St. Valentine's Day

The U.S. must slash its deficit to 3% from an expected 7.5% before the president’s second term in office ends, otherwise, bond markets will not be able to absorb the amount of new debt the Treasury issues, and a death spiral will ensue, according to Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio. He states the U.S. no longer had the luxury to form a consensus in society over the breadth and scale of the cuts needed. Read that again.

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An app called TouchTunes lets people pick and play their favorite songs in more than 65,000 bars, restaurants, and other venues—even from hundreds of miles away. One user, Logan Bartlett, has used the remote control feature to troll bars in Ohio with the University of Tennessee’s unofficial fight song…all from New York.

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Australia appointed its first rabbit tsar to combat invasive species

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St. Valentine's Day

Before the 14th century, St. Valentine's Day honored a Christian martyr. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer connected St. Valentine's Day to romance. 

Chaucer lived in the Middle Ages, the era of courtly love, celebrated with broad, romantic statements of devotion in poems, songs, and paintings. In his poem "The Parliament of Fowls," written around 1382, possibly to commemorate the engagement of King Richard II, he envisions birds gathering on St. Valentine's Day to choose their mates. The goddess Nature declares: "You know that on Saint Valentine's Day / By my statute and through my governance / You come to choose — and then fly your way — / Your mates, as I your desires enhance." From then on, Valentine's Day was seen as a day of romantic love.

Young girls in the U.S. and the U.K. once believed they could tell what type of man they would marry by the type of bird they saw first on Valentine’s Day. If they saw a blackbird, they would marry a clergyman, a robin indicated a sailor, and a goldfinch indicated a rich man. A sparrow meant they would marry a farmer, a blue bird indicated a happy man, and a crossbill meant an argumentative man. If they saw a dove, they would marry a good man, but seeing a woodpecker meant they would not marry at all.