In the fever of emotion, any song with a romantic melody and anguished refrain can sound meaningful. But always check the lyrics. You might be in for a shock when you realize that they express a sentiment you could not in a million years condone, or worse, the exact opposite of the way you feel. The following are five classic tunes whose messages should have them stricken from karaoke books.

“Mendocino” (Doug Sahm)

Sir Douglas Quintet, “Mendocino” (1969, from “Playboy After Dark“)

I don’t necessarily approve of grown-ass men dating high school girls, although Sir Douglas certainly makes it seem natural. My issue is not with him screwing a teenybopper, however, but with his insistence that she stay in Mendocino.

A word of advice to chicken hawks: if you’re going to date a teenager, at least observe certain rules of etiquette. Rule number one is leave her better than you found her. At the end of the day, she’s got a whole adult life to live, and you’re wiling yours away dating children. Let her go to college, for Christ’s sake. I’m talking to you Doug Sahm. And to Woody Allen in “Manhattan.”

Woody Allen, “Manhattan” (1979)

Here’s what happens three years down the road from Sahm’s idyll: his “teenage lover” is 20 and pregnant and hates his guts; he is drinking and carousing, having buckled under the prospect of raising a kid in a “love house by the river.” Much like infatuation itself, that shack looks pretty gruesome in the harsh late of day.

“Oh No Not My Baby” (Gerry Goffin/Carole King)

Maxine Brown, “Oh No Not My Baby” (1964)

The Partridge Family, “Oh No, Not My Baby” (1974)

Goffin & King’s lyrics read like a demented playbook on balancing pals and relationships: “When my friends told me you had someone new/I didn’t believe a single word was true/I showed them all I had a faith in you/I kept saying, “Oh no, not my baby.”

Words of wisdom, if you’re Sammi from “Jersey Shore.” In fact, your friends’ unanimous disapproval — nevermind their confirmation that your man is making time with someone else — is a good reason to break off a relationship. The singer doesn’t see any problem with denying her boyfriend’s infidelities though, and even boasts about not listening to her mother’s advice. (If pop songs were horror movies, this would be tantamount to announcing “be right back.”) There’s a term for people who tune out their friends’ warnings and stick by their partners against all sense: “someone’s bitch.”

Even the singer acknowledges that her boyfriend “might have had a last-minute fling.” But then he gives her a ring. That leaves her cuckolded, friendless, and bejeweled. There’s values for you.

I Believe in You (Neil Young)

Neil Young, “I Believe in You” (2010)

When I was 18, I dated a guy I was just crazy about. I used to listen to this song on my way to Sociology 101, tuning out all but the titular line, because it just sounded like the way I felt. When I finally listened to the lyrics, I realized they fairly approximated his feelings at the time. This was after he dumped me in a Second Cup.

Despite appearances, this song isn’t a tender ballad to a new partner, but an ode to early-relationship doubts, featuring one of the cruelest refrains of all time: “Now that you’ve made yourself love me/Do you think I can change it in a day?” It’s an anti-love song, from the victor’s perspective at that.

Profound, yes. And, having found myself in Neil’s situation once or twice, I’ve since listened to it with genuine empathy. It’s always made me feel a little foolish though. Nuanced or deceptive — you decide.

“This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)” (Holland-Dozier/Sylvia Moy)

The Isley Brothers, “This Old Heart of Mine” (1965)

The Zombies, “This Old Heart of Mine” (from French television, 1967)

This song accurately describes a situation familiar to many of us: a pathetic, drawn out, one-sided romance in which the person you love uses your feelings against you, takes a territorial piss on your thoughts, and ultimately ruins your life. But unlike Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor” or Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” — both upstanding tracks — this celebrates the experience of being crunched under someone’s heel like frozen dogshit.

Although the music sounds like a happy ending, the lyrics indicate a terrible sickness: “If you leave me a hundred times/A hundred times I’ll take you back/I’m yours whenever you want me/I’m not too proud to shout it, tell the world about it.” It’s really not something to be proud of, guys. The singer describes the exact opposite of what one should do under these circumstances (i.e., go cold turkey and cry to those friends Goffin & King thought so dispensable), and exalts his own bad decisions. Self-esteem is bullshit, apparently.

Malevolent partners are like addictions; concerned parents everywhere ought to have raged in the streets when this song was released, the way they would have had it been called, say, “Doin’ Heroin’s Easier than Not Doin’ It.”

“You’ll Never Get to Heaven” (Burt Bacharach/Hal David)

Dionne Warwick, “(You’ll Never Get to Heaven) If You Break My Heart” (1966)

Darlene Love, “You’ll Never Get to Heaven” (1964)

Finally, for all the pain of being heartbroken, breaking someone’s heart is no picnic. If you have even a modicum of humanity, reducing someone to fits of emotional agony can make you feel like a jerk. In the aftermath, you question whether you made the right decision and grapple with the fact that it would only take a phone call to soothe your feelings, likely at the expense of theirs. You need the comfort of a maudlin tune almost as much as the person you dumped.

