Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 25, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s the first Tuesday of autumn in this hemisphere—September 25, 2018—and it’s both National Lobster Day and National Food Service Worker’s Day (but who is the one worker implied by the placement of the apostrophe?).

Here’s a lobster joke:

A man walks into a bar carrying a large lobster and orders a double scotch. The barman pours him a drink and remarks “That’s a good sized lobster you have there.”

“Do you like lobsters?” asks the man, who has obviously had several scotches prior to his arriving in this bar.

“I love them.” replies the barman.

“Well, here. Take it.” The drunken sod passed the lobster to the barman.

“Thank you very much.” he said. “I’ll take it home for dinner.”

“No, no, no.” said the drunk. “He’s already had his dinner, why don’t you take him to see a movie or something?”

It’s also the Christian feast day of Finbarr of Cork, the city where dwelleth Grania.

Today’s Google Doodle reminds us that election day is six weeks away, and clicking on it will, if you’re American, take you to information about how to register to vote in your state. I’ll be out of the country on Election Day but have already applied for an absentee ballot. Let’s drain the swamp!

On September 25, 1237, England and Scotland established their common border by signing the Treaty of York.  On this day in 1513, the Spanish explorer Vascu Núñez de Balboa finally reached the Pacific Ocean. This is from Keats, referring to the wrong guy:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
On this day in 1789, the U.S. passed 12 amendments to the Constitution, including the ten now called the Bill of Rights. On September 25, 1957, the government desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas by using Army troops. And, in 1974, according to Wikipedia, “The first ulnar collateral ligament replacement surgery (Tommy John surgery) [was] performed, on baseball player Tommy John.” Finally, exactly four years ago, O’Hare airport here in Chicago regained its title as the world’s busiest airport by passing Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia. But now we’re back to #6, passed by these in decreasing order of business (passenger traffic): Hartsfield, Beijing, Dubai, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. How embarrassing! I’ve been to all of these airports but can speak knowledgeably only of Hartsfield and Los Angeles airports, both of which SUCK big time.
Notables born on September 25 include Fletcher Christian (1764), Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866, my academic great grandfather and Nobel Laureate), William Faulkner (1897), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906), 1929, Barbara Walters (she’s 88 today and still going strong), Shel Silverstein (1930), Glenn Gould (1932) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (1969). Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on this day include Miller Huggins (1929), Ring Lardner (1933), Emily Post (1960), Erich Maria Remarque (1970), George Plimpton and Edward Said (both 2003), Andy Williams (2012) and Arnold Palmer (2016).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili guffaws at on something Andrzej just wrote. As Malgorzata explains, “In a way this is Hili’s comment on Andrzej’s article of today, “Will artificial intelligence give us artificial rationality?” (funny, ironic, sad and serious at the same time).

A: Did you read it? Reportedly humans are more and more rational
Hili: Don’t make me laugh.
In Polish:
Ja: Czytałaś? Podobno ludzie są coraz bardziej racjonalni.
Hili: Nie rozśmieszaj mnie.
Yesterday Andrzej and Malgorzata visited Andrzej the Second and Elzbieta, as well as Leon, who got some Japanese “cat’s snacks” sent by Hiroko Kubota:

Leon: I’ve been waiting all year for this Japanese delicacy.

A tweet from reader Blue, once again proving that cats are part liquid:

https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/1043812517192114177

and a tweet from Matthew. Yes, the Bible says this!

Tweets from Grania: The first one is stunning (turn video on to see dolphins having fun):

Emus are just bizarre—the most dinosaurian of ratites:

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1043444568308547585

Sound on:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1043889030851698688

Baby tabbies are adorable. Here’s on cooling off in a bodega:

Clearly a bird with strongly developed aesthetic tastes. . . .

Grania’s answer to this question is “cat videos!”

Grania calls this “religion as absurdist theater”:

I want one of these! This one’s at University College Cork, but I could use it in my office:

Matthew sent a cartoon from SMBC by Zack Weinersmith. Clearly mortality is weighing on him, as it is on me:

18 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Nice lobster joke. Please – the year on the bill of rights thing was 1789. And after that it was not until 1791 that the bill of rights was ratified by the states. The dates are important for all of those who somehow think the boys in Philly simply went there to do a bill of rights. They had nothing to do with it in 1787.

  2. Early voting started yesterday here in Wisconsin. I was #3 downtown at City Hall. Somehow it felt like I could hurry the process along.

    1. Hurry the process along? Why? Don’t you just love all the fascinating campaign advertisements on radio, television, print media in your mailbox, internet, billboards and random posters of stickers in public places?/s

  3. I wouldn’t trust the rainbow-flag-burning Chicago priest to be left all alone in the sacristy with an altar boy.

    Just sayin’.

    1. I know I shouldn’t read too much from a picture, but damn if that priest (father?) doesn’t look like he’s got a touch of the fanatic about him in that picture. It’s the eyes.

    2. Note to priest: It’s a FLAG. It is an inanimate object. It does not have a soul. It cannot be possessed by demons. Exorcising it is futile and pointless. (And would be even if souls, demons and exorcism existed).

      That white pod thing in the UCC library that is busy devouring a human – that, now, needs to be exorcised and destroyed with fire.

      cr

  5. Apparently cats ARE part liquid. I’d name that orange one “Slinky”.
    I wonder what the little mouse sized hole in the door is all about? Maybe so if the plumbing springs a leak it won’t pile up to the ceiling.

  6. So does this mean that this feature of cats co-evolved with the seemingly collapsible skeleton of rodents like rats and mice?

  7. Two lobsters in a tank. After a while, one turns to the other and says “when are you going to learn to drive this thing?”

    Two lobsters the beach. One says to the other, “do yo fancy an ice cream?” The other says yes, so the first lobster wanders off looking for an ice cream seller. Some time later, he arrives back empty clawed. The second lobsters says
    “where’s my ice cream?”
    “well I was walking back with the ice creams and they started melting in the heat”, says the first lobster. “So I ate them.”
    “God you’re so shellfish”.

  8. It’s a good thing they didn’t have those napping pods when I was a student. I would be too tempted to pull practical jokes on the occupant…assuming I knew them.
    eg. encase their legs in silly string while they slept, hang amusing signs or notices on the pod or their shoes while they used it (dreaming of…), etc.

  11. “O’Hare airport here in Chicago regained its title as the world’s busiest airport by passing Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia. But now we’re back to #6, passed by these in decreasing order of business (passenger traffic): Hartsfield, Beijing, Dubai, Tokyo, and Los Angeles.”

    I’m surprised at that. Hartsfield might call itself “International” but I suspect that in terms of international flights Hartsfield would be way down the list. (Who wants to go to Georgia?) I’d bet the percentage of Hartsfield’s pax who are ‘international’ is quite small.

    (Checks – oh yeah, doesn’t even make the top 20.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_international_passenger_traffic
    Not surprisingly, Dubai heads that list, and I’ll bet 99% of Dubai’s are transit pax
    JFK is #19 )

    cr

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