Day Afternoon to raise money for DIFFA (The Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS) and the Animal Humane Society. Instead of just taking her dog to the event, Nides had a better idea.

“I thought, why don’t I add onto that event, and have my dog get married? And instead of people bringing gifts, ask for donations?” She called up her neighbor and friend Cindy, mother of Sampson, a pedigreed bearded collie, and tested the waters. Would Sampson be intersted in, you know, hooking up with Sylvie?

Few arranged marriages work out so well. The nuptials were held on July 27, 1996 at Midway Stadium in conjunction with Dog Day Afternoon, with more guests, bridesmaids, musicians, and cake than most human weddings.

Every year since then, Nides has hosted an anniversary party in her Linden Hills home, with Sylvie in her original wedding dress. And while the annual event is a chance to get together with friends, it’s always connected with at least one charity.

This year’s party raised money for the Alzheimer’s Association and the Humane Society. And being that Sylvie and Sampson were celebrating 50 dog-years of wedded bliss, Nides pulled out all the stops. As guests arrived on the warm September even-ing, they were asked to choose a dog tag, in-scribed with one of three legends to wear over their black-tie garb: “good dog,” “bad dog,” or “crazy dog.” Thus tagged, they were treated to wine, fine food, strolling musicians, and the commissioned work of Minneapolis mural artist Peter Bue, better known as Fucci.

When everyone was present, Nides announced on a megaphone that the ceremony was starting down in her newly created rock garden. The crowd stood in solemn anticipation as the steadfast couple renewed their vows under the colorful chuppah. Lawrence Hutera, the Twin Cities singer who serenaded the couple at the original wedding in 1996, sang the same beloved songs. After Sampson broke the wine glass (with the help of an unidentified size-9 pump), the lovers spent the rest of the evening mingling. After many hours of revery, guests were sent on their way with two lovely keepsakes: a “House of Fun and Fur” chocolate bar, and a lint roller to relieve themselves of stray Sylvie and Sampson fuzz.

The couple’s secret to keeping the puppy love alive? Having a little breathing room in their marriage. “Sampson moved away a while ago, so for the past few years they’ve only seen each other at the anniversary parties,” Nides explains. “It works well.”—Stephanie Watson

Benjamin has been looking for Erin for about four months. He met her at a party in August, and she hit his car two weeks later. But it wasn’t like that. There were no damages. Rather, Ben had a crush on Erin.

The number he put into his cell phone never saved. He searched the phone’s memory again and again. Then he made some calls. But for all anyone knew, Erin was a figment of Ben’s imagination. There was no last name, no friend-of-a-friend connection. Nothing.

He took out an “I saw you” ad in a local paper and it ran the next week. “You hit my car in NE Mpls. You looked beautiful. Please call to discuss the ‘damages.’ My name is Benjamin.” It ran the week after that. And again the week after that. And again.

It’s January and Ben’s had no response. When the ad first ran, he checked his messages daily. He says he’s down to once a week now, and even then it’s a halfhearted effort. The hope is gone. “I don’t think anyone reads those things,” he says dismissively.

Ben is adamant about one thing: He’s not desperate. But, to be honest, it’s hard to meet attractive, interesting women when you’re a 28-year-old medical student. And even when you do meet one, well, there just aren’t any guarantees of lifelong (or even week-long) compatibility. Ben doesn’t know if it would be different with Erin. But in their fleeting, beer-infused moment in time, he perceived a spark in her brown-eyed self that Ben rarely sees in Minnesota ladies. There are just so few good ones available, he laments. And even if they are available, how do you meet them? Now she probably just remembers him as the guy who never called.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. His friend ran into her last week, but he forgot to mention Ben, his interest, or his search. And then she was gone. Again.

According to the 2000 census, there are 82 million people living alone in the United States. Forty-eight million of those people have never been married; another 20 million are divorced, and some 13.6 million are widowed. The census has no way of measuring whether these people are happy about their swinging singlehood, but human nature being what it is, it’s probably safe to assume that most would prefer to be coupled. Or at least try. After all, thousands of people vow every day that theirs is a union that will be different. They thumb their noses at the divorce rate and tie the knot. But we all know the statistics. The Census Bureau notes that, on average, people between the ages of 15 and 85 spend more years unmarried than married. Divorce plays a big part in that stat. But you also have to consider the additional ten percent of people who will never marry at all.

Ask anyone in their late 20s or early 30s why they’re single, and they will probably tell you there’s simply no one attractive or interesting or datable left. With the exception of the single person you happen to be talking to, of course, all single people on the scene are weird, ugly, unemployed, or sleazy. But get them talking a bit more, and the truth comes out. Regardless of whatever else they might be, attractive young eligibles are all one other thing: completely, utterly unapproachable. Why? There are lots of reasons, mostly having to do with the limitations of the would-be approacher, not the approachee: because you haven’t actually approached anyone since college; because there’s no one to approach when you work in information technology/nursing/business; because there’s no one to approach when you spend your nights watching prime time. Because you can’t approach anyone when you’re shy, insecure, or out of practice; you can’t approach anyone when you have an overwhelming fear of rejection; you can’t approach anyone when you’re wallowing in singledom; you can’t approach anyone when you’re emitting from every pore the saccharine scent of your loneliness.