Well, delete this proselytizing little earworm from your playlist before you hit “shuffle.” It’s like a nightmare amalgam of your ex and Mrs. Lovejoy, canting an epic nag crossed with a Jonathan Edwards sermon. Similar to an off-colour joke ruined by shades of earnestness, the sentiment could make even a jilted lover uncomfortable: nothing says “emotional abuse” like “demons will torture you for all eternity if you go away.”

Thing is, after a bad break-up, the dumper already feels this way. Leave it to Hal David to articulate the most heavy and irrational of human sentiments, and Burt Bacharach to set them to a feather-light soundtrack.

The moral: if you want good advice, listen to Bobby Womack. Always.

Bobby Womack, “Woman’s Gotta Have It” (1972)

-Alexandra Molotkow

Question: What is the opposite of human? Answer:

bugspray.com, “Common house centipede” (2008)

Scutigera coleoptrata, the common house centipede, haunts my apartment like a vengeful ghost. I go cold and my skin pricks up when one of them appears in my peripheral vision. If I see one darting out from under my wardrobe late at night, I’ll scream and scream until I’ve sprayed it to death with the Mr. Clean bottle I keep nearby for that purpose. As a result I have a pavlovian aversion to the smell of Mr. Clean.

I don’t want to kill them, so I try banging the floor to make them run in the opposite direction. But they never run where I want them to; in fact, most of the time they run toward the banging. Dodging them can be dangerous: once I knocked over a lit lamp which nearly broke against the floor. The centipede made it onto my mattress. I bashed it to death with the butt of the lamp and stood quivering for half an hour before I summoned the courage to dispose of its body.

They are found all over the world. Some of them are unnaturally big and all of them are alarmingly fast. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t at least get the willies watching one shoot across the wall.

But we ought to leave them be. First and foremost, killing bugs that pose us no harm is downright nasty, and house centipedes aren’t dangerous: their fangs are rarely strong enough to break human skin. They look like big danger, and they are, but only to little things.

Second, they eat bad bugs--including bedbugs and roaches, which are less frightening than centipedes but more hateful. If various sketchy internet sources are to be believed, the Japanese introduce them into their homes as a pest control measure. And judging by this clip, Japanese house centipedes are twice as large as ours.

deanwignell, “Attack of the Japanese Geji Geji — Part 1/2” (2008)

However, fearing the house centipede, which is both alien in appearance and Porsche-like in its mechanical efficiency, is a human reflex, and it takes more than knowledge to mitigate the fight or flight response. Sadly there are no anthropomorphic centipedes in Disney movies, and you don’t get to make a wish when you encounter one.

So I’ve been trying for the past year to conquer my coleoptrata phobia (a word I’ve yet to say out loud), recording my methods so that they may benefit other sufferers. YouTube has been invaluable.

Force empathy

Watch videos of centipedes doing human things, like self-grooming (which indicates self-consciousness!). And whenever you can, take a good look at their eyes. They’re just dots, but that’s one-half of a smiley face.

JAGaleaffan, “Horrible creature caught and observed” (2008)

Force sympathy

If you can’t help killing the big guys, spare the babies first. They’re fairly cute — they look like little eyelashes — so it’s easy to develop a fondness for them. Once this happens, you’ll start to see the larger ones as parents. No one wants to be an orphan maker.

Flame060, “House centipede” (2010)

Guilt yourself

A dying centipede is a pathetic sight. It scrambles and then squirms helplessly until it gives up the ghost. No matter how much centipedes scare you, it’s hard to do away with them without feeling lousy about it.

MugenGoon, “After Effects of a House Centipede Sprayed by Raid MAX” (2008)

Think of them as bodyguards

Apartment living makes you vulnerable to many nimble enemies: roaches are barbarians that invade your living space and have sex in your walls; termites munch voraciously and, with each bite, increase your chances of dying under a pile of rubble; bedbugs will ruin your life and they’re nearly immortal.

But centipedes are on your side. Their raison d’etre is smiting, and they smite brutally: they lasso prey with their bodies and gobble them up.

ebcarel, “Brown Recluse vs. Centipede” (2009) (Brown recluses are the necrosis-inducing spiders whose terrible handiwork has probably appeared in your inbox.)

Morbid fascination

Have you ever seen “Cloverfield?” It’s pretty good, but the ending is stupid because you actually see the monster and it’s just a dumb-looking CGI. Why didn’t the filmmakers enlarge a house centipede instead? They’re scarier-looking than any product of human artifice and they’re very easy to obtain.

Matt Reeves, “Cloverfield” (2008) — music added by NegiandNodoka

Expose yourself

Don’t just look at pictures; make one your desktop image. Watch videos habitually. Trap one in a jar and keep it for a few days as a pet. Name it. Watch it from every angle and visit it first thing when you get home from work. Release it humanely and muster a pang of regret when you do.

centipedelover, “My pet centipede grooms himself.” (2009)

Be thankful

That you’re not dealing with these fuckers.

nickbachman, “Giant Centipede Eviscerates Mouse” (2006)

- Alexandra Molotkow

I’m not a child psychologist, but it’s been my (limited) experience and (total) conjecture that children don’t have world concepts. They have isolated blobs of knowledge — basic arithmetic, their ABCs, their teachers’ names, their parents’ occupations — but they don’t yet understand how everything they know fits together. So they take cues from stories we tell them, books, pop songs, movies, and, most especially, TV.

