Saturday: Hili dialogue

November 19, 2016 • 5:36 am

PCC(E) here, back at the helm. Thanks again to Grania for filling in during my trip!

Today is Saturday, November 19, 2016, and I’m still jet-lagged.  Perhaps I’ll wake up if I have some coffee, for it’s National Macchiato Day. I abjure that form of coffee: I like either no milk (the drug experience) or lots of it (the latte experience).  It’s also World Toilet Day (I am not making this up) as well as International Men’s Day, which, sadly, focuses only on our health and not our general awesomeness.

On this day in 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon, and I recalled when I read this that no woman has yet set foot on the Moon. I wonder if anyone will during the next several decades? Do you know how many men have set foot on the Moon? The answer is here; they’re all Americans.  On that very same day, November 19,. 1969, Pelé scored his 1000th goal.  Also on this day in 1998, the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton with regard to his statements during the Lewinsky affair. (For some reason I just had a moment of panic as I remembered that Donald Trump will be our next President. Woe is we.)

Notables born on this day Indira Gandhi (1917, assassinated by her Sikh guards), Allison Janney (1959♥), and Jodie Foster (1962). Those who died on this day include The Man in the Iron Mask (1703), and Emma Lazarus (1887), author of the sonnet The New Colossus, which contains these familiar and stirring words:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(We’re now going to keep out the huddled masses with a Big Wall.) Mike Nichols also died on this day in 2014. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, looking wise, has some deep thoughts—or perhaps it’s only a Deepity.

Hili: I do not doubt…
A: What is it you do not doubt?
Hili: That one always has to doubt.
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 In Polish:
Hili: Nie wątpię…
Ja: W co nie wątpisz?
Hili: Że zawsze należy wątpić.
As lagniappe, a picture of Lion Hugs from Grania. We could all use some of these.
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30 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

      1. Glad you liked ’em.

        (New Zealand isn’t just scenery, we have Architecture too 😉

        cr

  5. Why not combine the two:

    International Men’s Toilet Day, where we celebrate peeing standing up and forgetting to lift the lid.

    1. Apparently not married. And by the way, did you ever have to clean the toilet. Just a thought.

      1. HA1 You are correct, I am not married, nor dating (I usually refer to my status as “terminally single”) but I did grow up in a house with three sisters, so I was trained early on to lift the lid or catch hell if I didn’t. I’ve also spent much of my adult life working in female-dominated workplaces, in fact, I am currently only one of four men in the building of 40+ women, and the toilet in a shared break room flushes with such gusto that it splashes water up onto the seat. I make a point to wipe it off for fear of being accused, hunted down, and publicly executed.

        1. oops, that’s supposed to read “HA!” not HA1. that’s what I get for typing whilst supine and recumbent.

      2. I’ve just realised something I’d not previously about American English. On that side of the Atlantic, you don’t have distinct names for the toilet seat and toilet lid, do you?
        Or is it just that you don’t have lids on the toilet seats? (I can’t remember what American domestic arrangements are – but industrial kludgies don’t have lids normally.)

        1. Kludgies? That’s a new one for me.

          Anyway, toilet seat and toilet lid. That’s what I’ve always called them, growing up in the middle of the mid-west. I’ve yet to encounter any other names for the two, and as far I can tell or remember, the ones I’ve used always had both.

          One thing I’m glad to have seen the last of is the horrible multi-person trough filled with ice that used to be fairly common in bars and other high-used mens’ facilities of less than hygienic repute. It’s like they were barely one step up from the communal Roman toilets. There is a pizza place down the road from me that still had one a few years ago, but after seeing how “clean” the restrooms were, along with the hole in the wall and the grimy condom machine (not to mention they undercooked my pizza; completely raw dough in the middle) I’ve not gone back to check.

          1. So ‘forgetting to lift the lid’ really did mean the lid? In what – umm – condition were the Real Men at the time?

            Never mind, you could point out to accusers that at least the seat stayed dry, even if the floor didn’t.

            cr

          2. hehe, good point! I didn’t even notice I was interchanging the two. I can only admit to not lifting the actual lid while under the influence of a certain amount of adult beverages, and one horrible time when the lid fell just prior to the act…messy. I guess there is a tendency to use the word ‘lid’ for both lid and seat for conversational convenience.

