Sunday, October 26, 2025
1881 The Earp brothers faced off against the Clanton-McLaury gang in a legendary shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.
1918 Baronet Cecil Chubb, the last private owner of Stonehenge, gifted it to the British people. Three years earlier, on a whim, he paid £6,600 for the ramshackle megalith at auction. His wife, who had sent him to buy dining chairs, was not pleased.
In bed at 10, up at 5:50. Very painful leg/ankle when standing, painful right hand, even wearing an arthritis glove. 45/38/55
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 7:10 a.m. Doxycycline at 6:10 a.m. and 5:10 p.m.
Photos from Istanbul from Sarah.
My FB note accompanying Roger Rosenblatt's NYTimes op-ed "I Don’t Fear Winter, and I Don’t Regret Spring, Oct. 26, 2025
Unlike my usual Jeremiah-like postings, I share this happy article by a happy man in his happy 80s. There is a lot of truth and wisdom in it. Although I hardly find the mid-80s quite as blissful as the author does, I thought it might be helpful to at least someone if I seconded his endorsement of poetry as a worthwhile friend of the aged. Of all the treasures that were shared with me by my teachers during 19 years of formal education, the only one that has stuck with me through all my years is an appreciation for poetry. No, not poetry generally, so much of which is so dense and opaque as to be indecipherable, but the poetry that delights me, or comforts me, or stings me, that hits me where it hurts. Which poems satisfy those criteria are (is?) unique to each of us, but they are worth searching for, remembering, and going back to for company. One advantage of having a swag bag of favorite old poems is that one can still turn to it when failing eyesight, declining short-term memory, and diminished energy rule out long reads, novels, etc. They are long gone now, but I give a warm shoutout to Brothers Birmingham and Coogan at Leo High School, and to John Pick, Roger Parr, and Father Bruckner at Marquette University, who gave me gifts that I barely appreciated at the time but now hold and treasure.
I love Halloween, not the adult Halloween party stuff and not the front yards decorated with skeletons and spooky stuff, but the kids out in their costumes, especially the little kids accompanied by one or both parents, trick or treating. For some reason, Geri is turned off by it; I'm the opposite. It warms my old heart to see these children. I wish for nothing but good for them, though my heart aches for them, considering the world my generation is leaving for them. The photo is of our neighbors from a few doors down Wakefield and their daughter trick or treating back in 2022.
A Book Forged in Hell by UW professor Steven Nadler. I'm 50 pages into this book about the history around the publication of Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I'm enjoying it greatly, even the rather esoteric history about the relationship between civil and religious authorities in 17th 17th-century Netherlands. I am reading it mainly, though, for a better understanding of Spinoza's theories about God, religions, the Bible, and the clergy.
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