Welcome to Friday, October 2, 2026. We’ll have a shortened Hili dialogue today as I was at the doc’s yesterday, having my retinas inspected nine days after cataract surgery. And the news is very good: my operated-on right eye is healing well, with the hemorrhage decreasing in size, and it should be gone in 1-3 months. In the meantime, I have no symptoms except EYE PAIN since they not only created an incision on the right side of my right eye during the cataract operation, but, in the frantic period thereafter when the eye pressure skyrocketed, the opthamologist POKED THREE HOLES IN MY EYEBALL with tweezers. And oy, did that hurt! The pain comes when I look down and the four wounds make contact with my lower eyelid.
But still: I’m a very lucky boy as this rare occurrence of a hemorrhage (1/1000 at most) could have been much worse. I also found out that while I had the impression that the hemorrhage was small, in fact it covered 25% of the inside of my eyeball. But it did not encroach on the crucial central area of vision, the macula.
Enough about my medical issues. It’s October and I missed putting up the month’s painting from the 15th century manuscript the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Here it is: none other than the Louvre itself, which of course used to be a palace surrounded by country.. Celtic Studies Resources describes the painting:
In this calendar image for the month of October from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (f. 10v) the labor of the month is sowing the winter grain. This is one of the images that was left uncompleted when Jean Duc de Berry died in 1416. The original artists responsible for most of the image in this book of hours, the Limbourg brothers, also died.
The manuscript passed to King Charles VII, the Duke’s brother, and the image for the October calendar was finished by another artist.
In the warmer parts of Europe, the wine regions, October marked the month when the grapes harvested in September were put into barrels for aging. In the regions less friendly to grapes, October’s labor is sowing the winter grain, or sometimes, plowing.
As it says in the medieval lyric listing the labors of the month “And here I sawe my whete so rede” (Bodleian MS. Digby 88).
In the background, you can see the Louvre; this Parisian palace was built by the Duke’s older brother, King Charles V. The medieval Louvre was substantially changed by successive royal owners; here’s a reconstruction showing what we think it looked like in the 15th century. The Très Riches Hours calendar image shows three central towers. Between the three central towers are two balconies, or brattices, each pierced by three windows from which, during a siege, defenders could hurl boing water or hot oil on to the attackers below.
Beneath the towers and the central donjon of the the Louvre, you can see a small door that opens in the thick wall, exiting on to the banks of the Seine. People chat in a small group right at the door. A set of steps leads down to the Seine, where women do their laundry by beating it with a stick, near a small boat that’s moored. To the right, in front of one of the central towers, two dogs play. There’s a second set of stairs down to the Seine, and three more boats are tied up.
In the central scene below the Louvre and the river, a man in red mounted on a horse drags a harrow across the field. The wooden harrow is weighted with a rock. The weight of the rock forces the tines of harrow into the earth. As the horse drags the harrow along, the tines break up the dirt clods. This is particularly useful after plowing since the harrow helps cover the previously sown seeds as it smooths the soil. Beyond the mounted rider, in the central part of the image, there’s a field that’s already been sown with seeds and a scarecrow dressed as an archer. The strings tied with rags that criss-cross the field around the scarecrow are meant, like the archer scarecrow, to ward off marauding birds.
To the right in the front of the image, a peasant dressed in blue scatters seeds, hand-sowing, while magpies (the black-and-white birds) and crows devour the freshly sown (but not yet covered by the harrow) seeds. Notice the naturalistic detail of the footprints left in the soft earth as the seed-sower progresses along the row. Those footprints, like the shadow cast by the scarecrow, the reflections cast by the boats, or the vaporized breath and the smoke from the chimney in the image for February are other early examples from the Très Riches Heurs of the artists using realistic, technical, details in European art of the Middle ages.
And of course yesterday I missed Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Hymn to October, which I always put up on October 1. Here it is. from his novel Of Time and the River:
Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big that you cannot say that the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails, just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up; the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling upon you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun so that you cannot say that sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves. .
October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.
The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all: the sweat, the labor, and the plow is over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf, smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.
Wolfe in 1937 (he died of TB in the next year only 38 years old):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Although I’ve reserved judgment about the reason the copilot tried to take down a FlyDubai plane headed for Israel, it’s starting to look more like terrorism might be the reason.
The Omani copilot who stabbed the pilot on the flydubai flight yesterday discussed killing Jews on social media, an Israeli official tells The Times of Israel.
The official adds that the attacker asked the Emirati crew members to kill him, citing conversations with passengers on the flight.
“This was a person who was willing to commit suicide,” says the official. “His social media accounts [say] clearly that he has been radicalized into jihadist ideology. He talks about killing Jews.”
