Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 15, 2018 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning, welcome to the day where the world got its the first registered domain on the internet in 1985, symbolics.com. Yes, the domain still exists and has been turned into a kind of internet museum.

It’s the birthday of evangelist and fraud Jimmy Swaggart (1935), and musicians Terence Trent D’Arby (1962) & will.i.am (1975).

Deaths today include, Julius Caesar in 44 BC, surely a contender for most dramatic death ever although we probably have Shakespeare to thank for that, and writer HP Lovecraft in 1937 who has taken on a new life in the Age of the Internet as the spawn point of countless Cthulhu memes.

Putin has inspired a new meme all his own this week.

And someone has been spending his time productively and has produced a visual chart aid for Billy Joel’s 1989 song “We didn’t start the fire”.

Here’s something I did not know about walruses. (Okay, there’s a lot I don’t know about walruses, but this was one of them).

https://twitter.com/shingworks/status/973931851873046528

Finally, a remarkable encounter while skydiving.

Onto the cat portion of this post.

Someone has clearly been fat-shaming Hili.

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: How to lose weight before the next meal.

In Polish:

Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Jak schudnąć przed następnym posiłkiem.

And up in Winnipeg, It’s too darned hot for Gus, the spoiled cat of the century….

And as a lagniappe, a public service announcement.

Hat-tip: John H. ; Matthew

36 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “We didn’t start the fire” – instant ear worm – and history worm?… why did you do this to me!?

  3. Found out the walruses are nicknamed “tooth walker”, because they use their tusks, which are indeed teeth, to haul themselves out of the water**. Both sexes have tusks.

    ** and harem protection

    And that isn’t skydiving – the rig we can see is that used for paragliding. Another hipster holiday adventure coming to a venue near you if you’re blessed with hills, cliffs or mountains! There’s loads of “parahawking” vids on the net – this is the one with the least offensive music [but still crap] – couldn’t find one with just natural sounds:

      1. I can’t be doing with the panpipes genre, or the airy female backing vocals genre, or the plinking xylophone genre – all those genres that are put at the back of compilation videos.

        I note that aerobatics videos have their own horrible range of inspirational ‘musical’ genres too these days! It varies from Drum’n’Bass through Grime & on to Enya or Corrs soundalikes. Vomitous crap.

    1. More bad Putin jokes. He will be re-elected with 70% of the vote and no credible accusations of election fraud.

      1. After living in a Soviet satellite where elections are won by over 99%, I am sooo glad to live in a country where they never get anywhere close to 70%. Not to mention that opposition figures are part of life, rather than gunned down or poisoned.

  5. Hili may be practicing Trump Think on food. Next we will put a tariff on food and that will fix everything.

  6. Holy cow, Terence Trent D’Arby! Haven’t heard that name in decades. Since the fame of his first album. Back when it came out I thought it was pretty good and that he would likely become a star. Then he disappeared and I’ve never heard of him until now. I think I still have a vinyl copy of his 1st album in my collection. I’ll have to re-visit it.

    1. Back in the day he said that his first album was the best thing since Sgt. Pepper. He now goes by the invented moniker Sananda Maitreya & he’s still got an ego bigger than the combined Gallagher bros + Madonna. I do admire him for being a true singer/songwriter with a unique voice [although he can sound like a Stevie Wonder tribute act] & having an unfailing self-belief that’s kept him bobbing on the surface. Unfortunately his lyrics lean towards the trite or space-cadet-hippy & he rhymes the hell out of everything – e.g. illusions/delusions

      Here’s a recent example free from his usual plodding, crooning, cabaret vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHgbpYtFfU

      1. Now that you mention it I do recall that his ego was his most defining characteristic. I wonder if that had anything to do with his quick fade into relative obscurity after such a promising start? I seem to remember him claiming to be better than Michael Jackson too.

        1. Yes – he didn’t/doesn’t take advice on contracts etc & lords it. He has his own website to sell music which is a good idea for him! I wonder how he keeps his session/touring musicians? Perhaps he doesn’t.

    2. Oh yeah – just remembered TTD filled in for the deceased Michael Hutchence around 1999 for INXS live gigs. Nobody alive can fill in for Hutchence of course. 🙂

      1. Huh! Never knew that, don’t know how I missed it.

        Agreed about Hutchence. I’ve fairly recently come to appreciate INXS’s Hutchence era music all over again after years of not listening to it. It seems to me to have aged very well. And I really notice just how good his voice is, more so than I did in my 20’s.

