Saturday: Hili dialogue

October 21, 2017 • 7:04 am

Good morning on Saturday, October 21, 2017. It’s going to be another beautiful day in Cambridge, even though back in Chicago the Cubs, after last year’s Moment of Glory, have resumed their status as Perennial Losers. But there’s one down side: it’s National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day: a travesty of a food if ever there was one. Give me a plain cheesecake with a graham cracker crust or, if necessary, a bit of cherry topping. The addition of pumpkin turns it into the dessert equivalent of the yuppie’s dream: a Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice latte. I eschew all pumpkin-flavored cheesecake. In the Bahá’i faith, today celebrates the birth of the Báb.

On this day in 1520, Ferdinand Magellan discovered the Strait at the tip of South America that bears his name. On October 21, 1805, Lord Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar but lost his life. On this day in 1879, Thomas Edison applied for a patent on his incandescent electric light bulb. In 1945, the women of France were finally allowed to vote (1945!). And on this day in 1983, according to Wikipedia, “The metre [was] defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.”

Notables born on this day include Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772), Alfred Nobel (1833). Oswald Avery (1877), George Solti (1912), Martin Gardner (1914), Ursula Le Guin (1929), Carrie Fisher (1956), and Kim Kardashian (1980).

Those who died on this day include Horatio Nelson (1805; see above) and Jack Kerouac (1969). Here are two of my literary/life heroes: Kerouac (right) and Neal Cassady (left), who appears as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s great novel On the Road. Cassady was also the driver of the “Furthur” bus for the Merry Pranksters’ cross-country trip described in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This is a famous photo known to all Kerouac fans.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants to run for Leader of the World, though no such position exists. We could be sure, though, that were she elected we’d all be required to take mandatory naps:
Hili: The world needs a new leader.
A: Are you going to run?
Hili: It’s too early to say.

In Polish:

Hili: Świat potrzebuje nowego przywódcy.
Ja: Będziesz kandydować?
Hili: Jeszcze za wcześnie, żeby coś powiedzieć.

Out in Winnipeg, Gus and his staff had a nice day outside before the winter snows begin. Naps were also involved. His staff reports:

It was a beautiful fall day today, I think we broke a record at 25°C.

A tweet from reader Barry (with a video):

Three tweets found by our own Twitter Addict, Matthew Cobb; be sure to watch the videos in the first two!

Check out the bouncy bobkittens!

How many fox kits does this vixen have? What a nutritional load that is!

And more mammalian fitness on display:

11 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Neal Cassady was the inspiration for the “Ray Hicks” character in Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers (the character played by Nick Nolte in the movie Who’ll Stop the Rain. Like Cassady, Hicks dies while hiking alongside railroad tracks in the desert.)

    Ken Kesey (a fellow fellow of Stone’s in Wallace Stegner’s writing program at Stanford) also paid homage to Cassady after the latter’s death, in the short story à clef “The Day After Superman Died.”

    1. I always thought the circumstances of Cassady’s death (somewhere in Mexico, right?) was a mystery.

      Also immortalized in the Grateful Dead’s “The Other One”…Cowboy Neal! (the bus driver).

  3. Mandatory naps, fine, but if Hili were the leader of the world, we’d all have to chow down on kibble and use a litter box.

  8. Hili: The world needs a new leader.
    A: Are you going to run?

    Hili doesn’t run unless she wants to. She’s got humans to run around for her. A stately procession towards power would be about right.
    Trump had better clean the chair properly before vacating it.

    1. Dizzy used to run for President, but had to stop after adopting the Baha’i religion. They don’t acknowledge borders between nations.

      “This doesn’t prevent me from trying to rule the World”, Dizzy commented.

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