Friday: Hili dialogue

September 1, 2017 • 6:30 am

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

—Verlaine

Good morning; we’ve reached Friday again in the U.S., and it’s the first of September, so that another month has gone by. Here in America it’s the beginning of Labor Day Weekend, a three-day holiday during which nobody labors; and it’s my last full day in the U.S. for several weeks. At the University of Chicago, though, where we’re on the quarter system, classes don’t start till the beginning of October. It’s National Gyro Day, celebrating that great spit-roasted meat sandwich that Americans shouldn’t eat because it’s cultural appropriation. It’s Random Acts of Kindness Day, too, but only in New Zealand (it’s celebrated in February 17 in the U.S.). So if you’re a Kiwi, put $10 NZ in an envelope and send it to yours truly, which will fund my next trip to New Zealand.

On September 1, 1715, Louis XIV of France died. He had reigned 72 years, the longest tenure of any European monarch (Queen Victoria reigned 63.5 years). On this day in 1878, Emma Nutt became the world’s first female telephone operator when she was recruited by Alexander Graham Bell for the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company. Before that, boys were used as operators. The criteria for women operators, according to Wikipedia, was this:

To be an operator, a woman had to be unmarried and between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six. She had to look prim and proper, and have arms long enough to reach the top of the tall telephone switchboard. Like many other American businesses at the turn of the century, telephone companies discriminated against people from certain ethnic groups and races. For instance, African-American and Jewish women were not allowed to become operators.

Martha my dear

On Sept. 1, 1914, St. Petersburg, Russia changed its name to Petrograd, but now it’s back to St. Petersburg. And on the very same day, the last known passenger pigeon, “Martha” died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo. Here she is alive; now her stuffed carcass resides at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.  And of course it was on this day in 1939 that Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe. On August 1, 1951, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand signed their pact of allyship, the ANZUS Treaty. BFFs forever! Finally, on this day in 1972 (do you remember?) American Bobby Fischer beat the Russian Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, becoming the world chess champion. He made America great again! Nobody produces chess champions as good as we do!

Notables born on this day include Johann Pachelbel (1653; I like to call him “Taco Bell”), Engelbert Humperdinck  (1854), Edgar Rice Burroughs, (1875), Art Pepper (1925), Ann Richards and Conway Twitty (both 1933), Alan Dershowitz (1938), Archie “Lemme Put This Hamburger Down” Bell (1944), Barry Gibb (1946), Al Green (1947) and Gloria Estafan (1957; she’s 60 today). Pepper was an underrated jazz saxophonist who spent much of his life either addicted to drugs or in jail, but was capable of sublime music. This is my favorite of his songs; it’s a crie du coeur: the most plaintive jazz solo I know.

Those who died on September 1 include Siegfried Sassoon (1967, just as I was going off to college), Ethel Waters (1977), Albert Speer (1981) and Hal David (2012). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is complaining about her canine mattress:

Hili: Why does Cyrus feel obliged to pee in places somebody else has alreade peed?
A: So that his would come up tops.
In Polish:
Hili: Dlaczego Cyrus czuje się zobowiązany do obsikiwania czegoś, co kto inny już obsikał?
Ja: Żeby jego było na wierzchu.

I’ll soon see my Princess:

Matthew Cobb found us two illusion tw**ts produced by Akioyoshi Kitaoka:

In this illusion, all the motion is illusory, as you can see by covering up the borders or the central square:

Matthew’s “explanation”:

If you want to know why it wiggles, I guess it’s to do with the saccadic movements your eyes are making all the time, and some kind of interaction with the receptive fields of the higher processing bits of your visual sytem. I have no idea.

Here’s the square on top:

And how Kitaoka made it:

52 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  3. “The long sobs of autumn violins wound my heart with a monotonous languor”

    The sadness for growing old and the signal to the French Resistance of the start of the D-Day operations.

    2. It is reported that the Germans took these ‘personal messages’ to be some sort of code (rather than just a pre-arranged phrase) and put considerable effort into trying to decode them.

      cr

  4. Same holiday in Canada except we call it Labour Day because we were good colonists. 😛

    1. And yet, less than two years later the Germans sealed their own fate with operation Barbarossa.

      1. And six months later he declared war on America ,which put the cherry on the top .
        I read somewhere that after Stalingrad the Russians sent the Germans an offer for an Armistice ,but the Russians broke off talks in case the other allies found out .
        I think the war would have lasted longer if adolf had not declared war on the USA .

      1. Sure, they did.

        Auslander Hass is nothing new in the US. We pretty well hated all newcomers when they came. Even the early Catholics got herded off to Maryland …

        My point with these, always, is that “your people” were hated in exactly the same way when they came. (My usual response to Drumpfys who express dislike of immigrants.)

        1. Shit’s been goin’ on since the first Pilgrim down the gangway at Plymouth Rock turned around to the second, put his hands up, and said “not so fast furriner!”

          1. Hi ,i did hear that if all the Americans who claimed to be descended from the Pilgrims are correct ,the Mayflower would have to have been twice the size of the QE2.

        1. There was also a lot of sympathy for the poor, huddled masses when the European economy collapsed and the Irish had their potato famine. But, businesses loved the cheap labor. Railroad building and foundries needed an influx of workers as the US economy expanded.
          Now the decedents of those huddled masses hire Mexicans to pick crops and do landscape work.

    2. So, no colored Irish Germans then?

      I find it curious that Irish were rated below ‘coloreds’ in the domestic servant pecking order…

      (I take it most of the Irish immigrants were Catholics…)

      cr

      1. Yes, this was mainly against Catholics; but also against those “southern Europeans” who were considered to be insufficiently “white”. Hitler would have been proud!

