Valentine

Last year, Warren Ellis had this to say.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

Horny Werewolf Day needs to come back. I expect R Stevens and J Rowland to have t-shirts ready for next year.

He's talking about Lupercalia, though Jason “Wild Hunt” Pitzl-Waters says says it ain't so. Still, sure enough, there are now t-shirts.

On a more romantic note, I offer this little passage from Iain M. Banks' brilliant and decidedly unromantic SF novel Use of Weapons.

He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she were some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness an ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.

I know the feeling. Happy Valentine's, everyone.