🎈 election day in my country🎈 (the first Tuesday in November) — for which I re-play this Jim Benton cartoon:
(#1) From my 3/3/25 posting “Warnings”: it’s all the fault of the Cassandras; they should have made us believe them, they shouldn’t have let us not believe them
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate November; it’s a beautiful bright fall day here in Palo Alto, the day after the costumes and candy of Halloween, and also The Day of the Dead, to honor those who have died before us
This posting is a continuation of yesterday’s “Medicine Day”, a list — an alarming inventory — of the medically significant conditions of my life, very roughly in chronological order. I admitted that the list was surely incomplete, and in fact I was driven to get up in the middle of the night to construct a second list, almost as big as the first.
But I will hold that recital of afflictions off for a bit, to entertain you with a note on one of my grand-child Opal’s favorite Halloween candies and one on yellow-orange marigolds for Mexican remembrances of the beloved dead.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate October; and of course that very odd couple, Halloween and (Protestant) Reformation Day (put on your best witch’s hat and nail some theses to the old church door!)
Musing over the oddities of my life this morning, I recalled a series of unusual medical conditions that suddenly turned up and then passed away: otoliths with (terrible) vertigo, Bell’s palsy, a (benign but quite notable) scrotal mass, that sort of thing. So I set out to list the medically significant conditions of my life, very roughly in chronological order.
💀 💀 💀 three days in October: Halloween Eve, Halloween, Day of the Dead — with today’s Bob cartoon for the second of these occasions; and then the Day of the Dead is also a significant day for me personally — my (Path to) Sobriety Day, the day I took my last drink, 5 years ago now
In my mail yesterday, 10/20, a World Postcard Day postcard from my old friend and Stanford colleague Ryan Tamares, mailed from him (in Mountain View CA, a few miles from my place) on 9/22, to go through the World Postcard Day site in College Station TX on 10/1 (the day itself) and then wend its way to me (whether by intention or misadventure) as if had come by surface mail from the place in the card’s picture, Vienne en Isère, France (note: not the much better known Vienne en Autriche / Vienna in Austria / Wien in Österreich).
I’ll put off the occasion and its sponsoring organization to an appendix to the main posting, which is about the card itself: the town pictured in it, the shop in that town pictured in it, and its source.
Yes, it’s Saturday 10/18, and that means NO KINGS day, with people marching by the millions to celebrate democracy over autocracy and to rebel pointedly against Our Overlord Grabpussy and his army of thugs and grifters. Meanwhile, I celebrate a much more modest and personal occasion, from 10/16:
🎈 🎂 🎈 Larry Schourup’s 78th birthday. LS and I have been loving friends since 1970; see a longer exposition of our relationships in my 3/16/24 posting “The three Larrys”. And we both have early-fall birthdays, me on 9/6, him on 10/16. For me this year, see my 9/6/25 posting “Sloths, penguins, and Buddhist joy”, the Buddhist joy (zuiki in Japanese, sounds like Zwicky) being a sweet 85th birthday gift from LS.
I got Buddhist joy (Larry grew up in SoCal, now lives in Japan). Larry got phonograph records (I grew up in Pa. Dutch country, now live in NorCal). It’s a complicated relationship.
I have been going over about 50 pages of draft stuff for my lawyer: revisions of my trusteeship, my will, the advance health care instructions, and a durable power of attorney — the product of a session with the lawyer last month. Oh my. Well, it all seems to say what I said I wanted, but of course, in careful legalese and with provisos for all sorts of circumstances I had never even contemplated.
And there in the advance health care section was a Treat with Dignity section that begins:
If I should suffer serious disease, injury, or illness, I desire that those who love and care for me touch me and tell me so, demonstrating that I am precious to them.
And then I burst into tears at the delicate intimacy of the wording, even though it’s probably boilerplate text these days.
🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)
The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:
(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)
The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.
A comic poem and a cartoon for October.
From Beth Levin to the Stanford linguistics department on 9/10:
The Department of Linguistics was officially established on September 1, 1975, and so this year is our 50th anniversary! In celebration, we will be hosting a reception from 4-6pm on Friday, October 10 in the Linguistics Courtyard behind Margaret Jacks Hall. We have invited our many Ph.D. alumni and emeriti to attend, and we are anticipating a good turn out.
An astounding number of PhD alumni have said they’re coming (going back to 1970, from the precursor to the department). I don’t know how many emeritus faculty are coming. And then there are the people currently in the department. So it will be quite a scene.
