The Seedy, Scandalous History of Valentine's Day

Forget roses, chocolate boxes, and candlelight dinners. On Valentine's Day, this is rather boring stuff - at least according to ancient Roman standards.

Imagine half naked men running through the streets, whipping young women with bloodied thongs made from freshly cut goat skins. Although it might sound like some sort of perverted sado-masochist practice, this is what the Romans did until 496 A.D.

Indeed, mid-February was Lupercalia (Wolf Festival) time. Celebrated on February 15 at the foot of the Palatine Hill beside the cave where according to tradition the she-wolf had suckled Romulus and Remus, the festival was essentially a purification and fertility rite.

Directed by the Luperci, or "brothers of the wolf," the festival began with the sacrifice of two male goats and a dog, their blood smeared on the faces of Luperci initiates and then wiped off with wool dipped in milk.

As thongs were cut from the sacrificed goats, the initiates would run around in the streets flagellating women to promote fertility.

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Finally, in 496 Pope Gelasius I banned the wild feast and declared Feb. 14 as St. Valentine's Day.

But who was St. Valentine? Mystery surrounds the identity of the patron saint of lovers.

Indeed, such was the confusion that the Vatican dropped St. Valentine's Day from the Catholic Church calendar of saints in the 1960s.

There were at least three men by the name Valentine in the A.D. 200s and all died of a horrible death.

One was a priest in the Roman Empire who helped persecuted Christians during the reign of Claudius II. As he was imprisoned, he restored the sight of a blind girl, who fell in love with him. He was beheaded on Feb. 14.

Another was the pious bishop of Terni, also torturted and beheaded during Claudius II's reign.

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A third Valentine would have secretly married couples, ignoring Claudius II's ban of marriage. When the priest of love was eventually arrested, legend has it that he fell deeply in love with his jailer's daughter.

Before his death by beating and decapitation, he signed a farewell note to her: “From your Valentine.”

Apart from legend, the first connection between romance and February 14 goes back to Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), the English poet and author of The Canterbury Tales.

In his poem Parliament of Fowls (1382) Chaucer suggested that St. Valentine's Day was the time on which birds chose their mates.

"For this was Seynt Valentyne's Day. When every foul cometh ther to choose his mate," he wrote.

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Some 33 years later, Duke Charles of Orleans wrote what is considered the oldest known valentine in existence.

Imprisoned in the Tower of London after being captured by the English, in 1415 Charles wrote his wife Bonne d’Armagnac a rhyming love letter, which is now part of the manuscript collection in the British Library in London.

The first two lines of the poem were:

"Je suis desja d'amour tanné. Ma tres doulce Valentinée." [I am already sick of love, My very gentle Valentine].

It was an intense but unfortunate love: Bonne d’Armagnac may never have seen him again. She died before Charles's return to France in 1440.

Image: St. Valentine's Day. John Callcott Horsley (1817–1903). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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NASA's 2013 Budget Sees Mars Mission Cuts

NASA funding will remain relatively flat through 2013, but funds will be cut from the Mars program. Planetary science funding expected to be slashed by 20 percent, whereas Earth science and tech development will see increases. The James Webb Space Telescope's ballooning costs will likely be covered by the planetary sciences cuts.

The proposed 2013 federal budget unveiled by President Barack Obama on Monday (Feb. 13) keeps NASA funding relatively flat next year, but bites deep into the agency's robotic Mars mission coffers while shifting new funds to human exploration and space technology.

According to the White House's 2013 budget request, NASA would receive about $17.7 billion for next year -- $59 million less than the space agency received for 2012.

However, NASA's planetary science efforts would suffer a 20 percent cut next year, with the president allocating just $1.2 billion for unmanned missions to Mars and other solar system bodies. Meanwhile, funding for human exploration and commercial spaceflight would rise nearly 6 percent, to $3.93 billion, and space technology would get a 22 percent bump, to $699 million.

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Experts say the reduction in planetary science funding will probably compel NASA to drop out of the European Space Agency-led ExoMars missions, which aim to launch an orbiter and a drill-toting rover to the Red Planet in 2016 and 2018, respectively. NASA was due to provide rockets for both missions, as well as various instrumentation.

These two missions are viewed as key steps along the path toward a Mars sample-return mission, which many researchers regard as the best way to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

"Underpinning this is not committing to a long-term Mars program ending in a multibillion-dollar sample-return mission," said space policy expert John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "They don't want to head down that road."

NASA's Budget Basics

The White House's proposed allocation for NASA in fiscal 2013 represents less than 0.5 percent of the overall federal budget request, which is $3.8 trillion.

Other NASA programs fare better than planetary science in the request for fiscal year 2013, which runs from Oct. 1, 2012, through Sept. 30, 2013. The space agency's Earth sciences program, for example, would receive $1.78 billion, slightly more than the president allocated in his fiscal 2012 budget request.

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The White House also prioritizes space technology, as evidenced by the 22 percent increase requested in the 2013 budget proposal.

"The Administration's commitment to enhance NASA's role in aerospace technology development aims to create the innovations necessary to keep the aerospace industry -- one of the largest net export industries in the United States -- on the cutting edge for years to come," the White House wrote in a summary outlining the budget request.

Obama's proposal also allocates about $2.9 billion for NASA's next-generation manned transportation system, which consists of a heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) and a capsule called the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.

The SLS and Orion, which are designed to carry astronauts to destinations in deep space such as asteroids or Mars, received $3 billion in fiscal 2012. NASA hopes the combo is operational by 2021.

Commercial space transportation gets a vote of confidence in the 2013 budget request. The president slotted $830 million for NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, NASA's effort to encourage American private spaceflight companies to start ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Since the space shuttle retired in July 2011, NASA has been completely dependent on Russian Soyuz vehicles to perform this taxi service. The agency wants several different private spaceships to be up and running by 2017 or so.

