Happy Valentine's Day all. The day invented to sell more candy and make couples feel like jerks when they forget to get something (or be sleazy for whatever reason). Actually, though, Valentine's Day... or Saint Valentine's Day wasn't meant to be a day about lovey dovey stuff. In fact, it didn't become one until almost 2000 years later during the middle ages with the help of poets fluffing the time up in general.
The holiday was actually meant to be a feast honoring a saint or group of saints with the name Valentinus. So little was known about who or what was being celebrated that the Pope in 1969 decided to strike the entire honorary feast off the calendar all together. Now the person or group isn't even sainted anymore, just "proposed" to be sainted. So basically, some random guy might have been one of the holiest dude of all time, but let's just say he's no longer a saint because hell if I knew who he was. While we're at it, let's say the holocaust never happened, because hell if I was there. Wait long enough and important events or people don't matter anymore.
History is a strange mistress. Sometimes we hold it up on a pedestal claiming that we need to respect history, or we are doomed to repeat it. Other times we don't believe history has any baring on reality whatsoever, which is a load of hooey if you ask me. If history never happened, I wouldn't have this computer that I'm typing at right now, nor the games I play, the TV I watch, the mass produced food I eat, or the car I drive. We twist history to what suits us whenever it suits us no matter what is being twisted. Of course, humanity does that for just about everything including business numbers like Enron, global warming (hey, it was global freezing in the 70s, it'll be again eventually), and just about everything else.
As they say, history is written by the victor, or in this case, the people still alive to deny you were worth a damn a few thousand years ago. Now then, what else can we ruin today? Let's do it!