“We can’t say for sure until the investigation’s over,” the official continues, “but it certainly seems like he was a suicide actor who was probably going to try to down that plane.”
“Our understanding is he’s going to be transferred to the UAE,” the official continues. “We will be part of that investigation.”
In the meantime, Israel is doing its own internal investigation and making changes to security procedures, says the official.
Ergo it might have been a suicide attempt and an attempt to kill Jews. We don’t know now, and perhaps we never will.
*And if you are pleased that 200 Jews did not die in the flydubai hijacking the other day, and have any sympathy for Israel you will like the Substack piece by Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.: “The meaning of FZ 1073″ (h/t Bat):
, . .Israel’s response to October 7, however, unique in the contemporary world, has not been cost-free. Our people remain agonizingly divided over which of our leaders bore responsibility for that morning’s failure and for decisions made in the subsequent war. A no less bitter schism separates those who are willing to fight from those who, avowedly for religious reasons, are not. Some 924 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 8, and thousands physically and emotionally wounded.
And yet, we keep fighting. We will defend ourselves in the court of international law, we will stand up for truth in the media. We will battle Hamas and Hezbollah again as the need arises, and mount crippling operations against Iran should America resume the war. Missiles may once again smash into our neighborhoods, schools and businesses may close, and the world will continue condemning us for doing what so much of it no longer has the will to do—for defending our homes and families. We will celebrate births, bar mitzvahs, and weddings, and pioneer technologies that benefit humankind. We will do all of this not because, it is often stated, we have nowhere else to go, but because of who we are. We, the Jewish people, are indomitable.
We are the people who, for nearly two thousand years, never forfeited our hope of returning to our ancestral homeland. The people who, a mere three years after the Holocaust, declared our independence in that land and thwarted successive enemy efforts to destroy us. We are the people who, despite grave disagreements between religious and secular, right-wing and left, Ashkenazi and Mizrachi, geographical periphery and center, still coheres. We are a people that, less than a month from now, will go to the polls, demonstrating once again our uniqueness as one of the very few nations never to have known a moment of non-democratic governance.
That, then, is the meaning of FlyDubai Flight FZ1073. While their airliner plunged nearly 20,000 feet in under two minutes and their courageous wounded pilot struggled to open the cockpit door, ordinary Israelis overcame paralyzing uncertainty and rushed to the front of the plane. There, regular citizens—not commandos, not armed air marshals—with their bare hands and headphone wires, disarmed, subdued, and bound the co-pilot suspected of trying to kill everyone on board precisely because most of them were Israelis. Were Jews. And once the danger passed, the Jews of FZ1073 didn’t wallow, didn’t shrink, but instead broke into song. They sang words of the late 18th and early 19th-century Hasidic genius, Rabbi Nahman—“All the world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to fear”—and “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel live.
FZ1073 has a message for the world. For the terrorists striving to take innumerable Israeli lives and make the survivors’ lives unbearable—the message is that your love of death will never diminish our love of life nor make us any less determined to defend it. For the European leaders who prefer to boycott Israeli Jews rather than confront the extremists who are conquering their countries from within. FZ1073 stands as an example of what a proud, strong, and self-respecting people can still accomplish. And for Israelis soon to celebrate the completion of the yearly Torah readings—Simchat Torah—and commemorate the anniversary of October 7, FZ1073 reminds us of who we are, what we stand for, and what we are willing to do to remain Israelis. The sheer heroism displayed by the Israeli passengers of FZ1073 shows why nothing can ever defeat us.
I for one hope that he’s right.
*The governor of Tennessee has decided to suspend executions in his state after the botched attempt to execute a woman via lethal injection.
Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman who was set to be executed on Wednesday, survived two doses of a lethal drug that had been administered, according to her lawyers.
Ms. Pike, who was convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate, is the only woman on death row in Tennessee. Before the failed attempt to put her to death, she was set to become the first woman to be executed in the state in more than 200 years.
Ms. Pike was in “critical condition, receiving life-saving care” on Thursday afternoon, one of her lawyers said.
It was not immediately clear what went wrong with the administration of the lethal drug on Wednesday night.
Ms. Pike’s lawyers said that while two syringes of pentobarbital had been administered, she did not lose consciousness. She still had a heartbeat, they said, and was audibly snoring.
. . . The Tennessee Department of Correction later said Ms. Pike had been taken to an off-site medical facility.
This was the second time this year that Tennessee had struggled to administer a lethal injection. In May, the state called off an execution because staff members could not find a vein to administer lethal drugs.
