Dia de Los Muertes

Today is Thursday, 1 November 2007.

“Hear that lonesome whistle blow … “

Ain’t that a caution: HH lives in earshot of that archetypical American icon, a railroad line, and just heard, at 5.43 AM CDT, a couple of toots.

Which is HH’s way of sidling up edgewise to a great sorrow, which he discovered a few minutes ago, when he retrieved the local newspaper from the porch: Washoe is dead.

From Nicholas K. Geranios, AP-Spokane, Wash. this date: “Washoe, a female chimpanzee believed to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died of natural causes at the research institute where she was kept”.

Ferocious editorial comment: AP copy-editor, everlasting shame upon thee, for allowing “kept”, rather than “lived”.

Washoe was about 40.

Pity the fools, such as S--- P---, whose name I will not write, who, in their species bigotry, deny possibility and fact that, if consciousness is deemed to reside in Dick Cheney, consciousness is not also in my dog, Chopin.

Sorrow also for Tulsa, OK, chef, Paul Caplinger, of The Chalkboard, passed in his sleep the past Sunday morning, aged 48.