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Last year, the White House allocated $850 million for CCDev activities in fiscal 2012, though Congress ended up granting only $406 million. Obama requested a total of $18.7 billion for NASA last year, but Congress eventually approved just $17.8 billion.

Next-Gen Telescope Eats Up NASA Funds

NASA's planetary science funding is likely being slashed in part to help pay for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a huge instrument that NASA bills as the successor to its Hubble Space Telescope.

JWST has suffered numerous cost overruns and delays over the years. Back in 2001, the National Academy of Sciences pegged the telescope's price tag at $1 billion. NASA's first official appraisal, performed in 2008, estimated a cost of $5 billion, with a launch coming in 2014.

The telescope is now slated to cost $8.8 billion, and to launch in 2018 at the earliest. The White House proposes giving JWST $628 million in fiscal 2013, compared to $519 million in the current year.

"Finishing Webb is being given a higher priority than starting or committing to new Mars missions," Logsdon told SPACE.com.

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NASA officials stress that the agency is still committed to exploring Mars, both for scientific purposes and to enable future manned missions to the Red Planet. NASA has had a string of successes with robotic Mars missions recently, and its 1-ton Curiosity rover is slated to touch down on the Red Planet this August to assess whether the world can, or ever could, host life as we know it.

"Consistent with the tough choices being made across the federal government to reduce spending and live within our means, NASA is reassessing its current Mars exploration initiatives to maximize what can be achieved scientifically, technologically and in support of our future human missions," NASA spokesman David Weaver told SPACE.com in an email.

"But it is important to remember that America is the only nation that has successfully landed missions on the Martian surface -- and of course the only nation with a car-sized rover on its way right now to explore the Red Planet in unprecedented detail," Weaver added.

Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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'Woolly Mammoth' Video a Hoax

The video became an Internet sensation around the world. The man who made the film of the river said his video had been on YouTube since July, 2011.

Last week, a new video surfaced claiming to show a live woolly mammoth — an animal scientists think has been extinct for at least four millennia — crossing a river in Russia. The suspiciously blurry footage was allegedly "caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia," according to a story in The Sun newspaper.

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The video became an Internet sensation, making headlines around the world. Some Bigfoot believers and Loch Ness Monster lovers murmured their tentative approval, hoping it proved that large unknown (or assumed extinct) animals still exist in Earth's remote wilds.

While most people didn't believe that the animal in the video was really a woolly mammoth as claimed, viewers were sharply divided about what exactly it was.

Some suspected the video is an outright hoax — a computer-generated mammoth digitally inserted into a real river scene. Many others, however, were convinced that the animal was real: not a mammoth, but instead a bear with a large fish hanging from its mouth. That would explain its relatively small size, the shape of the "trunk" on its head, and the color. Experts cast doubts on the video's authenticity; Derek Serra, a Hollywood video effects artist, concluded that it "appears to have been intentionally blurred."

Serra isn't the only expert who can shed some light on this mystery: another person is Ludovic Petho. His name may not be familiar to most people, but his work has been seen by millions; he filmed the mammoth footage at the Kitoy River in Siberia's Sayan Mountains in the summer of 2011.

He's not an anonymous government engineer, but instead a writer and videographer. Petho filmed the river scene during a 10-day solo hike in the mountains as part of a video project he's working on about his grandfather's escape from a Siberian POW camp in 1915 and his walk across Siberia to Budapest, Hungary. The footage may end up being used in a documentary film — but there's one big difference between the video he shot and the woolly mammoth video.

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"I don't recall seeing a mammoth; there were bears, deer and sable," he said in an interview with Life's Little Mysteries. "But no woolly mammoths. I had no idea my footage was used to make this fake sighting." Petho noted that his original video had been available on YouTube since July 2011, depicting an exactly identical scene — minus the faked woolly mammoth, of course.

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Copyright 2012 Lifes Little Mysteries, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Salvage Workers Begin Pumping Fuel from Italian Shipwreck

The operation to extract 2,400 tonnes of fuel from 15 tanks is expected to take 28 days, weather permitting. It may then take seven to 10 months to refloat the vessel.

Salvage workers Sunday began pumping fuel from the shipwrecked Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia, a day ahead of schedule, officials said.

Operations began at around 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) on the wreck off the Tuscan island of Giglio to remove fuel from seven of the massive ship's tanks, with conditions calm.

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The Costa Concordia ran aground on January 13 with a total of 4,229 people on board, an accident that cost the lives of 32 people. The bodies of 15 of those lost have still to be recovered.

Civil protection officials had said earlier they would start the pumping operations on Monday, after severe cold weather required them to revise their schedule, but final preparations were completed over the weekend.

Dutch company Smit, working with the Italian firm Neri, is handling the operation, which will involve extracting 2,400 tonnes of fuel still inside the vessel to avoid what officials say would be an environmental disaster if it leaked into the sea.

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They plan to complete the operation in 28 days, working around the clock to empty a total of 15 tanks, so long as weather conditions permit, the civil protection authority said.

Only once that operation is completed can work begin to refloat the vessel, an operation that experts say will take at least seven months and possibly as many as 10.

The Costa Concordia ran aground just a few dozen meters (yards) from the port of the island of Giglio, which lies off Italy's Tuscan coast and from where ferries run to the mainland.

Pierluigi Foschi, the chief executive of Costa Crociere, owners of the cruise liner, visited the tiny island of Giglio, which has 800 inhabitants, on Thursday.

He told local people they would have a concrete plan by the middle of March on getting the vessel out of their waters and promised to everything he could to minimize the impact on the local tourist industry.

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