Which is why, on a cold December night, a hundred of those despicable singles gather on the mezzanine of William’s Pub in Uptown. These singles are mostly white, and mostly white-collar. They each shell out $40 to spend three hours of their busy schedules as Fast Daters. If you’re shy, busy, or genetically predisposed to the bizarre, Fast Dater is the up-and-coming way to meet your honey.

The Rake goes inside the criminally overshadowed AV Club.

If The Onion is the nation’s class clown, the AV Club—the newspaper’s unheralded entertainment section—is its thoughtful little wallflower of a brother. Originally a wacky complement to the newspaper’s celebrated satire, the section grew into its current format under editor Stephen Thompson, who fought for a more serious critical focus when he took over in 1993. The specialty of the house quickly became long, free-flowing Q&As with notable celebrities, both up-and-coming and down-and-going. There are legions whose presence in an irreverent Gen-X publication like The Onion is nearly mandated by law—Penn & Teller, Henry Rollins, the creators of Mr. Show. But the AV Club is distinct for its focus on completely forgotten B-listers. Long before Behind the Music and Fear Factor, they let the Vanilla Ices of the world steal a little overtime in their 15 minutes of fame.

The AV Club’s new book The Tenacity of the Cockroach collects 68 interviews with such diverse figures as Joan Jett, animator Chuck Jones, film director Russ Meyer, and novelty-music king Dr. Demento. These folks have little in common, other than their scars from years of showbiz struggle, and their hard-won place in popular culture—even if that place is far out on its fringes. Tenacity explores that theme through the widest possible cast of characters, moving from embittered cranks and recluses to focused pros to those grateful just to be here. The Rake recently turned the glare of the Q&A spotlight back on AV Club editor Thompson.

The Rake: What valuable life lessons can we learn from celebrities?

THOMPSON: Obviously I don’t think Rachael Leigh Cook has a lot to teach us, or Ashton Kutcher, God bless him. But if you select wisely, and talk to celebrities that have an interesting perspective on their work and how it fits into the culture, there is potential. We probably share a certain skepticism about the tendency to make a celebrity’s story universal, like we can all learn about what it’s like to have a baby because Celine Dion had a baby. If you remember when Celine Dion had her baby, it was like this triumph of the human spirit because Celine Dion had managed to breed, and her baby was of course a kind of miracle baby. (Laughs) How ridiculous is that? I mean, obviously, Celine Dion had difficulty conceiving and I’m glad she was able to have a baby. But it was this ridiculously overblown thing where we were supposed to take this great uplifting life lesson because a pop singer went through this.

The comedy section of The Onion gets far more attention than the AV Club. Do you sometimes feel like you’re the redheaded stepchild?

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a little bit, over the years, but I’d never in a million years expect to be acclaimed the way the comedy section has been. That’s perfectly understandable. We’re not doing groundbreaking comedy. I think we’re doing a very good entertainment section, but there are so many entertainment sections. At the same time, it bothers me when long articles appear about The Onion and don’t mention that there is an entertainment section.

How did the AV Club evolve, relative to the rest of The Onion?

We launched the entertainment section in 1993. In 1995 we renamed it the AV Club. Originally everything was written by me and the comedy writers, and eventually I brought in my own entertainment staff as I found people. It was trial and error. And there were certainly conflicts. It was originally going to be just a wacky entertainment section. And that idea I didn’t think had ever been particularly well executed. Over time the idea became, why don’t we just do a really smart, interesting entertainment section that has The Onion’s directness and economy of phrasing, has the spirit of The Onion, but is a real entertainment section that would be taken seriously and would enhance the value and the voice of the paper. It took years to figure that out and a ton of fights. My feeling was, why bother having an entertainment section if the jokes you’re putting in aren’t particularly on target? We can be cutting and clever and still provide people with some sort of service. A consistent set of opinions and a clitoral — I mean critical — perspective.

You’d probably get a lot more press with the other one.

(Laughs.) Yes, we’d be faring better today.

There’s a school of thought that a clever interviewer can draw out something universal in just about anybody.

Everyone has a story to tell and everybody’s unique, but finding people who can articulate what makes themselves interesting is a little bit trickier. We try to make sure that our interviews don’t dwell on just a current project, but to do general career overviews because that’s what we’re more interested in to begin with. It helps that our favorite sort of interviewees tend to be a little older, to have a large body of work. And in a lot of cases, they’re people whose work we grew up admiring. We have jokes about interviewing bitter, jilted cranks and geriatric comedy legends. We all have our niches. So the fact that everybody has the tenacity of the cockroach, that they have survived in entertainment, that’s the product of the mentality we’ve always taken into the interviews. We seek out people whose work we’ve enjoyed for a long time.

