Friday: Hili dialogue

February 13, 2015 • 7:29 am

It’s Friday and I’m in Hattiesburg, Mississippi to give a belated Darwin Day talk. (Remember, if you come, buy a copy of WEIT (on sale at the venue and in fine bookstores everywhere), and say “Felis silvestris lybica,” you will get a cat drawn in it. However, I have the feeling that I have few readers in this area!

I arrived last evening, and haven’t seen much of the town (though I had an amazeball BBQ dinner), but what is dead obvious, even in the dark, is the huge number of churches in this area. There are steeples everywhere, and interspersed between the churches are the dreaded institutions of Chick-fil-A (I am talking to two FAs I know here), and the odious HOBBY LOBBY, a store I’ve never seen before.  I am in the South. But, as always, I will find some nice secularists here, and some will whisper to me furtively during the book signing, thanking me for my work and telling me that they agree with it. That’s the best part of lecturing in the South.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is making  brief forays into philosophy, but her neurons are so wired for noms that every thought gets derailed:

Hili: Peace is an extention of war conducted by other means.
A: What do you have in mind?
Hili: I will not eat you if you fulfill my three wishes.
P1020291
In Polish:
Hili: Pokój jest przedłużeniem wojny prowadzonej innymi środkami.
Ja: Co masz na myśli?
Hili: Nie zjem cię, jak spełnisz moje trzy życzenia.

23 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. To many of us not from the south, it is an eye opening experience to go and spend some time down there. To move and live down there is yet another experience. I have done this a few times and have always been glad to not be there.

  2. I’m amazed you havent run across (our haven’t commented on) any of the “855-FOR-TRUTH” billboards or the “Jesus is lord and you know it!” or the 5 million (or more) church billboards. They are rampant across Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama.

    1. I guess if they didn’t have such an embarrassment of religious messages (ha ha, literally! It’s embarrassing!) in the South they’d probably have bottom-tier overall health and top-tier levels of teen pregnancies and methamphetamine addiction.

      Oh, wait …

  6. So, is Darwin Day being held belatedly because:

    A) Things move more slowly in the South,
    or
    B) It’s a calculated move to have a better chance of attracting top-tier speakers a tad off-anniversary since the better speakers will opt to accept invitations to more prestigious venues smack on the anniversary.

    Otherwise, noted in passing while Google Imaging to see what the campus looks like – they don’t mess around when they plant trees down there.

  10. I live in a 100,000-population city near Nashville; it has 300+ churches and four Walmarts (also a Hobby Lobby). When I moved here seven years ago, all my new neighbors’ first question was which church did I plan to attend.

    But we also have a nice group of secularists, the Murfreesboro Freethinkers. And if you’re going to live in the South, Nashville is a nice island of progressive thought.

    1. They used to say in Norwich, my old home, that there was a church for every week of the year & a pub for every day. It certainly still has more than 30 mediaeval churches – & plenty of pubs! 🙂

  11. Here in Alabama, how many times have we fought “Northern Aggression”? Well, let’s see, there’s the Civil War, of course. Then there’s Brown v. Education, the prayer in school thingy, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the blacks marrying whites thingamabob, and what else? Oh, yeah, we’re currently engaged in the attempt to prevent gays from getting married. I may have forgotten a few, but I don’t need any fingers to count the number of these that we’ve won. I think a trend is emerging.

  12. On David Silverman’s interview on Godless Spellchecker’s podcast he said all conventions would be held in the south while he was president because of all the people who have to keep their atheism a secret and never get to meet another atheist. He talked about how many are moved to tears being able to attend.

    1. Yeah I’m sure they can feel very lonely and isolated as many keep quiet about it fearing retribution especially toward their families.

  14. Buy a copy of WEIT (on sale at the venue and in fine bookstores everywhere), and say “Felis silvestris lybica,” you will get a cat drawn in it. However, I have the feeling that I have few readers in this area!

    So, the cat-drawing pen was drained dry?

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