About a half-dozen tipsters, starting with Seema, wanted us to point out this little tidbit in a New York Times Op-Ed published this morning:

Give me some tongue baby

SINCE it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s dwell for a moment on the profoundly bizarre activity of kissing. Is there a more expressive gesture in the human repertoire?…

All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn’t know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting. Among the Lapps of northern Finland, both sexes would bathe together in a state of complete nudity, but kissing was regarded as beyond the pale…

If kissing is not universal, then someone must have invented it. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M, has traced the first recorded kiss back to India, somewhere around 1500 B.C., when early Vedic scriptures start to mention people “sniffing” with their mouths, and later texts describe lovers “setting mouth to mouth.” From there, he hypothesizes, the kiss spread westward when Alexander the Great conquered the Punjab in 326 B.C. [Link]

Well who would have thought? In addition to writing the Kama Sutra we can now take partial credit for kissing! The Hindu right-wing activists are going to go into shock when they see this (or at least they will try and keep it out of California textbooks). For the rest of this week I plan to honor my forefathers by exchanging as much saliva as possible. Who is with me?