Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon lagniappe)

November 18, 2015 • 4:52 am

It’s Wednesday, it’s going to rain again, and my office ceiling has sprung a leak, so that I must work with a slowly-filling bucket on the floor beside me. And it’s going to rain every day until Friday, with a 70% chance of SNOW on Saturday. Why did I think that we might miss winter this year? On this day in 1928, when my late father was 10 years old, Walt Disney released Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon with fully synchronized sound. I’ve seen it, and its protagonist, a ratlike Mickey Mouse, had not yet undergone the process of temporal neoteny described in Steve Gould’s piece, “A biological homage to Mickey Mouse” (read it!) That piece, and Gould’s lament about shrinking of candy bars, “Phyletic size decrease in Hershey Bars” (read it!) are his two best Natural History essays on popular culture.  But I digress. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is warming up Andrzej’s chair. Isn’t she cute?

A: May I sit on this chair?
Hili: Of course, I’m waiting for you.

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In Polish:
Ja: Czy mogę usiąść na tym krześle?
Hili: Oczywiście, czekam na ciebie.

*******

And in Wroclawek, Leon is jealous of Elzbieta’s shirt:

Leon: Let’s have a serious talk. Who is this creature on your top?

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20 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon lagniappe)”

  1. Why stay in cold Chicago now that you are retired? You could be lovely Santa Fe! Good year round climate.

    1. Retirement home for Emeritus Professors – surely Florida?!

      Dead right on chocolate bars & it continues. Costa have done it with their sweet cakes etc but as there is no weight as it is off the shelf & unwrapped, only those who have one regularly notice. Price remains steady of course but they make savings!

    3. Currently Santa Fe is colder than NY or Chicago. Are you sure you don’t mean Santa Rosa, CA?

      1. Being a Londoner I recommended Santa Fe despite not knowing anything about it because I’d heard it was nice from Douglas Adams who loved the place. Also, I didn’t mean to imply that PCCE go into a retirement home somewhere warm. Just to go and live somewhere warm!

        1. In that case you are probably forgiven. 😉

          Actually, as a rule Santa Fe, NM is very much warmer than NY or Chicago. It just happens to be a bit cooler this week. Now, we can go back to what we were doing.

  4. Leon is going to prevent Elzbieta from reading her book until he gets an answer! Both cats are indeed very cute this morning.

    1. You beat me to that one. Soon as you open a book it is sat upon.

      I wonder if some of the people here ever sleep. I’m pretty sure PCC does not.

  7. A terrible day in history, indeed…copyright laws will forevermore be adjusted such that Steamboat Willie is never ever released into the public domain. Think about that for a moment…Steamboat Willie is 87 years old. Disney couldn’t have become the success it was without a lot of stuff in the public domain that dates to well after 1841, 87 years before Steamboat Willie. That’s the real theft of intellectual property: the public domain has been stolen, in its entirety, from the public.

    As to weather…I’d suggest Arizona, but, despite our perfectly clear skies right now, it was a bone-chilling 40°F at dawn and we’ll be lucky if it makes it up to 68°F by midafternoon. But at least this cold snap is short-lived…should be back to non-arctic conditions later in the week, with it finally thawing out to about 80°F by Saturday afternoon.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go boil some more water to try to ward off the hypothermia….

    b&

  8. I promptly downloaded those two Gould pieces. Thanks! I will read them later. (I have to head off to work in a moment.)

  9. Gould’s pieces is my entry to xkcd’s genetics comic. He is killing the gene sequence = ‘source code’ nonsense, and I like his description:

    “DNA is the result of the most aggressive optimization process in the universe, running in parallel at every level, in every living thing, for four billion years.”

    And the result was the cute Princess of Poland.

  11. I was reading an update on the ongoing El Niño today; it indicated that the Northeast (and perhaps the Plains states) would have warmer than usual weather this year. But warmer than usual probably does not equal warm.

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