Respects

This is the 953rd anniversary of the day on which William set sail to conquer the British Isles, September 27, 1066.

I grudgingly applaud the move. Residual self-interest tips me.

Thanks Comey

It was one year ago today that James Comey took it on himself to effectively (very effectively) swing the presidential election to Donald J. Trump. Thanks, Comey.

Lotta Shaking

Here are 40 remarkable photos of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco, curated by Alan Taylor at the Atlantic. As of April 18, 110 years have passed now since that day.

All of my grandparents were on the far end of the Mission District, a mile south of the furthest reach of the fire that levelled much of San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake. As for the earthquake, one grandmother never spoke of it, and the other always called it "The Fire," preferring, like so many who lived through it, to memorialize the enormity with that all-consuming word instead of the other.

Five-Oh

Today, December 4, marks the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of the newly-named Grateful Dead music band. They had been the Warlocks, notionally, for awhile, but, rebranded, went on to a nicely achieved career in music.

Grateful Dead Blues For Allah, Stained Glass, installed in the Grateful Dead Archive exhibit space, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz

The Return of Robert F. Kennedy

Forty years gone, a slideshow of photos of folks gathered along the route as the train carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy from New York to Arlington Cemetery in Washington passed by.

Happy Rohatsu

Rohatsu is what the zen tradition calls Bodhi Day, the day Buddha achieved whatever enlightenment is. In Japanese, Rohatsu means the eighth day of the twelfth month.

Hundreds of years passed and people began writing down what the Buddha might have said at that tremendous moment, just sitting there, had he in fact said anything at all.

Siddhartha looked at the planet Venus in the morning sky on the day following one week's steady samadhi, and there he was, enlightened, Buddha.

One year ago today my father celebrated his last birthday. He was 89 that day, and gone in less than a month.

For Roman Catholics like my father, December 8 marks the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, mother of God. Although this feast is often confused even in the minds of nominal Catholics with the time God had his way with Mary and they conceived Jesus, it is not that conception, but her own conception that is being celebrated here. Notwithstanding the puissance of the godfucking of Mary that made Jesus, her own parent's fucking stands as the greatest, most thoroughgoing and holy human-on-human fuck of all time, producing as it did, according Catholic dogma, by the grace of god, the unblemished vessel of Mary herself, a fuck fully worthy of yearly commemoration.

My father enjoyed reminding everyone that kids got the day off from Catholic school on his birthday.

It Be Talk like a Pirate Day, Boy-o

From Language Log (and what more appropriate place to host a longterm discussion of talking like a pirate, for that matter), incited by today's annual occurrence of Talk Like a Pirate Day, this nice image, created by someone who left it out in the open on the internet anonymously some years ago:



On this day twenty-six years ago, with a full-throated "Arrrrrrrrrrrr!" I swung down on a rope from the highest yardarm in the British Navy, grabbed up the prized damsel in my free arm, and pirated her away with me. That would be the pirate way of putting it, I suppose, endorsed by the thinking like a pirate that all this talking like a pirate on this day encourages. For certain values of Arrrr, is what I'm saying, it was just like that, matey.

I got married on this day twenty-six years ago, though I can't square the pirate way of putting it with the wedding day itself, which in honest haze of memory I recall engaging with in a hyperreal daze, stunned by the magnitude of all the great yet still tentative possibilities opened up by taking my part in the act on that day.

Right there in the open field of Aptos Village Park, in front of all the people who cared to see it done, I acted the approved part of the dazed groom. There was little of the swagger, let alone the swinging down on a rope, required of buccaneers from me on that day, as I recall.

Today, twenty-six years on, we're heading over to Monterey to see our special friends the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Happy Anniversay, dear.