Valentine’s Day

Today is Valentine’s Day, and putting my cynicism of commercial holidays temporarily aside, I thought it would be appropriate to post something about it.

I went through the 5th Estate archive in search of inspiration…

From Valentine’s Day 2007 – Words of Love:

Harper Perennial and Fifth Estate are delighted to bring to our readers a small selection of Brian Patten’s celebrated love poetry. Why not choose one to send to a loved one… or if you’re not in the mood maybe something more cynical?

We even created a form so you could type in the email address of your recipient, and they would receive the poem direct to their inbox – see the accompanying post, Send a poem anonymously for Valentine’s Day, for more information.  Or if you’d prefer a downloadable jpeg, simply click on the name of the poem you desire.

Here’s my favourite:

From Valentine’s Day 2008 – Bloggers’ Classic Love Stories. Mark Johnson explains:

With Valentines approaching, we asked our favourite bloggers and some of our top authors to name their own favourite love story – in any medium. Nearly twenty responded, citing romances from books, poems, songs, films – and more besides.

Click here to find out what Sarah Crown of the Guardian Books Blog and Scott Pack chose, among others.

Also from that year, a Q and A with author Jeffrey Eugenides on picking love stories for the anonthology he edited, My Mistress’s’ Sparrow is Dead:

Jeffrey explains how he chose which stories to include, which he particularly loves, and which ones got away…

Valentines Day 2010…

2009 will always be remembered – I think – as the year we went a little iPhone app crazy. It’d only be appropriate then for me to write something here about Valentine’s Day on the Apple app store.

I was actually vaguely interested to see how they would deal with this festival, since it’s no mean feat to find a way to capitalize on a gifting holiday when – as yet – there is no way to gift apps directly in the store. That said, as mentioned in a previous post ‘What is the iPad for?’ Apple’s biggest strength when facing most challenges is its ability to rely on third parties to solve problems so they don’t have to.

Here are some examples of interesting Valentine’s Apps, which seem to  circumnavigate the issue*:

• Love C@rds – An easy-to-use way of creating mobile e-cards, where you can choose from a selection of ‘beautiful and romantic templates’
• Love Detector – ‘Show your Loved ones how much you care about them on a scale of 0 – 10′
• Love Quotes - ‘Impress the love of your life with some of the most romantic quotes of all time’

*I don’t endorse these apps, I just thought they looked kind of fun…

Hope everyone has a great Valentine’s Day!