Yesterday was Valentine's day. As a part of a longstanding policy of desynchronizing from the world of people trying to mark-up products Sarah and I have decided to celebrate Valentine's Day the other 364 days of the year by being generally decent to one another and kissing whenever people aren't looking.

As a matter of course I recently learned from Tom Robbins the strange origin of kissing. Apparently kissing wasn't invented until recently in history. Robbins wrote in Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, "kissing, as we know it, was invented by medieval knights for the utilitarian purpose of determining whether their wives had been tapping the mead barrel while the knights were away on the crusades. If history is accurate for once, the kiss began as an osculatory wire tap or oral snoop, a kind of alcoholic chastity belt, after the fact."