It follows that children’s television should operate according to an internal logic: protagonists shouldn’t break character without good reason, and their actions should invite predictable consequences. Writers can go nuts with subject matter (manic marine animals; huggable reptilian predators; giant baby heads giggling in the sky) just as long as the form is consistent.

When you dispense with these rules of thumb and throw the kids a curveball, you screw up their concept of how life works. And that’s exactly what happened when, as a child waiting for “Are You Afraid of the Dark” to air on YTV, I encountered “Pyramid,” part of the channel’s “Short Circutz” series of computer-animated bumper videos.

Michael Boydstun, “Pyramid” (”Beyond the Mind’s Eye,” 1992)

The backdrop is bad enough: a familiar setting rendered uncanny, as if someone scraped the world of detail and then shined it with a floor buffer. But the action is worse: you’ve got stick figures river-dancing on a pyramid, then a veiled woman-entity doing the charleston in front of a golden woman-entity running in slow motion and two mixed-gender entities who appear to be doing it.

Cue some pyschedelic screensaver imagery, more stick figures, a few butterflies — and then leopard lady mumbles something to zebra man, who proceeds to leap to his death. No, wait. He becomes a butterfly. Softens the blow. All of this to a panpipe-and-electric-guitar soundtrack evocative of death and rebirth and the eternal metamorphosis of Being.

Nowadays, the clip is more artifact than entertainment. It started as “The Little Death,” a cutting-edge short created by computer company Symbolics Inc. in 1989, and was revamped in 1992 for “Beyond the Mind’s Eye,” a collection of early animations lifted from various sources and set to music by Jan Hammer, formerly of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. (”Short Circutz’s” material was lifted from this video, as well as its predecessor, “The Mind’s Eye,” and the similar Imaginaria.)

Matt Elson, “The Little Death” (Symbolics Inc., 1989)

“Pyramid” belongs in a digital museum. It’s goofy as all hell but historically rich, a reminder of how far we’ve come since the early days of computer imaging. But what does it all mean? Unfortunately, Hammer et al have never spoken publicly on the subject. The answer could very well be nothing — nothing more than the vanguard noodlings of a few new media dynamos.

But for the eight-year old me, Pyramid jostled up a lot of heavy questions that that had no straight answers: What is this place? Earth? Heaven? If these are angels, why do they look like crash test dummies? Is zebra man married to leopard woman and, in becoming a butterfly, did he abandon her? Can you remarry in the afterlife? Is leopard lady alone now forever?

Such an off-kilter marriage of sound and imagery can send a naive viewer into a doubt spiral. A friend of mine remembers having a similar response to “Faces,” the NFB short.

Paul Bochner, “Faces” (NFB, 1978)

Much like the difference between a nightmare and a delirious fever dream, “Are You Afraid of the Dark” was “scary” (pleasant), while the “Short Circutz” clips were “disturbing” (thoroughly unpleasant).

As a child, I loved being frightened: I’d hang out in the horror section of the video store to look at screen caps at the backs of tapes, and grill my parents’ friends on what (restricted) scary movies they’d seen and what the scariest parts were. I scorned “AYAOTD” episodes that were too tame and relished ones like like this, which scared the bejeezus out of me:

Ron Oliver, “Laughing in the Dark” (”AYAOTD,” 1992)

“Are You Afraid of the Dark,” in which a semi-regular cast of teens and tweens (the “Midnight Society”) gathered by a campfire to tell scary stories, had sensible storylines and was bookended by normalcy. No matter how frightening the tales were, in the end the flame was doused and the kids went home to their parents. Episodes generally had happy endings, and when they didn’t, it was fairly easy to see what had gone wrong and to draw lessons from the characters’ mistakes. At best the show was, like a run-of-the-mill nightmare, terrifying but easy to shake off.

“Pyramid” on the other hand was a fever dream (the kind one usually has in the throes of a bad flu or a constant ache), which makes no sense and has no ending, defying the hard-wrought mental framework through which one understands the world. To YTV’s programmers, the Short Circutz clips represented computer media’s potential value to children ever in need of stimulation. The shorts were intended as general-audience fun: none of the series’ CGI anthropomorphs got killed or haunted or chased down by bad guys.

However, to kids like me, viewing them out of context, they were disquieting non-sequiturs. They suggested that reality was tenuous, that we could be easily dislodged from the world that was forming around us — which, it turns out, is true. An important lesson, but one I wish I hadn’t learned so early.

To this day, watching “Pyramid” makes me a little uneasy, and no amount of YouTube viewing or Googling for background information will change that. The only thing that tempers the discomfort is discussing the short with folks my own age. It helps to know that, throughout the country, there are twenty-somethings whose minds have the same minor warp as mine does.

- Alexandra Moloktow