Here's wishing everybody a happy Valentine's Day, a day on which romantic love is celebrated in honor of a martyr of possibly apocryphal provenance. Personally, I think the equally apocryphal St Floradora should have been honored by having her name attached to a celebration of love.
Being a cynic, I've always turned a bit of a jaundiced eye towards the solemn Feast of St Valentine, a celebration which seems calculated to put people in serious relationships under stress, and to put people not in serious relationships under stress coupled with self-esteem issues. This stress-with-self-esteem-issues has reached it's peak in Japan, where the Revolutionary Alliance of Men that Women find Unattractive has held a rally against the celebration. My advice to these unattractive men is to just calm down for a bit and to recalibrate their expectations, just because you won't date Miss January doesn't mean you won't find Miss Right. In the meantime, these guys should learn the rudiments of romance from the late, great King of Fuji Rock, Kiyoshiro Imawano, whose Love Love is one of my personal favorite love songs:
Also associated with St Valentine's Day is the St Valentine's Day Massacre, which a bunch of killjoys turned wannabe killboys wanted to recreate in, of all places, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Thankfully, the Halifax attacks were thwarted. The perpetrators would have done better to join the marchers in Tokyo to demonstrate their disapproval- guns tend to make everything worse, with the exceptions of big-game hunting and trap/skeet shooting. Anyway, happy Valentine's Day, stay safe and may you be loved.
POSTSCRIPT: I've been trying to find an "embedable" version of that song for years, and I'm ecstatic about finally locating one. It's a big favorite of my brother Sweetums's wife, and was on the playlist for their wedding reception. I really dig it, I look at it as a "Country and Eastern" tune.
I took the Frau Doktorin down to the pub where a couple of Klezmer bands were playing... the Underscore Orkestra from Portland, and the Rasnolnikovs, who are local. How romantic is that?
ReplyDeleteWe worked on fixing the electrical problem in the upstairs back bathroom. It seems this is on the same fuse as the downstairs study. My dad's pc died.
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There are, it is true, some downsides to being an old 'hermit'. But there are also some beautiful, freeing moments - such as Valentines Day. It is a day people like me (and Bouffant, I should think) can safely and comfortably ignore. No cards, candy or flowers. Better yet, no thousand dollar diamonds for the woman who by coincidence is your girlfriend in mid February and will be gone with the sparkly bits by August. No expensive meals at crowded restaurants, no wondering if you've done enough or regrets that you did too much.
ReplyDeleteYou can have your Hallmark Holidays. I'm celebrating the three day weekend engendered by the coincidental birthdates of our first and 16th President. (By the way, have you ever looked objectively at a picture of Mr. Lincoln? Get past the iconic nature of the image and that is one weird, scary lookin' dood. If I didn't know interstellar travel was impossible I'd suspect he was an alien)...
I took the Frau Doktorin down to the pub where a couple of Klezmer bands were playing... the Underscore Orkestra from Portland, and the Rasnolnikovs, who are local. How romantic is that?
ReplyDeleteIt's very romantic for the clarinet fancier.
We worked on fixing the electrical problem in the upstairs back bathroom. It seems this is on the same fuse as the downstairs study. My dad's pc died.
Good luck! I hope dad didn't lose too much data. Luckily, computers aren't all that expensive these days.
t is a day people like me (and Bouffant, I should think) can safely and comfortably ignore. No cards, candy or flowers. Better yet, no thousand dollar diamonds for the woman who by coincidence is your girlfriend in mid February and will be gone with the sparkly bits by August. No expensive meals at crowded restaurants, no wondering if you've done enough or regrets that you did too much.
One of my cousins used to go on hiatus with her boyfriend from December to March just to avoid the whole "obligatory gift giving" nonsense. She's married now, so she can't really do that, but married couples tend to be more realistic about these sort of things.
(By the way, have you ever looked objectively at a picture of Mr. Lincoln? Get past the iconic nature of the image and that is one weird, scary lookin' dood. If I didn't know interstellar travel was impossible I'd suspect he was an alien)...
He's certainly not a handsome man, but I'd describe him as striking looking, but not necessarily ugly. He definitely looks like he had a syndrome which resulted in atypical growth.
I've read that many people who met him in person described him as having a "presence" that transcended his looks- he wasn't photogenic, but he was far from repulsive in person. He was also quite the badass.