Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

February 14, 1477: Margery Brews called John Paston, her fiancé, in a letter: "My olde Valentine." This is regarded as the oldest surviving UK St Valentine’s Day message. The letter was originally bought by the British Library as part of a collection of papers from a family called Paston in the 1930s, one of the largest collections of 15th century English letters. The letter was not discovered until 1999.


Letter image from the British Library Blog but I'll be damned if I can find a working URL to the British Library where we are told the original is stored or hidden.

Anyways, this site, This Is Paston Portal:
The Earliest Surviving Valentine's Letter has it in readable text. These are a collection of personal correspondence between members of one Norfolk gentry family and their wider network of associates. These were composed between 1422 and 1509 and are a remarkable survival that inform us of much that occurred, whether on a local, regional or national scale, during this troubled period.

So, who were the Pastons? Well, the letters begin in earnest with William Paston, the only son of the Norfolk yeoman Clement Paston and his wife Beatrice Somerton. Through the patronage of his maternal uncle, this William became a lawyer and transformed the family's standing, expanding their property portfolio and rising to become Justice of the Common Pleas before his death in 1444. Within a generation, the Pastons had outgrown their old world, and were moving in high social circles, rubbing shoulders with aristocracy and even royalty.


Feb 14, 1925: AMENDING BLUE SKY LAW in West Virginia
"Theoretically, this law is supposed to arm the State Auditor & his deputies with power to suppress the sale of worthless stocks & to punish those who take advantage of the innocent..."




Happy Atomic Valentine's Day!




Happy Lupercalia Day.

Lupercalia was also known as "dies Februatus", after the purification instruments called "februa", the basis for the month, Februarius.

Valentine’s Day is a modern day "lustration" ritual dedicated to the fertility goddess.

The word lustration derives from the Latin lustratio, which means "purification by sacrifice". Lustration rituals and processes in ancient Greek and Roman society were intended to help individuals or communities rid themselves of impurities. They are similar to scapegoat rituals.

When a community was to be purified, either from collective guilt or from the accumulated ill luck and ill-doing of a period of time, different processes were used from culture to culture. The usual Greek method, for instance, seems to have been to lead through the village certain persons or animals capable of absorbing the pollution and then to lead them out of the city. In Rome, purifying materials were led or carried around the person or community in question. Many noteworthy public rites were of this kind, such as the Lupercalia (around the Palatine hill) and the amburbium ("around the city").



In many ways, Covid-19 and the pandemic resemble a world wide lustration ritual. Society at large still practices many of these ancient rituals without realizing it. The controllers invoke the old gods via the masses.


English poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld's A New Map of the Land of Matrimony, Drawn From the Latest Surveys (1772). More allegorical maps dedicated to charting the highs and lows of love, courtship, and marriage at Public Domain.




CAUTION: NSFW image follows...unless your work is at a fornix.

This unusual Latin to English glossary is from Bernard S. Talmey's "Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-Atttraction" (1919), a 458-page treatise on carnal acts which has all words deemed too scandalous translated into Latin.

The use of Latin to conceal or encode sexually charged or controversial language has a long history (see, for example, our essay on Emmanuel Swedenborg’s erotic dreams). As one might expect, a no-nonsense 458-page treatise on the "science of sex-attraction" would present plenty of opportunity for such Latinate veiling and Bernard S. Talmey’s Love does not disappoint. In fact, so replete with Latin substitutions is the work (particularly in the sections on "pathological activities") that in its second edition Tolmey was urged to include some help for the persistent and curious reader who might not be so proficient in Latin. Enter a most unusual bilingual glossary. Ranging from the familiar (cunnilingus, fellatio, libido), to the expected (sugo for “suck”, lambo for “lick”, fricare for “rub”), to the distinctly worrisome (gallina for “hen”, canis for dog), to the plain intriguing (nono quoque die for "every nine days"), the list gives a fairly good sense of what’s to come in Talmey’s study of the varieties of human sexual experience.

Care for a peek if you dare: Glossary of Censored Words from a 1919 Treatise on Love


Feb 14, 1955: the "Flash of Darkness" H-bomb episode (S1:E17) of MEDIC starring Richard Boone. This "what-if" episode imagines what would happen in the event of a nuclear strike on Los Angeles.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5TexD8Nlxw




Feb 14, 1964: John Frankenheimer's SEVEN DAYS IN MAY premiered in Washington, DC. Rod Serling wrote the screenplay based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II.


"You're not a weak sister, Mr. President. You're a criminally weak sister."





Feb 14, 1975: Canadian rock band Rush releases its second album, Fly By Night.




Zelenskyy: Send more $$$$. Look what big bad red bear did to us!

Russian attack drone with a high-explosive warhead struck the shelter protecting the world from radiation at the destroyed 4th power unit of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.


https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1890298176038682905


A-10 in snow that looks like a pencil sketch. BURRrrrrr



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