Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

March 11, 2018 • 7:00 am

Today is March 11, 2018. If you’re American, you lost an hour between yesterday and today, for it’s now Daylight Savings Time.  When this  post goes up, it will be 8 a.m. EST in the U.S.  It’s also National “Eat Your Noodles” Day. (Again, the meaning of the scare quotes is obscure.) It’s also Johnny Appleseed Day, though he was neither born nor died on March 11 (it’s celebrated now because it’s apple-planting season).

Not much happened on this day in history. In 1702, The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, went to press.  On March 11, 1851, the first performance of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” took place in Venice.  And on this day in 1888, the Great Blizzard of 1888 began in the Eastern U.S. You think your snow is bad? Check out that link. On March 11, 1945, Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, was captured by British troops. Having evaded capture for nearly a year, he was finally turned in by his wife, and then tried and hanged in 1947.  On this day in 1990, Lithuania declared itself independent of the Soviet Union.  Exactly three years later, Janet Reno was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as America’s first female Attorney General. Finally—and many of you will remember this—several trains were bombed in Madrid on this day in 2004, killing 192. The Spanish government blamed al-Qaeda, but firm responsibility hasn’t been established.

Notables born on March 11 include Vannevar Bush (1890), Shemp “Stooge” Howard (1895), Lawrence Welk (1903), Ralph Abernathy (1926), Rupert Murdoch (1931), Nigel Lawson (1932), Sam Donaldson (1934), Antonin Scalia (1936) and Alex Kingston (1963). Those who died on this day include Alexander Fleming (1955), Oscar F. Mayer (1955; yes, the wiener magnate), Richard E. Byrd (1957), and Erle Stanley Gardner (1970).

Back in the days when I would watch t.v. dramas, my favorite was E.R., and I loved Kingston as Dr. Charlotte Corday. Here she is with Eric La Salle (Dr. Peter Benton) in a scene that would end up as a romance.  The show ran for 14 seasons, and I remember actually weeping when Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) died of brain cancer at the end of season 8 while this song played.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili appears to show empathy for Cyrus! When I asked Malgorzata if this was true, she replied, “It’s quite possible that for once she is not self-centered. Cyrus really has trouble walking on gravel because small stones cling to his feet and make it difficult for him to walk.”

 In Polish:

And in nearby Wloclawek, Leon is kvetching:

Leon: Am I supposed to run around in this mud?

In Polish: Mam biegać po tym błocie?

Grania found a cat who brings flowers to its owner. How sweet!

And she importunes us to look at the series of sad photos in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/sharecats/status/972108637027164161

From Matthew, who sent a pile o’ tweets.

This is a very good question—one I’ve never pondered. See the “answer” at the link:

I’d love to have one of these cat heads, but they’re very expensive. Imagine showing up to teach wearing one of these!

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/972547401574526976

Read the backstory on this kitten at the link here:

A photo:

An ape is gonna smoke if you toss it a fag; the zoo visitor should have been punished, not the zoo!

And another murmuration (I love these!):

Rescue dog is dumb:

And a baby sloth:

A surprise!

Matthew found this fascinating. . .

Finally, I hope you recognize the bird and the rodent!

https://twitter.com/BrokenAnimaIs/status/972294837734203392

31 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)”

  1. National “Eat Your Noodles” Day

    Who decides these National Days? Is there a National Day Clearance Center somewhere?

  3. “ If you’re American, you lost an hour between yesterday and today, for it’s now Daylight Savings Time. ”

    I don’t think it’s every state.

    1. Most areas of the United States observe daylight saving time (DST), the exceptions being Arizona (except for the Navajo, who do observe daylight saving time on tribal lands), Hawaii, and the overseas territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands.

          1. Today?

            And is it all of Canada or are you asking me, because I haven’t looked this up, I’m learning from here today.

        2. Look it up and one will see that D(d)aylight S(s)aving(s) T(t)ime is observed not only in North America and Canada, but in various places across the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#By_country_and_region

          There’s also dispute about capitalization and whether it’s “saving” or “savings”. I don’t care how it’s spelled or capitalized, I just like the extra hours of productive daylight, though I know others would love to abolish it. May they be condemned to a life of darkness.

      2. Oh, my quote missed the “Today is”

        So maybe today is daylight savings time in the United States, or the continental states, or I don’t know, the computer tells me now.

        …. no snark intended!

        1. Thats interesting

          And the typo correction is critical – I didn’t auto detect it… if you take my meaning… thanks.

  4. We don’t give much thought to the Meteorologist or Forecasting today but the weather in 1888 reminds us of what can happen. 213 children died in the Midwest during the 1888 Blizzard referred to as the Schoolhouse Blizzard.

  5. I looked closely at that optical illusion, and then I went and got a ruler and looked again. The lines do indeed change size by a very small amount.

    If the moving arrow points were of a different color the blue and black lines might stay the same. But since the arrows are black a small but measurable length appears – around one millimeter. (I worked in a jewelry factory at one time, and got used to seeing very tiny differences, fractions of millimeters. After that, inches looked HUGE.)

    That said, the illusion still works because the apparent change seems much larger than the actual change.

  6. Speaking of Rudolf Hoss, I highly recommend the book “Hanns and Rudolf” by Thomas Harding. The author’s great uncle is Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who tracks down Rudolph Hoss.

  7. I was going to take my gigantic yellow dog to agility but I worried it would be hard on her gigantic joints. She is so high stim that I think she would love it. Also with me having frequent migraines, I didn’t know how much I could commit to it and my experience where I went for dog training was good for what we learned but bad for how cliquey and mean girlish it was.

    1. Sorry to hear your experience with dog training. We had some bad experiences before finding a great trainer. My highly reactive, dog aggressive, neurotic border collie (acquired as a 7 year old adult dog with “issues”) thrived in the highly structured environment of the agility class. We were never very good but it really helped him build trust with me and overcome his issues (along with a lot of training specific for aggression).

      1. That’s really great. Where I went, they taught us skills that were really good and my dog was very well trained, but they were a very cliquey group. I have so many horror stories to tell about this and how it would result in being treated badly.

  10. Our cats don’t like walking on gravel either. They jump from paving stone to paving stone to avoid it, as do I when barefooted. When they do walk on the gravel to check out something sufficiently interesting, they walk gingerly.

  11. Without wishing to question Hili’s altruism*, perhaps she doesn’t like walking on gravel but has clever deflected attention to Cyrus to preserve her apparent purrfection in our eyes.

    *you just know that when somebody starts with “without wishing to question…”, they are about to do exactly what they claim they don’t wish to.

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