. . .The failed execution on Wednesday night was the state’s second bungled death penalty attempt this year, and Mr. Lee on Thursday said he was suspending executions — including Ms. Pike’s — to allow an independent review.
Lawyers for Ms. Pike said that did not go far enough, and urged Mr. Lee to take her off death row. “This is awful, and this kind of thing should never happen again,” said one of her lawyers, Randy Spivey.
Mr. Lee previously denied a similar request and his office did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, he said the failed execution “shouldn’t have happened.” He added, “We should find out what happened and make those changes necessary to do what the people of this state want done.”
. . . The death row inmate Christa Pike was in critical condition and receiving medical care, her lawyers said Thursday, a day after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her. They called for Gov. Bill Lee to reduce her sentence to life in prison, calling the botched attempt to end her life with two doses of pentobarbital “cruel and torturous.”
*The dude in charge of the Eiffel Tower has stepped down after it was revealed that he removed women staff from the tourist magnet during a visit from an apparently misogynistic Hindu group (h/t: Ginger K).
The operating company that runs the Eiffel Tower said Tuesday its chief would step down at the end of this year in the wake of a controversy over the removal of women staff during a visit by a Hindu religious group.
Patrick Branco Ruivo, who has been director general of the Paris landmark since 2018, would leave his job at the end of the year after an internal probe revealed that “operational flaws and shortcomings” in organising the visit led to the “unacceptable” removal of women staff, the company SETE said in a statement.
The removal of women staff during a visit by the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) spiritual movement on September 5 prompted a staff walkout and the closure of the monument for a day, as well as an outcry across political spectrum in France which prizes secularism and gender equality.
At the time, SETE acknowledged the Hindu delegation had requested the visit be organised so as to limit “interactions with women” and said that “these conditions should not have been accepted”.
. . .The Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Gregoire, had lambasted the move to remove women staff as an “absurd, unjust and unacceptable decision” and ordered two separate probes.
The mayor Tuesday “acknowledged Patrick Branco Ruivo’s responsible decision” and commended “his commitment to the Eiffel Tower and SETE” since his appointment in late 2018, a person close to him told AFP, asking not to be named,
Yay for the French! There’s not even a conflict of rights here: the Hindu delegation had no right to have an environment free from women, though the women had a right to be on the job. They should light up the Eiffel Tower for one night in purple, white, and green: the colors of the feminist movement.
*The judge in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial refused to declare the defendant not guilty after the defense argued that there was no proof that Clancy in fact killed her three children:
The judge in the Lindsay Clancy murder case on Thursday refused to declare her not guilty, turning down a defense motion that had argued there wasn’t enough evidence to prove she was responsible for killing her three children.
During Clancy’s first trial, which ended Sept. 4 with a deadlocked jury, her defense argued that she was not criminally responsible because of a mental disease, specifically a rare condition called postpartum psychosis. As such, the defense didn’t dispute that the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse carried out the killings at her family’s Massachusetts home in 2023.
However, in a hearing earlier this week, Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington tried to persuade the judge that prosecutors had not offered any proof that Clancy did it. Prosecutors argued there was plenty of evidence, calling Reddington’s claim “laughable.”
Prosecutors have yet to decide whether they will put the case in front of a jury for a second time. They could choose to retry her on first-degree murder charges or seek to try her only on lesser charges, including second-degree murder or manslaughter, or drop the case entirely.
In his ruling Thursday, Judge William Sullivan noted that for the purposes of his decision, he was required to analyze the evidence in the light most favorable to prosecutors — and that it was up to the jury, not the judge, to decide whether to believe expert witnesses for the defense who testified that Clancy was not responsible for her actions because of mental illness.
“There was evidence introduced, both physical and circumstantial, that would permit a rational trier of fact to find beyond a reasonable doubt the elements of the charge of murder,” Sullivan wrote.
Clancy admitted she killed her kids in order to plead “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but she never did so on the stand. Here, from Grok, is the evidence that she did the deed:
- “Medical examiner findings of asphyxia/strangulation as the cause of death for all three children, with ligature or manual compression marks consistent with intentional constriction of the neck rather than accidental injury or natural causes.
- The children were discovered in the basement with exercise bands or similar items nearby that investigators linked to the mechanism of strangulation; the scene showed no signs of forced entry or third-party involvement.
- Lindsay Clancy was the only adult present with the children during the relevant period. Her husband had left the house earlier that day at her request (she had asked him to pick up takeout and medication).
- After the jump, while hospitalized and before formal charges, she made statements to police and medical staff acknowledging that she had harmed the children. Those statements have been referenced in court proceedings, though their precise admissibility and weight remain subject to litigation given her injuries and mental state.
