Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 2, 2017 • 7:00 am

It’s Thursday, November 2, 2017, and that means Shoulder Therapy Day: a checkup after a hiatus of a couple of weeks (but with daily exercise on my part). It’s also National Deviled Egg Day, celebrating a treat I’m quite fond of, but I have no idea why they call it “Deviled,” and can’t be arsed to look it up. Perhaps a kind reader will inform us. It’s also a mouthful of a holiday promoted by the UN:  International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. 

If you’re a baseball fan, you’ll already know that the Houston Astros took the World Series last night, beating Los Angeles 5-1 in game 7.

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the last day of The Day of the Dead, which started on Tuesday. It’s a nice drawing, though the artist, Lydia Nichols, is definitely not Hispanic, so this is an open and shut case of cultural appropriation. How dare they get an Anglo to draw about a Mexican theme? Time to head over to Twitter. . . .

On this day in 1868, New Zealand adopted its own national standard time. And it’s the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which proclaimed (on Feb. 2, 1917) but did not secure British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” In fact, later on the Brits prevented Jewish migration to what is now Israel.  On November 2, 1920, the first commercial radio station in the US, KDKA in Pittsburgh (one of the few radio stations east of the Mississippi that starts with “K” instead of “W”) began broadcasting. On this day in 1930, Haile Selassie was crowned the emperor of Ethiopia, ruling for 44 years thereafter. And two more broadcasting events on this day, both in 1936: the CBC was established in Canada, and the BBC began the BBC Television Service, which was renamed BBC1 in 1964 and is still on the air. Finally, on this day in 1960, Penguin Books was cleared of obscenity charges for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover  (the case of  R v Penguin Books Ltd).

Notables born on this day include Daniel Boone (1734), Marie Antoinette (1755), Bunny Berigan (1908), Burt Lancaster (1913), Johnny Vander Meer (1914; pitched two no-hit games in a row in 1938, something that hasn’t been done since) and k. d. Lang (1961).

Those who died on November 2 include Jenny Lind (1887), George Bernard Shaw (1950), James Thurber (1961), nature photographer Eliot Porter (1990; go here to see some of his photos), Theo van Gogh (murdered 2004), and Acker Bilk (2014).

Let’s have an easy start to a rainy day (in Chicago) with a lovely live rendition of Bilk’s most famous song, “Stranger on the Shore“. It was written for his daughter, released in 1961, and reached #1 in the U.S. and #2 in the UK. Remember it?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, the Editor in Chief, is ordering her staff about:
Hili: Fill the bowls, please, and go back to work.
A: To the computer?
Hili: No, clean my litter box first.
 In Polish:
Hili: Proszę napełnić miseczki i wrócić do pracy.
Ja: Do komputera?
Hili: Nie, najpierw oczyść kuwetę.

And here are a few tw**ts stolen from Heather Hastie:

Here’s another example of an animal eating live birds that shouldn’t be doing that. Go read the gruesome story:

Like me, naturalist and photographer Gil Wizen got a parasitic botfly, and, like me, he was fascinated and kept it in his body for weeks until it came out. But unlike me, he managed to get the wicked-looking larva to pupate and then hatch into a fly. Go read the story at his link:

No shit!

https://twitter.com/scienmag/status/925920460524662785

Finally, a kakapo and a cat:

https://twitter.com/TheDaiIyKitten/status/925885711386943491

19 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I’ve always thought the “deviled” in deviled eggs referred to the spiciness of the yolk filling.

  3. Eliot Porter was an inspiring nature photographer, always striving to capture the beauty of nature’s visual and textural complexity.

  4. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, the Editor in Chief, is ordering his staff about:

    I know gender is fluid these days but?

  5. I well remember Acker Bilk. A west countryman he played to the fore in well known British Trad Jazz bands, of which there were many (New Orleans style). A schoolboy they were my introduction to live music.

  6. My mum is a big fan of the novelist Alexander McCall Smith, a purveyor of superior comfort-food-writing who has gained great success by writing from the perspective of a Botswanan woman who sets up her own detective agency.

    I do wonder how on earth this white male has managed to evade the PC search-lights in spite of writing so many novels(and presumably making a great deal of money by doing so) from the perspective of a middle-aged African woman, all of which deal with her local culture and environment. I think he might be next up the steps to the gallows.

    1. …I was writing apropos the Google Doodle, just in case the post seemed like a complete non sequitur.

  7. I’ve been to Fenway Park a time or two to see a Sox game, but all I ever got there was a Fenway frank and a Gansett beer. Is there anyone else on record as ever having picked up a parasitic botfly at the old ballpark?

    1. “Is there anyone else on record as ever having picked up a parasitic botfly at the old ballpark?”

      Depends. Is ‘the old ballpark’ a euphemism?

      1. I was too but then remembered that Jerry’s botfly started to pupate @ Fenway. (But it emerged later that evening.)

        (Listen to the linked Radiolab piece – it starts about 44:00 and the Fenway part’s @ ~ 52:00.

        1. Oh, right, thanks. I was trying to make some association between Fenway and the guy in the above-mentioned tweet!

      2. NPR runs it every so often as an oldie-but-goodie. I was driving around running Saturday errands about a year-and-a-half ago, popped my local affiliate on the radio, and heard this oddly familiar voice recounting a strange tale about a trip to Fenway with his girlfriend.

  9. There’s a fairly decent BBC television movie about the trial of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.

    I own the standard edition, but also a rare copy of the censored/expurgated edition published in trade paperback before 1960. I bought it at a church yard sale in Berkeley.

    Re, the eggs. The word “deviled” came to be used in the 19th century with spicy or zesty food, including eggs prepared with mustard & pepper. It’s application to eggs persists to this day.

  10. For a long time, I have never read your posts because hii in my language means ‘This’. This dialogue. It makes sense still but ‘hili’ sort of pushed me away. I don’t know why but today I did and 👌👌

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