        There was a music talent search show on years ago, can’t think of the name of it, that featured INXS and the goal was to find a new lead singer for the band. Dave Navarro (talk about plus sized egos) was the host. I thought they picked the wrong lead singer. Should have gone with the other of the final two.

        1. 2005, CBS, Rock Star: INXS according to Wiki – I never bothered with them after Hutchence. You’re right about Navarro!

          But the WIKI has an amusing rock band timeline near the bottom. Unusual – rock steady band members over the years, but a flurry of singers. Doesn’t work for me normally although I did enjoy Queen fronted by Paul Rodgers live.

  7. The death of Caesar has been immortalised in art many times, but never so movingly as Kenneth Williams’ portrayal:

    1. The darling Kenneth! I loved the disgracefully camp homosexual Julian & Sandy sketches on the 60s Round The Horne BBC radio show, although I was too innocent to appreciate it fully. I stole this from the WIKI :-

      SANDY: Don’t mention Málaga to Julian, he got very badly stung.
      HORNE: Portuguese man o’ war?
      JULIAN: Well I never saw him in uniform…

  8. Apologies for the possibly rule-breaking comment here:

    Did anyone view Sam Harris’ gig with Steven Pinker?

    I can’t get it to work and it runs out in 24 hours WTF.

    … only reason I might get away with this is the discussion is about Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now.

    1. You can’t get ‘it’ to work???

      Paste a link here to what you can’t get to work
      And supply basic details of your Operating System [Apple, Windows, other], device [phone, tablet, Mac, PC].
      Too much info is better than your usual ‘not enough’ 🙂

      2. [1] I’m logged in
        [2] When I click the “>” on the video I see this on screen:

        WAKING UP BOOK CLUB
        SAM HARRIS in conversation with STEVEN PINKER
        MARCH 14, 2018, DOLBY THEATRE, HOLLYWOOD, CA

        [3] In the middle of the video screen it says in white letters “Stream unavailable”
        [4] At the bottom of the webpage I see this:

        “In this first Waking Up Book Club event, we’re streaming live from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Watch Sam Harris interview Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”

        [5] NOWHERE do I see wording that says this video is available for 24 hours. Where is that piece of information displayed?

        I read the video wording as saying you can watch it live only [streaming] rather than for a few hours after the live event.

        1. The email alert says :

          “Subscribers of SamHarris.org will be able to watch the entire Waking Up Book Club event with Sam Harris and Steven Pinker via live stream at 8pm Pacific Time on March 14th, 2018. The video will remain available for 24 hours following the event.
          ”

          …. still not working.

          It sort of looks like it’ll work, and then – bupkis.

          Thanks for checking – that helps. … hmmm, maybe … what browser did you use? “Stream unavailable” is not what I see in Safari.

    2. Here is an explanation from Sam Harris’s Twitter feed https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/974220360869531648.

      Hope this link works, if not, go to his Twitter feed and scroll down until you see the explanation (15 Mar. 2:46AM. Here is one reply:
      Replying to @SamHarrisOrg @sapinker
      thanks for the info — i thought it was just me or my computer.

      So you were not alone, and it wasn’t your computer.

        1. Thank you!

          (I’ve been successful at weaning myself off of The Social Media Which Shall Not Be Named… to my own detriment, perhaps.)

          … and I guess everyone is hammering on the site now, explaining its performance….

  10. Re Caesar. Wikipedia has multiple lists of unusual deaths including a list of inventors killed by their own inventions.

    But for most dramatic death ever, I’d say it was a tie between Caesar and Rasputin.

    1. I’d agree. Astounding to me how difficult it was to kill Rasputin.

      Re the death of Empedocles, unfortunately, it’s surely apocryphal (and Diogenes Laertius records several unrelated versions of his demise), but if it were real, the vision of Empedocles leaping into Mt. Etna, to prove that he was a god, is the most dramatic (and egotistical) death that I could think of; and I love it that the legend goes on to say that the volcano spit out one of his bronze sandals, showing him to be mortal after all.

  11. “symbolics.com first registered domain name.”
    OY! A Symbolics LISP machine was a novel computer on which I spent quite a few months on a project which I won’t detail. It is credited as being the first “workstation” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics). It was based on the LISP (LISt Processing) language with many outstanding features.
    The company eventually went under and the domain name now belongs to a group that now displays an enjoyable cruise through computer and Internet history.

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