            I will also go on record as being fully behind the notion of sitting down during micturition, at least late at night, or early in the morning. No reason to turn on the light and rudely wake myself up when I can sit down and go “hands-free”.

          3. I have to make sure I’m fully awake. Due to the infernal cleverness of my subconscious in incorporating physical influences into dreams – which is to say, I have to make damn sure I am actually using the loo and not just dreaming that I am, in which case I would be about to be woken up by that awful damp feeling… One experience of that sort tends to induce paranoia.

            cr

          4. I really should have taken some photos of the bear in the shit pit at Salym. Or the morning horrors of anti-malarial drug induced explosive diarrhoea under the tropical sun in Tanzania. Just to make you inexpressibly glad for the delights of that pizza place.

    2. Do men really forget to lift the seat? Or do they just not bother?

      In the interests of equality, when using the facilities in a male space where the seat is left up permanently, I always put it back up after use.

      I bet the men never notice! 🙂

      1. I’d bet they just don’t care, or at least not until they have to sit down. Little boys certainly don’t care, nor do they know how to aim. Gotta blame the parent for that one. A good tool for potty training boys during the stand-up is to toss a couple of cheerios into the bowl, gives them something to aim at, plus it’s fun for kids who resist the end of diapers.

        And as for me, I insist on both lid and seat being returned to their horizontal position. I think it looks nicer, can’t drop anything into the bowl by accident, and it keeps the d*gs from drinking out of it.

        1. Those modern hydraulically-damped ‘soft-close’ seats are very nice that way, you can just give them a nudge and let gravity lower them at leisure – a minor convenience (no pun intended).

          By the way, have you ever noticed how any mention on this notablog of, errm, less-than-lofty aesthetic matters instantly results in a race to the bottom?*

          cr
          (*pun regrettably intended, though only British readers may get it).

          1. I’ve yet to encounter one of these things. I assume they are similar to the drawers from Ikea that a friend put in his kitchen. I can see why these would be nice to have, especially if they also remain in the upright position until acted upon by the user (yes, sometimes gravity is not your friend, especially if the toilet owner has put one of those fluffy lid covers on their toilet) but the one thing I would want more than any other upgrade I’ve seen or heard about is a seat warmer for the chilly winter months.

          2. Those soft-close seats seem to be pretty common in new toilets now. I first encountered one in our daughter’s new (‘earthquake rebuild’) house in Christchurch. But I got a retro-fit seat+lid pair from our local hardware for $35.

            They will stay near-vertical if placed that way.

            cr

      2. Never notice the seat is back up, or never notice you using the men’s toilets?

        cr

        1. Never notice the seat is back up! 🙂

          I had to ask where it was in the first place after all …

      1. I’ve never had a proper cappuccino. I’ve only every ingested the horrid gas station swill (I was a teen in a rural area with no other choice) which my friends and I referred to as Crap-puccino, in the style of Beavis and Butthead.

  8. I scrolled down to just above the bottom photo, of(what turned out to be) the magnificent lion and his beautiful orange-blond mane, and instinctively thought it was something about Trump because of the shaggy hair poking from the bottom of the screen. I got an immediate Pavlovian jolt of extreme boredom combined with depression and irritation. I’m physically sick of the man yet I see his stupid face and hear his awful bullying voice everywhere. It’s nightmarish.

  9. Oh shit. On TV right now, on the bloody National Geographic channel, is a piece of crap entitled ‘Pope vs Hitler’ about how the heroic Catholics resisted the Nazis and how the Poop was secretly conspiring to get rid of Hitler.

    If so, this has been kept a much better secret than that of Hitler’s own generals… in fact as this sleazy bit of revisionism progresses it appears to be trying to arrogate the mantle of the Schwarz Kapelle to the Poop. I have enormous respect for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, which does not extend to the Poop. The premise of this programme appears to be as skewed as the title of Spike Milligan’s war memoirs – “Hitler: My Part in his Downfall” (but Milligan was being facetious).

    cr

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