- Digital and physical evidence recovered from the home (including her phone and notes) has been described in filings as reflecting planning or awareness in the hours beforehand, alongside a documented history of postpartum mental-health treatment.”
This defense maneuver is just that—a ploy—and won’t fly. If there is a retrial and she’s declared “not guilty by reason of insanity”, she will still be committed to a psychiatric facility (this will be the case, I think, even if they don’t try her again. That, however, might be a much shorter period that a sentence of guilty for first- or second-degree murder.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is referring to Andrzej’s new book (English title: The Blue Stone of Sisyphus),with the book launch party having taken place in Dobrzyn last evening. Here’s the book:
Hili: Fascinating.
Sharon: What’s there?
Hili: No idea. Some Sisyphus is trying to push a pebble up through the ground.
In Polish:
Hili: To fascynujące.
Szaron: Co tam jest?
Hili: Nie wiem, jakiś Syzyf wypycha kamyk spod ziemi.
*******************
From Give Me A Sign:
From Meow Incorporated:
From Masih: Two Iranian protestors were hanged yesterday. The charge:
Another morning, another gallows in Iran.💔
The Islamic Republic executed Ali Hemmati Sistani and Majid Nikandish at dawn today in Mashhad. Majid was just 25 years old. Ali was married and a father of two. Both were arrested during the January 2026 protests and sentenced to… pic.twitter.com/9QIl6OjiMC
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 30, 2026
From Luana; yet another professor who thinks colleges need to revert to all-oral testing along Socratic lines:
Another professor suggests a return to Socrates in the age of AI:
“Implementing AI-detection software, blue books and oral exams” addresses “only symptoms of the transformation of the university we are seeing in real time. The challenge is to identify that transformation and… pic.twitter.com/K2IxgB9Hfr
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 30, 2026
From Bryan; apparently UK television is a lot like this:
Most TV is just this now. pic.twitter.com/CoBVpb23Dm
— Michael Spicer (@MrMichaelSpicer) September 30, 2026
From Malcolm; proof of a non-flat Earth:
The proof Earth isn’t flat pic.twitter.com/E81S7enGa2
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 29, 2026
One from my feed: a hypocrite:
🚨 At tonight’s Harvard Medical School event, artist-in-residence Roxane Gay responded to a question about the health insurance industry with “Free Luigi.”
Minutes earlier, Gay admitted she uses concierge medicine after deciding to “throw money at this problem” and “buy my way… pic.twitter.com/i8EBRhPopA
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) October 1, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was ten years old. https://t.co/trGGeD7855
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 2, 2026
Two from Doctor Cobb. First, a fantastic photo. It took the photographer six years to get the conditions right; read about that here .It’s an amazing photo!
In this splendid photo from Valerio Minato three wonders were captured in a single shot:- the Basilica of Superga, located near Turin (Italy)- the Monviso, the highest mountain of the Cottian Alps- the setting Moon, captured in a crescent phase➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap23122…🔭 🧪 #sciart1/2
This has got to be a typo!
when your country's new accord on “super intelligence” misspells the country's name
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2026-09-30T18:55:43.265Z
‘Today’s music: “Rockin’ Chair” with trumpet solo by Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa’s band. When I first heard this solo by “Little Jazz,” as Eldridge was called, I was mesmerized. Wikipedia gives the details:
One of Eldridge’s best known recorded solos is on a rendition of Hoagy Carmichael‘s tune, “Rockin’ Chair”, arranged by Benny Carter as something like a concerto for Eldridge.Jazz historian Gunther Schuller referred to Eldridge’s solo on “Rockin’ Chair” as “a strong and at times tremendously moving performance”, although he disapproved of the “opening and closing cadenzas, the latter unforgivably aping the corniest of operatic cadenza traditions.” Critic and author Dave Oliphant describes Eldridge’s unique tone on “Rockin’ Chair” as “a raspy, buzzy tone, which enormously heightens his playing’s intensity, emotionally and dynamically” and writes that it “was also meant to hurt a little, to be disturbing, to express unfathomable stress.”
This is jazz at its best. (I do agree that the final cadenza is a bit out of place.)
I have always loved that photo of Malgorzata and Andrzej.
There is an interesting speculative (for now) analysis of the published ads-b data, video and passenger commentary, and basic aircraft dynamics in a 16-minute video on the Flying for Money website at url
He engages in some political analysis between 1:30 and 4:30 which I found interesting, and the actual flight data analysis begins around 4:28.
I looked for a cat. There’s a cat in the fridge.
Wowww – PCC(E) – great great news to hear – so glad the eye is healing.