*Ø* Blogmanac October 4 | So, Pip, what's on today?

Jejunium Cereris, Fast of Ceres, ancient Rome
This Roman holiday was propitiatory, begun in 191 BCE after a series of disasters. Originally held every four years, by the reign of Augustus it was celebrated annually. Besides fasting, celebrants wore garlands in the Greek fashion. This holiday has certain similarities to the Greek holiday of Thesmophoria which also honored the grain goddess.
Blackburn, Bonnie & Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Oxford Companion to the Year, Oxford University Press 1999 Source: School of the Seasons

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Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars,
In the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair …
Praised be You my Lord through our Sister,
Mother Earth
who sustains and governs us,
producing varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs.
St Francis of Assisi, from Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
St Francis of Assisi

Feast day of St Francis of Assisi
Born the son of a wealthy merchant, Francis’s father rejected him for giving generously to Assisi's poor. The Portiuncula, his small chapel, soon became thronged with disciples. Francis of Assisi ecame famous for his love of nature, preaching even to birds. His mendicant friars lived in extreme poverty. He was canonised 1228.

His father had him beaten and fettered because he was giving everything away to the poor. He took Francis before the bishop, whereupon Francis renounced all his rights of ownership and inheritance, and stripped off his clothes as a sign of his taking up of poverty.

If any part of his habit was too soft, he darned it with pack-thread. He slept sitting on the ground. He rarely ate cooked food, and when he did, he sprinkled it with ashes. Yet he disappproved of indiscreet or insincere austerity. He averted his eyes from women, and hardly knew any by sight. He cried copiously and nearly went blind from tears. In one of his hymns, he spoke of his brother the Sun, his sister the Moon, his brother the Wind, his sister the Water. When dying, he said, "Welcome, sister Death". Leo, his secretary, said that he saw the saint levitate while praying. He had the stigmata; the wounds from his hands, feet and sides, though he at first tried to conceal them, wrought miracles. Pope Alexander IV publicly declared that he had seen the stigmata.

Francis is the patron saint of Italy, Italian merchants (due to his family's business), animals, animal welfare societies, ecology, and ecologists.

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1895 Joseph Francis ‘Buster’ Keaton, American comic actor, director and screenwriter (The Navigator; The General)

How Joseph Francis became ‘Buster’
As a six-month-old baby, Joseph Francis Keaton fell down the staircase at the theatrical boarding house where his parents were staying. The accident was witnessed by an unknown by aspiring young magician and 'escapologist', Erich Weiss, who went by the stage name Hary Houdini.

Rushing over to the baby Keaton, Houdini found little Joe unharmed and actually laughing. Houdini told the Keatons, “That’s some buster your baby took”. The name stuck fast.

Waiting for Buster
Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot with Buster Keaton in mind.

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1903 Otto Weininger took his own life, aged only 23.

“Otto Weininger's extraordinary life culminated in the publication of his timeless work Sex and Character. Soon after the publication he went to Italy to await results. There appeared to be none, and during the next four months an intellectual malady, described by his friends as "a too grave sense of responsibility," became acute. On October 4, 1903, at the age of 23, he took his own life.

"Sex and Character began to sell. It ran through printing after printing. It was translated into innumerable languages, and in a few years his publishers could declare with no more than pardonable exaggeration that no scientific book in the whole history of books had ever a greater success." Source

Weininger aphorisms