VD
Why are you being hustled by street vendors to buy sad and drooping former roses, vegetative matter that missed the cut for bouquets, or were too late to the hospital?
Blame Esther A. Howland (1828 – 1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her guilt is writ large by the Greeting Card Association’s Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary. She imported the concept to the US from Britain to bolster her father’s stationery store in 1847.
Of course, it wasn’t long before the stationers had infiltrated school boards and imposed the now mandatory exchange in the classroom to push the low end product of Asian children and prisoners.
Seeing the success of the card merchants, the confectioners jumped on board to fill the lull between Christmas and Easter with the benefit that the bulk of purchases would be made by desperate men with less sense of taste than a golden retriever. If the box was red, heart-shaped, and said chocolate, a man would buy it.
There were at least three Saint Valentines and all were martyrs, as they should have been for the trouble they’ve caused. None are the reason for the “holiday”, only the excuse. They lived at a time when life and men were short and brutal, so the romantic aura of the holiday is pure piffle. At least one was reportedly part of a draft dodging scheme during the Roman Empire, marrying people so that men with “other priorities” could avoid being deployed to foreign wars, bachelors being preferred for catapult fodder.
It is to be hoped that the individual who first wrote: “Roses are red, violets are blue” was eaten by rabid wolverines, or had hemorrhoids.
7 comments
Stella and I ate chocolate and bought each other used books… no waste involved. My haul? a book by John Gribben about the Multiverse. Hers? a cartoon book on genetics. (!?!) It was a very science-oriented VD.
I wonder why the temp in Dawson, YK is “NA°F” … maybe those are the uppercased first two characters of that famous JavaScript lady “NaN”?
I spent my day hauling neighbors to their jobs in restaurants because their managers didn’t schedule enough people to work, and they currently have transportation problems.
The Dawson weather station is kind of iffy at the best of times because it is at the airport which isn’t open except by request, so if there are problems, like low batteries, no one knows about it to correct it. Utilities aren’t a regular feature of the far North.
One of the mushers, Abbie West, mentioned that she loved going to the big checkpoints, like Fairbanks, Dawson, and Whitehorse, because she can get a shower. She doesn’t have running water in her cabin, and baths involve heating buckets on the hearth after hauling in the tub, so it does have some conveniences.
In other V.D. news, there is now a variant of gonorrhea which is resistant to all known antibiotics. While I realize this isn’t the V.D. you were talking about, it’s probably a tie as to which of the two is more annoying. 😈
People who take running water for granted have no idea just how great a warm shower really is. I’ve lived that before, I much prefer having running water, running *warm* water…
We lowered our heads and snuck (sneaked?) through another fake holiday. One rule to survive, do not try to go out to eat dinner on Valentine’s Day (OR Mother’s Day!). I’ve refused to let a particular day become so ‘special’ that expectations always exceed results. So far we’ve survived with our marriage and family intact…
All three St Valentines were listed as ‘martyrs’, as they should have been given the trouble they have caused. Watching guys attempting to buy something that won’t result in ‘It’s the thought that counts’ is truly a pathetic thing to watch.
Given the rise of antibiotic use in food production, it isn’t at all surprising that more and more resistant strains are being discovered. Add to that the overuse of ‘antibacterial’ everything for the home, and only the strongest survive. Evolution is much faster in the world of microbes.
Yeah, Badtux, I’ve been in a few places where the ‘shower’ is powered by a 55-gallon drum on a scaffold, heated by the sun, if you were lucky.
The big problem, Ellroon, is the proliferation of these holidays to sell cards, flowers, and candy. I found that just doing it when you thought about it at random days with cards that said “Happy Thursday the 2nd” or some such silliness were much more effective and much less stressful. It also meant that I did it when I had money, not when someone thought I should.
And the popular science author’s name is Gribbin, not Gribben. By now you’d think I’d actually look it up if I wasn’t sure, but noooo…
Google takes care of that, Steve, so you don’t have to.