To the best of my information, it’s April 18. I leave for Portland on Wednesday (back Sunday evening), and it will be a busy week. On this day in 1775, Paul Revere made his famous Ride, warning of the British advance. The Great San Francisco Earthquake occurred in 1906. In 1954, Nasser took over in Egypt, and in 1983 terrorists bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63.
Those born on this day in include Clarence Darrow (1857, a nonbeliever), and Hayley Mills (1946, so she’s 70 today; raise your hand if you saw “Parent Trap”). Those who died on this day include Erasmus Darwin (1802), Albert Einstein (1955), and Thor Heyerdahl (2002; raise your hand if you’ve read Kon-Tiki). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej instructs Hili on the propers of skepticism:
Hili: Where do axiomatic certainties come from?
A: Some come from mathematics, others from the lack of skepticism.
Hili: Skąd się biorą pewniki?
Ja: Jedne z matematyki inne z braku sceptycyzmu.
And reader jsp sends us Electro Kitteh. Fat chance that you could get your cat to do this:
Thor Heyerdahl had some wacky ideas!
A supposedly true story – Heyerdahl was at the BBC having been on a programme (TV or Radio), & was waiting for a taxi. A taxi driver came into the lobby, & Heyerdahl said “I think you are here to pick me up.”
“No mate,” said the driver, “I’m here to pick up four Airedales.”
A BBC Radio 4 comedy in the 1980s lampooned him as ‘Tanned Thighs Explorer’!
Not four candles?
Aha, another Hayley Mills fan. She was a marvellous child actor, and one of the films she starred in, ‘Tiger Bay’, is just brilliant.
Whistle Down the Wind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle_Down_the_Wind_%28film%29
Whistle Down the Wind was a great movie (at least in my remembered-from-childhood-days recollection).
Hayley Mills was the first actress I ever had the teenage hots for.
cr
“raise your hand if you’ve read Kon-Tiki”
No, but I have read ‘The Ra Expeditions’ – does that count?
Currently re-reading Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington, and on the subject of getting value from your cat she has this –
“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp … The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.”
of course I thought of PCC
OMG, what a load of bull!! Except, maybe, for the part about the warmth of the desk lamp.
What will actually happen is that the cat will settle serenely for about thirty seconds. Then he or she will start knocking your stuff on the floor and chasing whatever that harvest provided – pens, papers, glasses, etc.
If you have more than one cat, (currently six of mine have access to our offices), they will also chase each other, vie for lap space and/or space on the back of your chair, express their various jealousies, and, in my case, plop themselves directly in front of the monitor and/or the TV screen.
They are a joy, they make me laugh, but serenity? In your dreams. L
Ms Spark’s novels typically take an ironic and satirical view . . .
And after the San Fran earthquake there was the fire.
Still trying to go for the mole with glasses.
Meanwhile, the governors of Idaho and Tennessee (who obviously have more sense or better advice – or both – than their state legislatures) have vetoed their respective official-state-book bible bills. And I note they’re both Republicans – not all Republicans are completely daft.
On a more biological note, the Idaho Giant Salamander is now the state’s official amphibian. I usually make fun of Official State things (does anyone have an official state disease? official state serial killer?) but I guess it’s harmless and besides, judging by the photo, the Idaho Giant Salamander doesn’t have much else going for it.
For more, see http://loweringthebar.net/2016/04/governors-veto-official-bible-bills.html
cr
Speciesist, much?
😀
Can you tell me what the Idaho Giant Salamander *does* have going for it, then?
cr
(unrepentant)
(P.S. The Chinese have a *much* bigger one)
Size isn’t everything. 🙂
And Idaho isn’t exactly the largest US state, either. But look at this distribution:
http://maps.iucnredlist.org/map.html?id=59078
Pretty cool how this ancient lineage has persisted in this tiny area of the US.
Vid created by the 8th grader pushing for State Amphibian declaration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Zg9-fwohk
I think Dicamptodon aterrimus fits nicely into the milieu of other official Idaho state…things:
http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/states/united-states/idaho
We can’t all be Texas…
Damn, forgot about the automatic vid embedding.
“Size isn’t everything.”
Somebody tell Donald Trump that. 😉
Though, if you want to be called ‘giant’, then size does acquire a certain significance.
The video was okay, though they should have canned the irritating background ‘music’.
“We can’t all be Texas…”
Who would want to be? 🙁
cr
Birders! The southern most tip of the lower Rio Grande Valley is farther south than half of Mexico–the avifauna is incredible! Field Biologists! Geologists! Petrochemical Engineers… 😉
I lived in Austin for a couple of years–great fun! Home of outlaw country music, tex-mex and authentic Mexican cuisine, honky tonks, Kinky Friedman, the Cotton-Eyed Joe, barbecue, cowboy boots, and at that time–Molly Ivins.
Not everyone in Texas is a fundamentalist nutcase.
I haven’t read _Kon-tiki_, but people mention it as discussing an experiment in history, which is often regarded as impossible.
I read Kon-Tiki probably around 1958, and it has always stuck with me. I have twice visited the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo, Norway. The museum also preserves Heyerdahl’s Ra II. Interesting place and history of an explorer and adventurer.
I read it a few years later than that and totally agree with you. (Except for not having seen the museum.) Wonderful true life adventure; I loved exciting tales like this one. So what if the hypothesis has frayed over time? Not every great idea or even demonstration survives the test of time.
I had a cat named Papageno that, if he had had thumbs, would have been an enthusiastic builder and repairer of computers. He avidly watched me remove every screw and insert every board and dress every cable. All he lacked was the dexterity to accomplish it.
Re the first cartoon, back in the early days of the proto-Internet, when BBS’s (Bulletin Boards) were in vogue, there was one board I was on where the juveniles (including geriatric ones like myself) would happily indulge in wild threats and insults. It was all tongue-in-cheek, all the threats to rain tactical nuclear weapons on each other were obviously in jest.
Then some newbie arrived and tried to chastise us about the tone of our ‘discussions’. So after some thought, I posted “You ******, why don’t you ****** ****** and ****** yourself and leave us to carry on our ****** ***** the way we ****** want?”
And the guy went absolutely ballistic over my ‘language’, which as I happily pointed out to him was all in his head. I didn’t say one bad word, just asterisks.
The offence culture is not new.
cr
Funny story!
But you certainly could not have been geriatric back in the BBS days. I estimate my experience with bill boards to have begun some 36 years ago, more or less.
Wait, I think I get it; at 30-something we (well I, at least) were as good as geriatric from the teenagers’ perspective?
Funny how fast I got from “don’t trust anyone over 30” to…30.
“I think I get it; at 30-something we were as good as geriatric from the teenagers’ perspective?”
Yup, that’s it.
I also joined the local BBC (computer) user group. The BBC Model B was uniquely adapted to being hacked around – it had a ‘user port’ for hooking up digital gadgets and the full circuitry was given in the manual, for example. Most Beebs spent their lives with the covers off and wires hanging out. There were several mid-teens kids there who were as brash and show-off as teen kids usually are, but it soon dawned on me that they were actually experts in this thing and knew more about it than I did. Very chastening.
cr
Yeah, well, they’re approaching fogeyhood themselves, now. Always talking about the good ol’ days of the BBS’s…
😀
Go to YouTube and search for “censored Count” (sorry for not linking). The Sesame Street muppet seems to have a filthy mouth.
That’s a very good analogy! Someone’s taken the Count’s perfectly innocent song about his obsessive counting and, by judiciously placed bleeps, made it sound as if he’s talking about *****ing.
cr