    3. I worked on a documentary about the subject a few years ago. Yes, there was a lot of resentment against foreigners. In 1911 the report of the Dillingham Immigration Commission helped set the tone against some “races” and in favor of others. The language was pretty stark. Southern Italians were – a dark, long-headed race of undesirables compared to the Northern Italians who were lighter skinned and ambitious.
      Schuyler Colfax, a strong nativist, was the 17th Vice President of the United State under Grant. He gave speeches denouncing immigrants. He called the Irish drunks and lazy bums, living off the generosity of Americans. Lot’s of rather ugly history there. Not much political correctness. Very Trump-like.

      1. A lack of tolerance began as soon as the pilgrims got off the boat. As others soon arrived they were sent packing down the road if they did not look, act and pray like those before them. The myth is that the pilgrims came because of religious intolerance, however they were as intolerant as any.

        2. Yes, that explains it. Well, maybe. Actually, the people and social structure of north and south in Italy differ quite significantly from my understanding. I think it has something to do with the south’s organization around family and local village power hierarchy that did not exist in the north. While the north adopted modern central governments the south was reluctant to give up the old ways.

    4. Lasted a while, too. My Italian, paternal grandfather changed his surname in the 20s because of it. Everyone thinks I am of English descent now, instead of Italian-Polish.

  9. I remember the Fischer match well; chess was “hot” for a while afterwords. My high school started a chess club right around that time.

    Too bad about ol’ Bobby. His disintegration was heartbreaking to see.

      1. Nigel Short, former world chess championship finalist, is 99% convinced that he played Fischer anonymously at blitz online several years back during RF’s self-imposed retreat from chess. The score? Short 0-8 Fischer.

        It seems Fischer still had it, if Short’s view is correct.

    1. ?

      The original Englebert Humperdinck the composer was indeed that old. The English singer Englebert ditto (who, btw, I am not a fan of) is pretty ancient (b. 1936) but not quite that geriatric. 1936? He’s older than Cliff Richard!

      I saw a contestant in a quiz show derailed by that.

      cr

      1. Humperdinck the Younger is a bargain shelf Tom Jones — he’s Julio Iglesias sans the funny accent. 🙂

  13. Kitaoka illusions are fantastic. I noted that my eyes respond the same way, statistically speaking to both illusions. I think this is something that my eyes do naturally.

    The shaking motion is about 2 Hz, but staggered or pulsed, such that the motion only occurs about 1 Hz or less.

    When I see it I think that this has something to do with how I feel like if I were to ever hunt or search for something, like prey or more likely today, for my kids at crowded park.

  14. The first of September is officially the first day of spring here (in the RSA). I’m wont to explain that that should be the 21st of September, when the sun is in zenith at 12 o’ clock at the equator, or when day and night (sunset/sunrise) are exactly of same duration. But the people here think that is nerdy, drawing attention and pompous, or even preposterous. I’m contemplating to give up, so: Spring it is. Yippee! 🙂

    The visual illusions of Akiyoshi Kitaoka are stunning. They figure prominently in the best site for Visual Illusions I know: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/
    (I may have posted the link earlier, but it has all the visual illusions we know, Michael Bach is for visual illusions what Johann Sebastian was for Baroque music, or better: what Joseph Needham is for traditional Chinese technology.)

  15. If Gyros is cultural appropriation, so is (at least) half of the English language.

    I had a Latin teacher in England in the 60s who complained about words that were part Latin and part Greek like “television” from Greek telos and Latin video.

    Now we can’t even borrow from one culture at at a time.

      1. By now, a large percentage of words in any language are probably appropriated from some other, to an extent that is sometimes useful.

        It’s quite amusing transliterating Russian Cyrillic signs into Latin letters, many of the words have recognisably been phonetically adapted from English or French. Such as лифт ( = LIFT, which is British English for ‘elevator’ ). Or сервис цертр ( = SERVIS TSENTR )

        It’s also possible to ‘fill in’ a patchy knowledge of French using the resemblance of many (usually longer) French words to similar-sounding English ones. Though one has to be careful of ‘faux amis’ – words that have diverged in meaning.

        cr

        1. One of my favourite cognates is the Hittite ‘wa-a-tar’ (originally in cuneiform ideogram) from the 50,000 or so tablets from their capital, Hattusas, ca. 1,500 BCE.

          Say ‘wa-a-tar’: yes, it’s water. It’s an Indo-European language. What’s ‘ninda’? Bread. Possibly related to ‘nan’? ‘Nu’, I think, is ‘now’. Maybe I’m a geek, but I think that is amazing.

          1. And in Russian water is ‘voda’ – I’m sure the similarity is more than accidental.

            (No, not ‘vodka’, though I wonder about that too 😉

            cr

  16. Not quite “BFFs forever” — the NZ leg of ANZUS has been suspended since NZ banned nuclear-armed ships in the mid 1980s.

  17. Wait, St Petersburg and Petrograd?
    Isn’t that just the Russian transliteration?

    Wasn’t it called Leningrad?

    1. It was changed from St Petersburg to Petrograd in 1914, Leningrad in 1924, back to St Petersburg in 1991.

      Currently Санкт-Петербург

      cr

      1. Although part of the inner city is apparently still called Petrogradsky District
        (according to Google Maps)

        cr

  18. Nobody produces chess champions as good as we do!

    Admittedly Fischer tend to be ranked highest in many lists, especially the subjective ones, but the game progresses. Arguably by ratings and rating models it is now Norway that produced the historically/current best (Magnus Carlsen). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history ]

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