ASSESSING BLAME FOR VALENTINE'S DAY.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

It's coming down to crunch time again, guys. Valentine's Day is just around the corner. Got any fresh ideas? No? Me neither.

How did Valentine's Day, with such a rich heritage, become so boring over the centuries?

Hallmark cards, poems, flowers, candy, dinner - blah. Been there, done that. Even those skimpy little red undies Fredericks of Hollywood and Victoria's Secret sell for $50 an inch are getting old.

Unless you're a millionaire and can hop on a jet to some romantic part of the world, you're probably going to be standing in line this weekend at See's or making restaurant reservations, like the rest of us working stiffs.

It's sad how far modern man has fallen in coming up with some fresh ideas to woo their women.

The ancient Romans are probably turning over in their crypts right now, seeing what we've done with their Lupercalia festival.

Yeah, that's where historians say Valentine's Day most likely started. They credit either Rome's Lupercalia festival, about 40 A.D., or birds getting spring fever around February 14 and starting to line up potential mates.

Personally, I'm voting for Lupercalia. Mating birds just don't do it for me.

``During the Lupercalia celebration, young Roman men seeking protection from wolves struck people with strips of animal hide,'' according to the World Book, which, like newspapers, never lies.

``Women took the blows because they thought the whipping made them more fertile.''

OK, I know where we're going with this. Lupercalia would never fly today. Way too violent and sexist.

Besides, we've pretty much figured out the fertility thing, and guys flailing women with animal hide whips didn't make the top 10.

The closest thing men have to Lupercalia today is Monday Night Football.

And it's not just a guy thing, this Valentine's Day malaise we're in. Women have to share some of the responsibility.

Englishwomen of the 1700s used to write men's names on scraps of paper, roll each one into a little piece of clay, and drop them all into water.

``The first paper that rose to the surface supposedly had the name of a woman's true love,'' the World Book recounts.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor came along, and, well, you know the rest. They ran out of scraps of paper.

``Also in the 1700s, unmarried women pinned five bay leaves to their pillows on the eve of Valentine's Day,'' the book says. ``They pinned one leaf to the center of the pillow and one to each corner. If the charm worked, they saw their future husbands in their dreams.''

If they didn't, on Valentine's Day they threw the bay leaves into a nice spaghetti sauce and cracked open a bottle of wine alone.

In England's Derbyshire County, the World Book reports, young women circled the church three to 13 times at midnight and repeated the verse, `I sow hempseed. Hempseed I sow. He that loves me best, come after me now.'

Now those were real women, the women of the 1700s. None of this sitting at home waiting for some guy to show up with flowers and candy. They went out and got their own Valentines, circling churches at midnight and sowing hempseed.

But then Kate Greenaway came along in the 1800s and ruined everything. If ever a witch should have been burned at the stake, it was this Greenaway woman, who came up with the idea for the first Valentine's card.

``Many of her cards featured charming pictures of happy children and lovely gardens,'' the World Book says.

It was all downhill from there, guys. By the mid-1800s, the plague had spread to America. A woman named Esther Howland, of Worcester, Mass., started mass-producing the damn things.

``She hired a staff of young women and set up an assembly line to produce the cards,'' the World Book says. ``One woman glued on paper flowers, another added lace, and another painted leaves.

``Howland soon expanded her business into a $100,000-a-year enterprise.''

And now here we are, guys, 150 years later - picking over mushy Valentine's Day cards at the drugstore and standing in line at See's, instead of whipping people with strips of animal hide.

And they say progress is good.