If we were buds with hedge-fund rock star John Paulson, we'd have this conversation tonight over drinks:

Paulson: So, what did you do today?
DI: Not much. Talked shit on the internet. Burned some toast and set off the smoke alarm again. You?
Paulson: I made $67 million in 25 minutes when Lloyds lost 5.9 billion pounds ($8.5 billion) in market value.
DI: Cool. Um, I forgot my wallet, by the way.

Paulson May Have Made $67 Million in Lloyds Plunge [Bloomberg]

It's Valentine's Day tomorrow, and New York's intrepid Jada Yuan has spent the past few weeks finding out what New Yorkers are doing to celebrate the day. Unsurprisingly, she found a lot of New Yorkers were pretty cynical about theHallmark holiday. Stephanie March said that she and Bobby Flay "won’t be prisoners to that kind of marketing," and Chace Crawford said he'd "never been that into" Valentine's day. (We think this is because he's never had us show up at his house covered in whipped cream before. It will be different this year, Chace.) Even professionally uncynical celebrities, like Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler, aren't that into V-Day. "We give each other gifts all year round, so Valentine's Day is kind of superfluous," Doonan said, causing us to barf a little. So instead of the usual roundup of celebrity holiday plans, we'd like to offer you a short compendium of advice, wisdom, and meditations on love in the age of Obama, courtesy of J.D. Williams, a.k.a. Bodie from The Wire, whom Jada ran into at Love, a performance of short plays, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation earlier this week.

Like us, Mario Cantone is a fan of Michael Phelps. “I think he’s sexy and odd,” Cantone told us at the amfAR gala last night. And he also thinks the whole bong brouhaha has really gotten of hand. “I think they should leave him the fuck alone," he said. "I think it’s appalling, I think that that sheriff is like that guy that Dom DeLuise played in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, you know, he’s just not stopping and he’s trying to arrest everybody,” he vented. As for the companies that dropped Phelps's ads: “It’s ridiculous! Why would Kellogg’s fire him? It’s ironic, because the only thing you want to do when you’re high is eat cereal. So what’s that about? It’s very upsetting! They should leave him alone. It’s not like he shot heroin, and it’s not like he’s a junkie. He took a hit of pot; shut up. Shut up! He took a bong hit; he’s in his twenties, shut the fuck up and leave him alone!"

Today is Friday the 13th, and superstition dictates that unlucky things are supposed to happen. Why? We have no idea, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to either, though it may have something to do with Norse mythology, the Knights Templar, or The Canterbury Tales — meaning nobody knows and it's just a bunch of bull used to sell movie tickets. But as we thought about our days, we noticed a disturbing trend of bad luck. For example, Jessica's hair air-dried in a decidedly funny shape, and she also got the sixth sense that Chris, who is away skiing for a long weekend, scalded his tongue horribly while sipping hot chocolate. Or at least she hopes he did. And when Dan went to eat breakfast this morning, he was startled to find that he'd run out of bananas, even though he really would have preferred to put banana in his cereal. So Friday the 13th, so far, seems pretty legit. But we throw it to you, legion of commenters. Has anything unlucky happened to you today? Or, conversely, anything lucky?

No, really! We look forward to meeting this guy on the street! We just can't really afford it, is all.

It's hard to remember sometimes, but there are a lot of upsides to the current economic crisis. That's why it's the Greatest Depression! Single women will benefit when out-of-work finance guys dump their trophy wives for being nasty, greedy bitches. There are some fabulous sales and great restaurant deals. And the Greatest Depression also provides, as the Times points out today in an early-release "Styles" story, an excuse to not do something you don't want to do, like buy an engagement ring for your girlfriend of three years, or renew your gym membership, because In This Economy we should really all be cutting back a little.

And, we'd just like to point out, if you're in the sciences, you can use the Greatest Depression to deny funding for completely terrifying projects suggested by your co-workers, such as this one, described in another Times story today:

Dr. George Church, a leading genome researcher at the Harvard Medical School, said Thursday that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million... Dr. Church said he had no plans for such an experiment, but if someone were eager to supply the financing, “We might go along with it.”

Despite a current six-game losing streak that has extinguished most playoff talk, our New York Knicks have at least resembled an actual professional basketball team most of this season, which is a marked improvement over most of this decade. With all the cap space and freewheeling offense suddenly found at the Garden, visions of LeBron James and a future that’s not so embarrassing are filling fans’ brains.

We thought Bernie Madoff's world record in Ponzi-scheming would be safe for a while, maybe for all of time. But now comes the news that the SEC is investigating one R. Allen Stanford, a billionaire who runs a money-management firm out of tropical, tax-free St. Croix. To his moneyed clients, Stanford offers certificates of deposit that offer "unusually high and consistent returns" (double the market average, according to Business Week). Hmmm, where have we heard that phrase before? Oh, also: The company overseeing the firm's books is "a tiny accounting firm in Antigua" whose CEO recently died. Oh, dear.