I heard about a lot of bad dates this week, but also some that went very well indeed. Like reader James Higgins’s first-date experience, which included a visit to a cemetery and a screening of John Huston’s adaptation of the James Joyce story “The Dead.” His date had insisted on the latter, and afterwards he learned that his fate depended on whether or not he liked the movie. “Well, to make a long story short,” he concludes, “that was about 25 years ago and we are still married.”