The Pear Shaped Bell

  We've all been there when things go sideways, take a turn for the worse, do a u-turn, or a backflip or otherwise go from perfectly nice to utterly awful in the seeming blink of an eye.   The time I spent living in England gave me my favorite phrase for this: going pear-shaped. It's such an odd visual, you know? Kind of wide and low and fat around the bottom, like something's dropped from the top and is pooling there, waiting for someone to pop it, to release all the badness.   Or something.