OFF KILTER

Melts in Your Mouth, Not on Your Pants: M&M;’s Chocolates apparently isn’t satisfied with being on permanent display at the Smithsonian or going into outer space as part of the official astronaut food supply. Now the company wants to invade the world of furniture and high fashion. At the new M&M;’s World store in Las Vegas, which features a one-story-high glass wall filled with the colored candies, shoppers can ogle a $7,500 M&M;’s sofa, a $2,000 M&M;’s designer dress and a $500 bustier made with sequined M&M;’s characters.

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Love Countdown, Part IV: Our tribute to Valentine’s Day concludes with a roundup of romantic facts and figures:

* Westerners are more likely to write love letters than Americans in the South, East or Midwest, according to a survey by Parker Pens. But they seem to be procrastinating. The survey says 43% of Americans haven’t received a love letter in 10 years, and 27% haven’t gotten one in more than two decades.

* The depressing news continues with a Men’s Fitness magazine survey that says only one in four American men is sexually attracted to his current partner. The rest suffer from grass-is-greener syndrome: 42% are drawn to women they’ve never met but see regularly at a distance and 25% have the hots for a platonic friend.

* If you receive a bouquet on Valentine’s Day, there’s a good chance it came from Colombia, the No. 1 supplier of cut flowers to the U.S. Fortunately, Colombian flowers are safer to sniff than the country’s other famous export, cocaine.

* Finally, although Feb. 14 is marketed as a day for starry-eyed lovers, most Valentine’s Day cards go to someone else, according to the greeting-card industry: schoolteachers.

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Loggins Update: You might recall about a month ago that we referred to singer Kenny Loggins as “a major freak” because of a book in which he admitted, among other things, to singing to his wife during childbirth while accompanied by a 25-woman choir that kept chanting, “I am opening, I am opening up.”

We thought we might hear from Kenny’s lawyers, but instead we got a call from the Learning Annex, inviting us to a Valentine’s Day seminar on relationships taught by . . . Kenny and Julia Loggins. Uh, we’re a little hesitant. Are you sure Kenny and Julia won’t be armed?

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Historical Footnotes Department: Thomas Edison, inventor of wax paper and the light bulb, would have been 151 on Wednesday. Edison was so fascinated with Morse code that he used it to propose to his wife and at his wedding, where the vows were tapped out in code.

Also on that date, in 1933, a 19-year-old Japanese student launched a bizarre suicide fad by leaping into a 1,000-foot-deep volcano. More than 300 other students eventually followed suit, and tourists visited the spot to eat lunch and watch the suicides. The fad ended when officials fenced off the volcano and outlawed the purchase of one-way tickets to the site.

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Best Supermarket Tabloid Headline: “Bank Robber Makes His Getaway in a Wheelchair” (National Enquirer)

The Enquirer called the crook “Ironside’s evil twin!” Actually, we may be in the midst of a wheelchair crime spree. The Weekly World News reports “Electric Wheelchair Driver Charged With Hit ‘N’ Run!”

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Roy Rivenburg can be reached by e-mail at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.

Contributors: Wireless Flash, Cutler On-Line Prep