How does your style differ from journalists doing similar long-form interviews, like Charlie Rose or Terry Gross?

I think they do fine work. Because we’re in print, it’s definitely a different art. Terry Gross and Charlie Rose have to talk much more articulately than we do. You can edit an audio interview, but in print you can really polish it up into almost essay-like clarity.

How did you come to the long-form Q&A interview as the AV Club ideal?

That’s the standard block of space between ads in our Madison, Wisconsin, edition, which is a silly thing to base interview lengths on, but we just found it was right. Too much longer, your eyes would glaze over. A lot shorter, the interview barely registers. So we like to do a nice long big meaty feature length interview, but for that to work it has to be interesting. You can’t disguise a boring interview if you’re doing Q&A. Not that we’ve never done boring interviews.

I personally find Q&A more readable. When we started doing interviews, they were essays, which can read kind of flat. The subject gets de-emphasized, and the writer does all this paraphrasing. When I read an interview, I want to read what the subject has to say.

How did I get so slovenly? Can I blame it on my upbringing, fraught with stringent housekeeping rules and rigorous cleaning chores from an early age? Is it the necessary byproduct of a creative temperament? Or am I just lazy?

I leave my dishes in the sink, on the table, or worse yet, in the bed. I toss my coat on the back of the nearest chair and my shoes in the middle of the floor. I tuck my keys wherever I’ll be least likely to find them again, and I abandon my purses in the seats of grocery carts as a karmic test to the next shoppers.

The cheese and cracker crumbs on the kitchen counter are mine, the stray toothpaste cap was my doing, and my coat pockets are overflowing with forgotten lipsticks, receipts, stray beads, and hairy lintballs.

Don’t jump to conclusions. My home is a pretty place. For one thing, my partner keeps house like a doting granny. But even I value a beautiful, orderly environment enough to work against my own nature. I clean in fiery, maniacal bursts. The bleachy smell of a clean bathroom lifts my spirits. I paint, I arrange, I rearrange, and most of all, I hide things. I am a lover of drawers, especially. Some people use desk drawers for pens, pencils, and paper clips. Mine are stuffed with more fascinating debris: yarn bracelets, loose potpourri, candle stubs, rocks, stale candy, paper wads, photos, sugar cubes, grapefruit oil, empty match books.

My younger sister, a self-described obsessive, finds this intolerable, and has long claimed that my tender-heartedness toward little dishes and baskets and bowls of odds and ends with no discernible purpose—pretty or not—is the root of all evil. But I’m not convinced. Sometimes doo-dads pay off. A few years ago, I got seized by the irrational impulse to clean out the kitchen junk drawer in the wee hours of Christmas Eve. I was short of cash, and worried about the modest sum of money I’d spent on gifts for my kids and family, and maybe I was channeling that anxiety into the desire to make the house perfectly tidy right into its crevices. In any case, when I’d finally emptied the drawer, wiped out the last crumb, and sorted every coin, coupon, scrap, petrified gum stick, and old check stub, I discovered one stub that was in fact an uncashed check from two years prior, for exactly the amount I had just spent on Christmas.

So while a dear, well-meaning friend once whispered to me in a cautious way that life’s journey is less stressful in a clean car, I find something potent about small pockets of clutter, something fertile. When left undisturbed for long enough, they become still life artifacts of the past in a way a journal can never quite achieve. Recently I emptied out a closet to move my enormous and unwieldy collection of clothes from one hanging rack to another, and I discovered an old handbag that I haven’t used, according to the receipts it contained, since 1998.

The zinc throat lozenges had liquefied in their wrappers and the lacy ankle socks are now far too small for anyone in the family, reminding me with a cold punch that I no longer carry anybody else’s tiny socks on my person. But the four dollars in loose change was legal tender, and the small pewter statuette of the Virgin Mary was an enigma.

Based on my own eccentricities I cannot very well expect my kids to be neatniks, nor have I loaded them up with chore charts or subjected them to the dreaded ritual of Saturday morning housework. My guidelines are far less clear but ultimately more authentic for a slob like me: Put your shoes away when you walk into the house and help out cheerfully when you’re asked. Most of the time, this works fine.

It’s not too hypocritical and it reflects the basic standards I set when my oldest child was just learning how to speak and think and sort out the oddities of growing up with a mother like me. We were riding in the car, me at the wheel and she in her car seat, and she dropped whatever sticky thing she was eating onto the car floor. She shrieked for me to pull over and give it back to her.

“No,” I explained, “you can’t eat it now. It’s dirty.”
“I don’t care!” she yelled. “I like dirt!”
“But Sophie,” I reasoned. “It’s on the floor of the car, it’s covered with icky stuff.”
“Like what?” she demanded.
“Like . . . dog hair,” I offered.

She contemplated in silence before pointing out that we did not have a dog. Fair enough. But she did quiet down, and as far as I can tell, I convinced her to avoid eating scraps from floor mats, which is good enough for me.