Holy crapload of work Batman!

A week and four day without hearing from your favorite little blogger. How do you people survive such things? Somehow my coworker finagled it that I got overloaded with proofs right before press day. He is smooth. However, I (smoothly) glided into his office and asked if he could take a few back. Like butter on a bald monkey.

Also, we got a neatokeen grant to publish all the workshop reports from our meeting in Mexico (pronounced May-hee-co). All those good ol' reports are being sent directly to me because apparently once you're a PhD your brain is so overloaded that you can't figure out a simple online submission system. So I have to upload manuscripts, check them, assign editors, contact reviewers, and chase the crap out of whomever doesn't bend to my will.

So Happy Tuesday!

Happy busiest day for private investigators to tail cheating sigficant others day!

Happy former pagan spring cleaning holiday where men picked women's names out of an urn and then were forced to live with them for a year day!

Happy former pagan spring cleaning holiday when women were whipped with bloody strips of goat hide day!

Ok. Perhaps the last two need a small amount of explanation. According to the gurus at the History Channel, once upon a time in a faraway land there lived a priest named Valentine. He was a neat guy and also a political subversive. When Emperor Claudius decided that single men were better soldiers than married ones he outlawed marriage. (Now lets reflect a little here. Were the single soldiers more bloodthirsty because they were bitter and had nothing to lose except a few mugs of mead and a woman of ill repute? And the married men were worse fighters because all they could do was moon about their sweetheart and the spectacular lasagna that she could prepare? Or were the married men sucky fighters because as a result of marriage (and the implied death of soul) they were completely useless? It makes a difference.) Anyhoo, good ol' Valentine defied the Emperor and married couples in secret. Tada!
Another version of the story says that Valentine rescued lots of Christians from torture imposed by the Romans. Tada!
And yet another legend says that Valentine was thrown into jail for one crime or another. In the dank and musty hole that is a medieval Italian jail, he fell in love with the jailer's daughter. He sent her a note, "from your Valentine." Tada!

Not sure how these actions get him sainthood (except the denying the lions a good meal bit) but some Pope with an unpronouncible name canonized him.

Then in a classic Catholic lets-deny-our-base-desires-and-disguise-a-pagan-holiday-as-a-religious-one, St. Valentine's Day was established. The pagan holiday in question was more unpronouncible than that Pope's name and celebrated the oncoming Spring and its associated naughty bits. To celebrate, people would clean out their houses and sprinkle a bit of flour in them. Then the men all went up to a dark cave where they sacrificed a goat and cut its hide into bloody strips. When they went back to the village they hit the woman with these strips (yum) to make them all fertile and stuff. ALSO, all the single women in the village would put their names in an urn. And the men would pick the a name out and be paired with that woman for a year. (I have no idea what happened if the numbers weren't even.) Apparently, this led to a lot of weddings after the year was up. (Anyone thinking shotgun?)

So anyway, I guess this means that the holiday was NOT invented by card conglomerates. It was invented by horny goat-herders who needed to clean their houses. But if you're still really bitter check out these cards.

I leave you with this: en Espanol casar = to marry, cazar = to hunt; esposa = wife, esposas = handcuffs. Hmmmmm.