💀 💀 💀 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
Archive for the ‘Events and occasions’ Category
Penultimate October
October 30, 2025A World Postcard
October 21, 2025In 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.
78
October 18, 2025Yes, 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.
… that I am precious to them
October 14, 2025I 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.
Holy Romaine Empire
October 11, 2025🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 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.
October’s song: amid rueful jesting, they slip into death
October 5, 2025A comic poem and a cartoon for October.
50!
October 4, 2025From 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.
Peter Paige
September 30, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tigers seeing off the month of September; meanwhile, the October Oz-rabbits are massing behind the great fence that separates the two months, and will soon burst through, to blanket the calendrical landscape
Today I will step way from the events of the day and of my life to pick up a recurring theme on this blog, that of the cultural type the queen, moved by catching an admirable exponent of the type, the actor Peter Paige, in an episode of the tv drama Bones (S6 E14, “The Bikini in the Soup”, from 2011):
(#1) Emily Deschanel (as Temperance “Bones” Brennan), Peter Paige (as Darren Hargrove), David Boreanaz (as Seely Booth); Paige plays Hargrove with plenty of queeny mannerisms, but also a certain degree of slyness (he looks serious here because he’s being arrested) (screen shot from IMDb)
September 29th
September 29, 202529 September: penultimate September, and also Michaelmas (the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael; the Feast of the Archangels; or the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels). Brief notes about the day; and then, in the midst of very difficult times (during which I am failing at almost everything, and in great pain), a report on some moments of pleasure that help to get me from day to day.
Orange roses
September 7, 2025Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care turned up yesterday with a surprise present for my 85th birthday: a big vase of orange roses (on the pinkish or peach side of the color), because those were the really big and beautiful roses she could find on the spur of the moment, without assigning any meaning to the color (though I’m a Princeton A.B., rah rah orange and black and all that), and indeed not knowing what the particular variety was named (you wouldn’t believe how many rose-growing companies there are in the world and what an encyclopedia of names they have registered for orange cultivars). Now located right in my line of sight as I type at my worktable:
Roses of the Orange 85th; for roses, orange seems to be the color of joy, enthusiasm, and desire, and that does feel like a good fit for me
Now, how the color orange came to be associated with Princeton is a remarkably tangled tale involving the Holy Roman Empire (the tale begins in 1163), the French region of Provence (the town of Orange), the Rheinland-Palatinate region of Germany (the town of Nassau), the Netherlands, and of course William-and-Mary, rulers of Great Britain and Ireland. Quite remarkably, oranges the fruit and the color orange have nothing to do with all this, or at least didn’t until Princeton (founded in 1746) adopted orange and black as the official colors for academic gowns in 1896, which is virtually yesterday in this context (I mean, my father and mother were born in 1914). What the story does have to do with is mostly the astounding rapacity of the great bulk of the ruling classes. I will attempt to fill in some of the details in a forthcoming posting, but today I just want to enjoy those roses.