Friday: Hili dialogue

April 1, 2016 • 6:00 am

by Grania

Friday at last, thank goodness! And a happy Spaghetti Tree Day. Back in 1957 the BBC perpetrated one of the first April Fools’ jokes that went viral thanks to television. Google apparently tried an April Fool’s prank this morning with a  Gmail Minion mic drop gif (pronounced …) but pulled the stunt when people complained. Consider yourself warned – today is that day when otherwise sensible people come up with silly pranks and stunts. Let’s be skeptical out there today.

Over in Poland Hili and Cyrus are having serious discussions again. I suspect that Hili subscribes to the theory “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine too”.

Hili: Look, only my forepaws are on your half of the bed.
Cyrus: This whole bed is mine.
Hili: That’s just a theory.

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In Polish:

Hili: Patrz, mam tylko przednie łapki na twojej połowie materaca.
Cyrus: Ten materac jest cały mój.
Hili: To jest tylko teoria.

Leon on the other hand is thinking of literary things.

Leon: I’m preparing the cover for “The Catcher in the Rye”.

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As a lagniappe, you can watch the old BBC April Fool’s broadcast here, complete with 1950s BBC accents and everything.

From Jerry: I’ve just arrived back at Bhubaneswar from Bhitarkanika National Park on the coast, where we were allowed to stay in a Forest Guest House of the National Park (thanks to my kind hosts at the Life Sciences Institute), and saw chital (spotted deer), lots of monkeys, and several HUGE saltwater crocodiles lazing on the banks (it’s hot now, so they spend most of their time in the water). Here’s one of the big salties I saw at about 7 a.m. More on the park and animals later. (I also saw scat from a leopard cat.)

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And some lovely chitals:

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28 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Waking up one night, I found myself, head to foot on the edge of my bed and about to fall. Looking back over my shoulder, there was my cat stretched out his full 3 feet across the bed front paws pushing against my back. I reminded him that I was paying the rent.

    2. From the Guardian’s roundup of April fools –
      I originally posted this BBC story as an April fool because I didn’t think it was real, but apparently it is actually true. What a time to be alive.

      Cat crime fighters could collar County Durham criminals

      A police force could become the first in the country to introduce cats in the fight against crime, after a five-year-old girl wrote to the chief constable. Eliza Adamson-Hopper contacted Durham police chief Mike Barton suggesting cats would be good at listening out for danger and rescuing people from trees.

      Insp Richie Allen, of the dog support unit, said: “I can confirm the force is looking into recruiting what we believe to be the first UK police cat.

      2. I saw that story too – sent it to Prof CC(E) if I recall correctly. For my next trick, “Here Puss” in the car paw-music system..

  4. In other news, the special snowflakes are at it again. London’s “Imperial College” is to be re-named “Gaia College”. “Gaia” obviously being the “Mother Earth” goddess of the ancient Greek, pre-Olympian pantheon, who fed her children to their father Cronus.
    I’m not quite sure that the Snowflakes have thought this through properly.

      1. I couldn’t be more than 50% sure. In either direction. That’s the joke.

    2. Is this one an April 1st? I’m inclined to think so, but other demands we have seen from the snowflakes are almost equally absurd (e.g. “jazz hands” instead of clapping), so it’s difficult to be sure.

        1. The “report” was in The Times, and was referred to in a very pompous editorial, which included a quote from “Dr Primus Aprilis, Reader in Histrionics”. So therefore…..

          1. Don’t know why my name came out abbreviated.

            As a postscript, I am just old enough to remember seeing the actual “Panorama” broadcast on our ancient steam-driven TV. It took in a surprising number of people, although of course those were the days when, to most Brits, spaghetti was something that came smeared with tomato sauce in a tin.

    3. I think this paper may have been submitted a few hours early.
      “SET-E: The Search for Extraterrestrial Environmentalism”
      (Abstract) (Submitted on 31 Mar 2016)There is currently no evidence for life on any known exoplanet. Here, we propose a form of “galactic anthropology” to detect not only the existence of life on transiting exoplanets, but also the existence of environmentalism movements. By observing the planet’s atmosphere over long time baselines, the destruction and recovery of a hole in an exoplanet’s ozone layer may be observable. While not readily detectable for any one system with JWST, by binning together observations of hundreds of systems we can finally determine the occurrence rate of environmental movements on Earthlike planets in the galaxy, a number we term eta-Green-Earth.
      Or, it could be serious.
      Where are the RFCs? Dull, dull, dull. you can’t get the nerds these days.
      Nature seems to be keeping a straight face too. Or I’m not getting the joke. Is the #2016MMM March Mammal Madness straight or a joke. Or a bit of both?
      Not a lot of obvious funnies in Science either. “A case for historic joint rupture of the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults” isn’t likely to be greeted with universal hilarity.

  6. I remember seeing that BBC film on the spaghetti harvest on the Jack Parr Show back in the day.

  7. That’s the same salt water croc species found in Australia – it says in wikipedia. I had no idea that their range was so vast. Quite an impressive swim, although I suppose they have had some time to make it.

  8. Good April Fool joke this am on CBC Radio for Nova Scotia (at least I hope it is a joke) Apparently Donald Trump is a frequent visitor to Cape Breton Island N.S. and just visited and purchased property and is looking to expand his portfolio of property and golf resorts and has been trying to purchase the National Park area and possibly the Canso Causeway (this connects mainland Nova Scotia to Cape Breton Island) The interview with the local Cape Breton realtor indicated that DT was very friendly and polite and generous and tipped a local taxi driver with a gold watch for driving him around for the day.
    Hope this doesn’t frighten those from the USA threatening to decamp to N.S. if DT becomes POTUS.

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