Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 30, 2018 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning, happy weekend!

Possibly a world first: a day of complete sunshine for Ireland. We have been having wall-to-wall sun all week. [JAC: It’s positively broiling in Chicago: the high today will be 94°F or 34°C, but it won’t be as bad as yesterday, which had the same temperature but 88% humidity. It was brutal!. Things will cool down after a hot Sunday.]

In the felid world today Leon is honing his bargaining skills.

Leon: To be allowed to pet me you have to put something tasty in my bowl.

Hili is completing a detailed study of apples? I have my doubts.

A: What are you observing?
Hili: I’m looking at how apples grow.

In Polish:

Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Patrzę jak jabłka rosną.

More mimicry

Life-changing moment for a cat.

https://twitter.com/Elverojaguar/status/1012225198215651328

A man with an excellent job. I’m slightly repulsed by the cloth that gets used on nether regions and then on faces. Dude, hygiene!

https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/1012345107234852864

Windy days are a problem when you’re Farrah Fawcett.

https://twitter.com/cutecatsviral/status/1012525560046616576

A political note.

Splish splosh

Dances with Bats

And the drama queen of the week goes to this dog.

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1012328111390814209

 

Finally, Jonathan Pie has something to say about the Laura Ingalls Wilder story from last week. My own opinion is that I find it telling that the author’s name has become toxic, but apparently not her money.

I read the books as a child, and several characters say very prejudiced things about Native American Indians. It certainly would not be published today in it’s unedited form, and any such references were quite correctly sanitised out of the 1970s TV series. In context though, the characters in the autobiographical books were obsessed by news of the “Minnesota Massacre” which was pretty much a current event for them. Fear and ignorance about the causes of the events as well as the graphic accounts of the brutality of the murders no doubt fueled the attitudes held by family. If children are going to read the books they should be prepared by an adult or teacher, and the content should be discussed and challenged.

Removing the author’s name from a prize is unlikely to bring racism in the USA closer to an end.

Hat-tip: Heather, Matthew

20 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  2. The rant on the roof top was pretty good. He lost me for a bit in the middle of it all because I thought of the Streisand Effect and how it works to make mountains of mole hills.

  3. Least we forget, today is World Cup day.
    My unlikely guesses (wish?):
    France 1 / Argentina 0
    Uruguay 2 / Portugal 1

    1. I read several reports stating that Putin is using Cossacks with whips to patrol the World Cup sites. Any news of their scores? But I shouldn’t jest, because the very idea of bringing in Cossacks to enforce the law is chilling — shades of the pogroms.

    2. Worse – tomorrow is a World Cup day too, which means the TVs in the pubs will be tuned to the balls and boots, not the brmmmm-brmmmms.
      Unless … perhaps the Romanian bar ?

  4. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper (like The Deerslayer and Last of the Mohicans), written a generation before L.I. Wilder, are even more culturally offensive by today’s standards, I suppose — though after Cooper’s famous literary takedown by Mark Twain, they’re known now primarily for their infelicitous writing.

    1. I had to print out that takedown. Couldn’t stand Cooper when I was a child; now I know why. Trying to follow the link backward (which quickly reaches a dead end), I find that Twain also wrote this brief satire of Cooper’s writing http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/noble.html.

      I wish Twain were around to take on certain contemporary ‘literary lights’ who are to me drivelmeisters.

    2. I read that a long time ago and can’t really complain – Cooper is tough to read. But I have to say Twain can be a real dick. A great deal of that essay is whining about implausible story lines, as if Cooper was writing a newspaper account of Natty Bumppo’s life. It is no different to people who complain that in the movie Gravity the debris that destroyed the space shuttle was going in the wrong direction.* Love Twain -one of the best English language writers EVAR. But man he could be a dick.

      *FFS, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney played ASTRONAUTS! So why in the world would anyone complain about the movie not being “real”? Just enjoy the friggin story already.

      1. “The debris that destroyed the space shuttle was going in the wrong direction.”

        If this was unintended, in my extremely limited but concrete experience with filmmaking, filmmakers take such faux-pas very seriously; they try assiduously to avoid such blunders, wherever they occur in a film. If the tiniest, most seemingly insignificant element doesn’t match from scene to scene, the scene will be re-shot or cut entirely, And when an anomaly makes it through the editing process, the director is ridiculed.
        Audiences may not know, notice, or care; but filmmakers do.

  6. The drama queen dog has clearly been watching World Cup and is hoping for a yellow flag from the ref.

    2. That was my first thought too – that dog’s been watching the soccer.

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