Monday: Hili dialogue

March 5, 2018 • 6:30 am

This is the way Grania (and I) feel this morning (she found the tweet):

Yes, it’s Monday again, at least in America: March 5, 2018: National Cheez Doodle Day, celebrating a popular comestible made of cheese-flavored styrofoam. In Cornwall it’s St. Piran’s Day (the patron saint of tin miners), celebrated with parades, music, and poetry.

On March 5, 1616, Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was added to the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books—73 years after it was first published. On this day in 1770, the Boston Massacre (tame by today’s standards), killed five Americans including the black/Indian man Crispus Attucks: the first American killed in the Revolutionary War. On March 5, 1836, Samuel Colt patented the first mass-produced revolver, a .34 caliber gun.  36 years later, George Westinghouse patented the air brake, saving many lives of brakemen.  On this day in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed a “bank holiday”, closing all the banks and freezing financial transactions. Although the Great Depression persisted, this helped mitigate it. On that very same day, Hitler’s Nazi Party got 43.9% of the votes in Germany in the last free election in a unified Germany until 1990. Although the Nazis didn’t get a majority, they had enough strength, with the help of other socialist parties, to pass an “Enabling Act,” making  Hitler the dictator. On this day in 1946, Churchill first used the phrase “Iron Curtain”, in a speech in Missouri, referring to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.  On this day in 1953, Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his dacha outside Moscow. And exactly ten years later, three country music stars, including Patsy Cline, died in a plane crash in Tennessee.

Notables born on March 5 include cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512), Rosa Luxemberg (1871), Louis Kahn (1901), Rex Harrison (1908), Daniel Kahneman (1934), Penn Jillette (1955), Andy Gibb (1958, died in 1988), Eva Mendes (1974), and Joshua Coyne (1993; I don’t know who he is, but I like the name). Those who expired on this day include Crispus Attucks (1770; see above), Edgar Lee Masters (1950), Joseph Stalin (1953; see above), Patsy Cline (1963; see above), Yip Harburg (1981), John Belushi (1982), and Hugo Chavéz and creationist “Galloping” Duane Gish ( both 2013).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is angling for real noms:

Hili: Isn’t eating bread harmful to you?
A: No, why?
Hili: It would be harmful to me.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy jedzenie chleba ci nie szkodzi?
Ja: Nie, dlaczego?
Hili: Mnie by szkodziło.

 

From Matthew who claims he checked this optical illusion with a ruler:

Dueling nuns! (The story, here, seems a bit doubtful.)

A cat makes a big mistake (“One small step for cat. . . “):

https://twitter.com/kraen0044/status/969933836241928193

. . . but a fox appropriates a snow den.

Somebody tell me why this snipe is bobbing as it walks:

Dung-eating flies!

https://twitter.com/bittelmethis/status/970009909705179137

More dung-eating flies:

https://twitter.com/bittelmethis/status/970011892482760705

Matthew comments, “This is one sexy bird!” And so it is: look at those colors and patterns! (The jack snipe is Lymnocryptes minimus.)

I never tire of looking at murmurations of starlings, and this one is terrific. Look how fast they descend!

Chuck Yeager reminisces about how he bailed out on this day (remember, he’s 95 years old):

This is Ollie, Matthew’s cat who once clawed my nose open. Matthew claims that you can hear Ollie making weird noises here, but I don’t hear jack:

When Harry met Ollie:

 

 

21 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Who have thunk that Penn Jillette is only a few days older than me… I think he has an aging portrait secreted in his attic.

  2. On this day in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed a “bank holiday”, closing all the banks and freezing financial transactions.

    FDR’s first full day in office.

    IIRC, he didn’t spend it bitch-tweeting about the crowd size at his inauguration.

  4. I found Ollie’s quiet breathing tame compared with the sound of a chainsaw starting that constitutes George’s super-relaxed sleep noises; I have occasionally been forced to turn up the volume on the TV when he is occupying the spot next to me on the sofa.

      1. It is somewhat quiet! George does sleep quietly, mostly, but when he snores…

    1. Yes. Hitler put the word “Socialist” into the party name because it polled well. They were not a socialist party – they were always fascists. Besides the Social Democrats, there were other socialists, but they called themselves communists, along with the more extreme communists. Communists were among the first rounded up by Hitler once he was in power.

      Having Socialist in the name of the Nazi party is something US conservatives have got their jollies off over ever since. I’ve never heard of Europeans making the claim that the Nazis were socialists. They probably have a better general awareness of the political history of the time?

  6. And after the Boston Massacre who was the attorney for the British, not exactly a popular job, 2nd Pres. of the U.S. John Adams.

  7. In the Boston Massacre: angry mob is hitting British soldiers with clubs, throwing rocks and snowballs, and calling them names. The soldiers fire into the crowd, killing 5 people. Two soldiers are convicted of manslaughter.

    Fast forward 247 years: Daniel Shaver is crawling on floor in a hotel hallway, begging for his life, and is shot dead by a police officer who has “You’re F**ked” inscribed on his weapon. The officer is acquitted.

    Progress.

  8. Snipe has some serious good music in his/her head.

    Meanwhile I have the jingle for Old London Cheez Doodles in my head, damn 50+ year old jingles!

  9. To hell with Mondays, that’s how I feel every day I am forced to go to work or deal with people.

  10. It’s Tuesday in NZ. I can confirm things get better once Monday is over.

    1. Here in Finland it’s 6:30 pm on Monday. I’ve just watched one of the last episodes of Brokenwood Mysteries. I hope they’ll make more.

    1. If the nuns had been supplied with something useful like, say, AR-15’s, and properly trained to use them, then the duel wouldn’t have turned out so… inconclusively, would it?

      cr

  12. All those who claim that there was no religion involved in the Galileo stuff should be asked why, if that’s the case, did the church go about banning books from scientific authors?

  13. Regarding one of our similar birds, the American Woodcock, no one hypothesis has been settled on as explanation for the rocking/bobbing walk, but one of the often cited theories is that the vibrations bring worms closer to the surface. (Others point out that they bob on hard surfaces, too–roads & such; worm-theory supporters suggest that that’s just because the bobbing, once adopted due to increased fitness, simply carries over to substrates that are inappropriate for it.)

    http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf114/sf114p03.htm

    Bernd Heinrich apparently has another opinion, one I can’t access:

    http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1656/045.023.0109?journalCode=nena

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