You’ve seen — and sniggered at — the 1930s marital test. (How far we’ve come! OH WAIT.)

Now, courtesy of Magatsu.net, you can take it, all interactive-like, yourself. (Though I’m pretty sure it’s a built-in fail. I mean, taking a test by yourself? On the computer? Way too independent. Next thing you know they’ll want an online DIVORCE.)

1 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

We held off on this one, since we figured not that many first dates were happening on Valentine’s Day. But now here we go. OKCupid, always ready with the best questions for blog posts, asks, what are the best questions for first dates? Actually, they put it a much better way: “What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?” Yes! Easy and deep-y. And did we mention easy? See, because what you don’t want — as with first “lines” — is something gimmicky, interviewy, or otherwise annoyingy. (“So, tell me, Sam. [Leans closer, significantly.] Would you rather be a cloud, or a grape?”) What you want, OKCupid determines, with the use of several handy bar graphs, is “the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep.”

OK SO LIKE WHAT? Well, then we get into some frankly fascinating correlations (derived from their vast database and some fancy math). If you want to know if you two have long-term potential, ask if he/she likes horror movies, or would like to chuck it all and live on a sailboat. Couples who agreed on such Qs were correlated with couples who lasted. If you want to know if your date is religious, ask if she/he is annoyed by spelling and grammar mistakes; “If your date answers ‘no’—i.e. is okay with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1.” Hooray for teh tolerance! Want to know if you have the same politics? Ask if your date prefers the people in his/her life to be simple or complex. The latter preference is correlated with liberal politics. JUST SAYING. (Also: clouds and grapes CAN get along!)

Read the whole piece for great fun and info, plus Kevin Costner in fingerless gloves. (The apocalypse kind, not the golf kind.)

AND: Since you’re going to need to get to that first date in the first place, here is BG’s definitive guide to opening lines.

According to this analysis, Superman is a moderate Republican, Wonder Woman a socialist, and Hulk “just want to be left alone” (libertarian). Whatever your leaning, please get out and vote. In a way, it’s your civilian superpower: please wield it (ideally, for good). If you haven’t already, learn about candidates, find your polling place, and remember, voting is a Breakup Girl issue. These folks may have a direct say in:

• how you learn about sex

• how you protect yourself if you have it

• education and law enforcement behind healthy relationships

• what you do with and how you’re able to take care of your body

• how much money you have to spend on dates (or “spa days” with numero uno)

• and, of course, whom you can marry

Please vote for candidates who make choices as sound as you do!

Bonus: Breakup Girl in … Red vs. The Blues!

Wow. C-Span hasn’t been this hard to watch/look away from since, well, you know. In case you missed it, via TPM Livewire:

See you guys tomorrow. BG is taking today off to practice with her new band, Cackle of Rads.

I know the authorities think otherwise, but I’m sorry — REALLY SORRY — to say: this woman (PDF) seems pretty credible. (We do not know for sure what happened, of course. But this is highly unsavory on its face.) Crikey, who is left?!

For the love of God, Franken, keep it in your pants.

“No other journalist brings the seriously hot, vaguely bi-curious baby-making energy strategy talk like Brian Williams.”

BREAKING: Our friends over at the esteemed Guttmacher Institute report news that’s sadly about as unsurprising as the lamented John Edwards being Quinn’s dad. That is: “For the first time in more than a decade, the nation’s teen pregnancy rate rose 3% in 2006 [the most recent source of data], reflecting increases in teen birth and abortion rates of 4% and 1%, respectively.”

2006: Let’s plot that on a timeline of SURELY UNRELATED events in U.S. history. Aha: Turns out a long-term decline in teen pregnancy — due in part to increased contraceptive use among teens — flattened out and then reversed…what’s this? The decline reversed at the same time that the Bush administration and Congress ramped up funding for rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that are prohibited from discussing the benefits of contraception. Coincidence, or…? Yeah, gotta be coincidence.

“After more than a decade of progress, this reversal is deeply troubling,” says Heather Boonstra, Guttmacher Institute senior public policy associate. “It coincides with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration. A strong body of research shows that these programs do not work. Fortunately, the heyday of this failed experiment has come to an end with the enactment of a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that ensures that programs will be age-appropriate, medically accurate and, most importantly, based on research demonstrating their effectiveness.”

And: “It is clearly time to redouble our efforts to make sure our young people have the information, interpersonal skills and health services they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies and to become sexually healthy adults,” said Lawrence Finer, Guttmacher’s director of domestic research.

For starters, we’ll need to let them read the dictionary.

(Click here (PDF) for the full report, “U.S. Teenage Pregnancies, Births and Abortions: National and State Trends and Trends by Race and Ethnicity,” and click here for Guttmacher’s Facts on American Teens’ Sexual and Reproductive Health. Also, find Guttmacher on Facebook and Twitter to learn more.)

Let’s hope, just to mess with Dad, their next boyfriends are Democrats. Or women!

Ashley Dupré, the “other woman” in the Spitzergate scandal (arguably engineered to punish the governor for trying to clean up the banking industry) has extended her brief stay in the public eye by dispensing homespun relationship advice in that classy journal, the NY Post.

We look forward to learning from the 24-year-old’s hard-won wisdom, and suggest that the Post doesn’t stop there. Why not hire Balloon Dad to write a parenting column? South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson can tackle etiquette questions, and Rod Blagojevich would be a natural for a sales technique blog. Or haircare tips.