BY ROB NAGLE

Let me say something plainly and simply: Valen- tine's Day is stupid. What's my problem? I'll tell you what my problem is. For one thing I'm just getting over Christmas and New Year's Eve, I'm all holidayed out! How dare society impose another commercial holiday a little over a month after the last one! I wonder if it has anything to do with our capitalistic ethic of BUY, BUY, and BUY?

For Christmas we buy all the things associated with New Year's Eve and Val-entine's Day combined. On New Year's we buy and consume even more booze, and now for Valentine's Day we buy more candy and more flowers, all for that special someone in our lives. Flo-wers, I might add that come at great cost to those who pick them. Let's hope that our honeys don't suffer from the same thing that "two thirds of Colombian and Ecuadorian flower workers suffer from." According to laborrights.org, these workers suffer from "work related health problems, including headaches, nausea, impaired vision...asthma, stillbirths" and so on and so on due to all the chemicals and preservatives used to keep these flowers fresh till they reach their final location, in the hands of your luuvaa. Flowers that for all their treatment will be dead in a week. Happy Valentine's Day.

All I can say is thank God I'm single. Hey, I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong, dead wrong. I haven't always been single, and maybe I wouldn't be now if I bought into Valentine's Day a little more. The truth is last Valentine's Day I donated $20 for flowers so Ecuadorian flower workers could go home with a head-ache to surprise my ex-girlfriend as I got home from work, only to be showed up by a beautiful full course meal she had prepared. The meal was great, and so was the port I had for desert. The port was so good with my Cuban cigar that I seemed more interested in that than snuggling with my lady (hey, I find it very difficult to snuggle after eating). She went to bed mad, my Ecua-dorian flowers rendered useless and soon forgotten. Happy Valentine's Day!

Ah, what do you know about Valentine's Day anyway? The most memorable Valentine's Day I can think of was in 1929. Seven lucky guys in Chicago got more than candy and flowers. They got lead, and lots of it. In fact they were riddled with little lead Valentine cards that may not have said "I love you," but they certainly conveyed a very weighty message. I'm talking about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, which took place during the Great Depres-sion. It was an era made all the more depressing because of the prohibition of alcohol. But that didn't prohibit the likes of Al "Scarface" Capone and George "Bugs" Moran from providing their own Valentine's present to the people of Chicago all year long: black-market booze. That year Capone had a special present for "Bugs" Moran, whose men were killed that day. In response to an associate who said Capone would have to go through a lot of guys to get to Moran, Capone simply said, "I'll send flowers." Happy Valentine's Day!

So how did Valentine's Day come about? Apparently it was derived from a pagan tradition that matched you-ng boys and girls together as couples for a year. When Christianity started to rear its ugly head during the Roman Empire, the day was renamed after a priest named Valentine.

Valentine performed marriages against the will of the Roman Emperor Claudius the Cruel. Claudius was having trouble getting men to leave their wives to fight his battles, so he outlawed marriage and declared all eng-agements null and void. Valentine, being the "romantic" that he was, saw fit to marry people anyway.

After he was caught and imprisoned, he corresponded with people sympathetic to his situation, always signing his letters "from your Valen-tine." So Valentine's Day as we know it was born. As for Valentine, he died in prison. Happy Valentine's Day!

Now I realize many readers may think, "does this guy have no sense of romance? No sense of tradition? What's wrong with giving someone candy?" And you may very well be right, mind you, this is all just my opinion. But really, do we need this holiday? Just for the sake of having nothing more to say about it, Happy Valentine's Day, I'll send flowers.

From the Mouth of Miles

BY MILES HARWELL

When I was a kid, my mom always used to complain about how George Bush Sr. was screwing our country over. I was young and new to politics, and I trust my mom's judgment, so I followed her when she started getting hyped over a Democratic governor from Arkansas named Bill Clin-ton who was running for president. I didn't know anything about Clinton, but I still knew I would vote for him if I could.

At the time, all that mattered to me when it came to political candidates was at least one positive quality that struck close to home. According to my mom, what Clinton had going for him was that he would fight for people who were doing badly financially like we were.

I was overjoyed the day I heard Clinton won the election, even though most of my peers were people whose parents had voted for Bush. Although I thought my views on politics would become more complex as I got older, they haven't changed at all.

I remember my teacher in 11th grade telling us about how Gov. Gray Davis was donating a large amount of money to scholarship funds for those planning to attend college in California. That was all he had to do to get on my good side. However, when I recently heard of money getting ta-ken away from the schools, and the tuition fees at City College being raised from $11 a unit to $18 a unit, I quickly became anti-Davis. With the special recall election coming for governor, I knew the only way to end his reign of terror was to vote against him. Although I did not know how good a job Arnold Schwarzenegger would do as governor, he got my vote because he was the only one who had a chance of beating Davis.

San Francisco recently held a mayoral election. I hardly knew anything about the candidates. After the general election Supervisor Gavin Newsom and Pre-sident of the Board of Su-pervisors Matt Gonzalez we-re left to face each other in a run-off. Gonzalez acted like a man of the people, while Newsom seemed to represent the rich. Newsom spent much of his time mudslinging, and badmouthed Gon-zalez just because he played bass in a punk band. I be-lieve that was dishonorable on Newsom's part, not to mention irrelevant. Why not just talk about your own positive qualities? It was easy for me to vote for Gonzalez, but I woke up the day after the run-off to find out New-som was our new mayor.

I'm in Ram Plaza nearly every day, and I can't sit there without someone trying to sell me something, including political candidates. If I had a dollar for every time someone tried to get me to vote for Lyndon Le Rouche, I'd be rich by now. It's hard for me to really get into politics un-less it immediately affects me. People have always tried to tell me that my vote counts, but on paper, I'm only one man. Unless I can get thousands of people to vote the way I do, my vote doesn't matter.

Politicians are selfish to think that potential voters are going to put their lives on hold to listen to what one candidate has to say. It would take a pretty important issue for me to lose sleep over what a politician says or does. I haven't witnessed a political candidate who has talked about anything that is entirely important to me. Until they do, I'm going to keep my same voting strategy, which means if I don't like you, I'm voting against you.

Support your local anti-politician, and the "I don't give a "----" mentality.

You know you can take it to the bank if it came from the Mouth of Miles.