14 February—Yesterday the ovine Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives resolved to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for no good or valid reason and by a margin of only one slimy vote. Just three GOP representatives had the intelligence and scrotal content to vote against the asinine motion. Of course, the impeachment will get nowhere in the similarly ovine Democrat-majority Senate.

Why, we wonder, do those assholes do it? The only answer that makes any sense is that besides diverting the public’s attention from all the important stuff they’re not doing—which generally works to the advantage of the country, mind you—our august elected representatives want to reaffirm their thoughtless, idiotic partisanship to their respective segments of the benighted electorate.

So be it, just wasting taxpayer money. As usual.

More important, 170 years ago today Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson received U.S. patent No. 10,535 for their lever-action Volcanic Repeater with a tubular magazine (still common today), one of the first commercially viable repeating firearms. A year later the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company was incorporated and a year after that it folded. But Smith, Wesson, and another principal, Oliver Winchester, went on to firearms legend.

Of course, we mustn’t neglect to celebrate appropriate saints today, Ash Wednesday. We’ll start with Saints Cyril and Methodius, ninth-century Greek missionaries. Cyril, who was born Constantine, is largely responsible for the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used by Slavic languages; older brother Methodius, who outlived Cyril, helped.

So what about Saint Valentine? Well, although the Roman Catholic Church continues to recognize Valentine as a saint, he was removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969 because of the lack of reliable information about him. Or them. One wonders what the church considers reliable. But here’s the annual Valentine’s Day disquisition anyway:

There were quite a few early Christian martyrs called Valentine. It was a pretty common name in the dark ages, derived from the Latin word for strength—“valent” means “they are strong.” The two Valentines whose feast day is 14 February are Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni. There’s a third Saint Valentine mentioned in martyrologies with the 14 February feast day, but nothing is known about him except that he was martyred in Africa along with a number of companions. So how did he come to be canonized? Go figure. That’s what religion is all about.

The probable Valentine of the special day, Saint Valentine of Rome, was a priest and physician who was beaten to death and beheaded in 269, buried in the Flaminian Way (the road between Rome and Rimini), and in 496 added to the saints calendar by Pope Gelasius I, an early advocate of the separation of church and state (but not quite like the First Amendment), whose name comes from the Greek for laughter—“γέλιο,” “gelio.”

Saint Valentine of Terni, on the other hand, was a bishop (of Interamna, now Terni) who was martyred about four years after Valentine of Rome in much the same way, beaten and beheaded. (That was before lethal injection.) He’s also buried in the Flaminian Way, but not near his Roman namesake. Emma of Normandy (married first to Æthelred the Unready and then to Cnut the Great; and called Ælfgifu—Anglo-Saxon for “elf gift”—when she was Queen of England) had what was claimed to be Saint Valentine of Terni’s head preserved in the New Minster Benedictine Abbey, in Winchester, in 1041. The good old days.

It’s not known with any certainty how the saints or the word came to be associated with all the love, sex, and associated mercantile nonsense. But one legend has it that Dr. St. Valentine signed a letter “from your Valentine” (but not in English, of course) to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had befriended and cured of blindness. Another legend has Fr. St. Valentine secretly marrying couples to spare the novice husbands from being drafted. Couldn’t Dr. St. Valentine have given them medical exemptions like Donald Trump got?

A Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers, probably because of the tangential association of bees and honey and sweetness and love. And Valentine of Terni, the bishop, is said to have cured an epileptic’s seizures, thus making him the patron saint of epileptics.

In all events, in the late 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer, in “Parliament of Fowls,” (pronounced “fools”) describes a group of birds who gather on “seynt valentynes day” to choose their mates for the year. It’s a poem, not a scientific treatise.

A century later, Margery Brews dropped at least one note to her cousin John Paston, calling him “my right well beloved Valentine” (in Late Middle English, of course). She closes, “By your Valentine” (also in LME). They had mutual hots and, yes, they overcame family objections and married. Not that it matters, but the Pastons were loaded and connected.

Last year, $25.9 billion was spent on Valentine’s Day compared to $24 billion on Easter, $12.2 billion on Halloween, $1.1 trillion on Christmas, and bupkes on Chanukah . . .