Saturday: Hili dialogue

January 9, 2016 • 6:00 am
After a week of almost no sun, Chicago begins yet another four days of gray, dreary weather, with rain or snow today and Monday, highs near the freezing point, and no sun till Tuesday. On this day in 1916, the bloody battle of Gallipoli ended with a Turkish victory, bringing glory and later the governance of Turkey to Kemal Atatürk, a secularist whose work is sadly now being undone by the odious Tayyip Erdogan.  On this day in 1908, author, philosopher, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir was born, an event celebrated in most of the Northern Hemisphere with a Google Doodle (but, as the next post shows, the U.S. gets butterflies). She’s buried in a double grave with her lover Jean-Paul Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery, where I’ve seen the plot. Pictures of the Doodle and the gravesite are below. Also on January 9 (1922), Har Gobind Khorana was born, later to win a Nobel Prize for helping decipher the genetic code. You can read about his work in Matthew Cobb’s spellbinding new book, Life’s Greatest Secret. In 1950, only eleven days after my own day of birth, Alec Jeffries, developer of DNA fingerprinting, was born. And, on this day in 1324, Marco Polo died at the age of seventy. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili still cannot find the Door Into Summer;
Hili: Look, the snow is also on this side of the house.
A: I expected that much.
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In Polish:

Hili: Patrz, z tej strony domu też jest śnieg.
Ja: Tego się spodziewałem.

The Beauvoir Doodle and her burial plot with Sartre:

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Sartre+Beauvoir_grave

Further lagniappe: a cartoon on cat breeds from Facebook (h/t reader Taskin):

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5 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  3. I woke up in in the middle of the night with a brutal migraine. I took medication but now my neck muscles are strangling me and even my hands hurt — the pressure really dropped with the rain last night!

    My great great grandfather fought with the ANZACs at Gallipoli. He was injured and sent home from there.

  5. That’s so funny- at our house Thomas the cat comes in from the cold and rushes to the back- wants to check it out there too but then complains. As if: “Surely it can’t be cold on both sides of the house?”

    Also in the cold will insist he wants out but clearly wants us to go with him- as if we can somehow make it more temperate. Or misery loves company?

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