Can D Hrtz
Brian’s pretty good with the few letters he’s got left. It’s no wonder they keep paying him to churn out that kind of letter sorcery.
Today is Valentine’s Day. It’s definitely not the best holiday, but it’s certainly better than Columbus Day. I’d rather celebrate unrealistic ideals about romantic love than Eurocentric nonsense any day.
This website is really just a front for posthumously insulting the memory of Christopher Columbus…
Like many people I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s Day. I don’t see anything particularly wrong with celebrating love, but the romantic ideal present in the minds of many modern Americans seems to be a fairly unrealistic one and the ways in which we’re taught to express this ideal seem silly and contrived. I’ve been seeing a lot of cell phone commercials now about how you should purchase a phone for the person you love and there have been car commercials about the same thing since I was a kid. What do cars and cell phones have to do with idealized love, exactly? Does the car represent some kind of physical manifestation of that love? Is the phone some kind of symbol for the brilliant communication that happens in the context of your relationship? If so, I hope you didn’t get him or her a phone with an AT&T plan. Your love is going to drop so many calls.
Every year, jerks like me point the finger at Valentine’s Day and start shouting about how full of crap it is. Why? Mostly because it’s a commercially motivated holiday that preys on peoples’ unrealistic notions about romantic love. There’s nothing wrong with taking a day to appreciate the love in your life, especially in the hectic world we live in today, but it seems silly to have to buy things to show that love. If it were just about spending time with someone or doing something nice, I’m sure most people wouldn’t have an issue with it. Sure, it’d be nice if everyone could express and appreciate love every day, but it’s tough for a lot of people when they’re working full time and trying to care for their families.
The other problem, for a lot of people, is that Valentine’s Day and sappy romantic movies and the like create unrealistic expectations about love. True love may exist, but it certainly doesn’t happen for everyone. The problem is that when you’re surrounded by images of love just happening and working perfectly forever, you feel cheated when your relationships don’t pan out like that. Love, like everything else in this world, is a process. It requires awareness, time, and, quite often, a lot of work to maintain. You don’t plant a garden and immediately get flowers, these things take time to grow.
Unfortunately, blaming modern media or holidays like Valentine’s Day for creating this view is not historically accurate. Human beings are sappy creatures, our stories have always been full of crap with regards to love, especially here in the west. Everyone from the Greeks to the Celts has, at some point, pushed stories of idealized love. Sure, the people of the past didn’t do it quite as much and they didn’t have the internet or movie theaters to help them do it, but it still happened. So it’s not exactly realistic to get angry with “modern media” over it.
What it really comes down to is that if Valentine’s Day jives with you, you should enjoy it. Spend the time with your loved one (or loved ones!) and really appreciate them, don’t buy into the commercial garbage if you can help it. Do something nice for someone you love and spend time with them. If you’re not into the holiday, let others celebrate it how they please and appreciate the love you have the way you do.
There’s room for everyone around here.
To those of you that don’t like it, Happy Tuesday. To those that do enjoy it, Happy Valentine’s Day.
Oh woops, let me get into the proper spirit of the holiday. A-hem!
Hpy Vltnes Dy!
There we go.
Oh that’s clever! xD
I spent way too long scrutinizing the keyboard looking for a joke that wasn’t there.
And then I read the fourth panel.
…And now I feel dumb.
The letters left on the keyboard are the only ones used on the heart! I approve.
But still, doesn’t he have an on-screen keyboard he can control with the mouse?
Twelve years since a hardware upgrade? I don’t remember an on-screen keyboard for windows 3.11.
Valentine candy makes so much sense now…
The anagram nerd in my would like to point out he can still do:
purity, typist, purist, spirit, rusty, usurp, usury, and best of all: purty?
I see word jumbles and have to do them 🙁 I’m sure some anagram solver could come up with some more awesome ones than I managed to compile in the couple of minutes I glanced at it.
Did anyone listen to today’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR?
This is ripped directly from the page, so I hope Mr. Keillor doesn’t hate me. (or PRI for that matter)
“The ancient Romans had a fertility festival celebrated at mid-February of every year. The festival was called Lupercalia in honor of Lupa, the wolf who was said to have suckled Romulus and Remus, who went on to found the city of Rome. Lupercalia was a pagan fertility festival celebrated with sacrifices of goats and dogs, with milk and wool and blood. Young men would cut strips from the skins of the goats then strip naked and run through the city in groups, where young women would line up to be spanked with the switches, believing it would improve their fertility. Lupercalia was still wildly popular long after the Roman Empire was officially Christian, and it’s not difficult to see why the Church would have wished to have a different sort of holiday take its place.”
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2012/02/14
Thanks Raineach! I wasn’t aware that Valentines Day was a cover-up of a pagan festival (like most of the Christian “holy days are)… one more thing to dislike about (“Saint”) Valentine’s Day…. So anyways enough of my criticizing… I hope everyone had a merry day, what ever you celebrated (or didn’t!)
I know it’s not february anymore but,
I read your comic strips for a while now but I never -shame on me- take the time to read all the text that was at the bottom.
Finally I did, it didn’t take me so much time. Well, enough with the speechless ! I just wanted to say that I like your point of view and the words you put on. I actually feel (for a part) in the same way and it helps to be able to express it in words.
Well whatever about me, thanks again and I hope you’ll keep going on like that. Funny and interresting !