Valentine's Week part 1: the beginning

I'm the Man, and there being no Woman woman enough for me... yet... I have nothing to do this week. SO as always in my benevolent public interest, I feel I must teach you all about the festive celebration of our corporate and sexual enslavement, Valentine's Day. Today we shall learn about the origin of the second least productive day of the year. Of course, it wont help you in any direct way conceivable, but it will provide you great knowledge, and knowledge is power, and power appeals to the opposite sex.

The Beginning

Most people know it's named after a martyred saint who used to chill out in and around Rome about 2000 years ago. Only, no one really knows which one. In fact, there is so little information on this guy, that the Church itself doesn't recognize it officially.

Undocumented history books say it could be one of several St. Valentines, which was a very popular name among saints from all over the place who had nothing in common except that they all lived most of their lives in brutal suffering leading up to an agonizing death. In PG terms, martyrs.

The theory that a saint would help young people get it on seems fishy so the corporate manufactured 'Saint Valentine' is simply a guy who was helping people to get married, and since he was doing this for then-heretic Christian couples, he was killed. Wow, a story that combines religious fervor with taboo sex. I would have almost thought some company just wrote a script to sell flowers, if it wasn't for the volumes of compelling and consistent historical account. Another version says he was a saint who was jailed and later killed for developing a relationship with the jailor's daughter. Well, one of them has got to be romantic and heartwarming enough to be true.

Nevertheless, today, there is a flower crowned skull exhibited in Rome. We can surely say it probably belongs to some saint, probably even a Valentine, and if so he surely must have lived and died in great pain and suffering.

And we have indeed kept the tradition alive. Valentine's day is still remembered a day of great suffering worldwide. The whole world over, men who traded a life of ease and comfort for one with a woman, mark this day in somber solidarity and alleviate their suffering with Valentine's Day chocolates, Valentine's day greeting cards and some Valentine's night action, if you know what I mean.

And now I ask you the reader to join me in one minute silence to remember our great qualities of unconditional love, economic prudence and level-headed common sense.

We will surely miss them all.

This is the first post in our Valentine's Day series. Come back for part 2 of this series tomorrow.