Sunday: Hili dialogue

October 7, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day: Sunday, October 7, 2018, and National Frappe Day, honoring a liquified ice cream treat that’s called a “frappe” only in New England; the rest of America calls it a “milkshake.” It’s also International Trigeminal Neuralgia Awareness Day

Here’s Sunday on the Cheezburger site’s new calendar: “A typical week through the eyes of a [Pallas] cat“.  The manul is resting today, as did God:

October 7, 3761 BC is taken as the reference date—or the beginning of—the modern Hebrew calendar. On this day in 1868, Cornell University held its opening ceremony, enrolling 412 students. On October 7, 1916, Georgia Tech defeated Cumberland University by the score of 222-0; it was the most lopsided college football game in American history. Read the link; as the Atlanta Journal wrote:

As a general rule, the only thing necessary for a touchdown was to give a Tech back the ball and holler, ‘Here he comes’ and ‘There he goes.’

On this day in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (what we called “East Germany”) was formed, and exactly one year later, Mother Teresa established the Missionaries of Charity. On October 7, 1985, four terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front hijacked the ship MS Achille Lauro off Egypt, killing the wheelchair-bound American Leon Klinghoffer and tossing him overboard. Although the terrorists were captured with the help of the U.S., the Italians in effect let them go, and nobody ever served jail time for the crime. On this day (and read the Wikipedia link), “a hunter [discovered] three gray whales trapped under the ice near Alaska; the situation becomes a multinational effort to free the whales.”

On this day 12 years ago, the Fox News Channel gave its first broadcast, and on October 7, 1998, Matthew Shepherd, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, was tortured and left to die, tied to a fence. The two men who killed him were given life sentences.  Finally, on this day in 2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began, only a month after the 9/11 attacks.

Notables born on this day include James Whitcomb Riley (1849), Niels Bohr (1885, Nobel Laureate), Heinrich Himmler (1900), Desmond Tutu (1931), Ulrike Meinhof (1934), Harry Kroto (1939, Nobel Laureate), Oliver North (1943), Vladimir Putin (1952), Yo-Yo Ma (1955), and Tim Minchin (1975).

Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on this day include Edgar Allan Poe (1849), Christy Mathewson (1925), Leo Durocher (1991), Allan Bloom (1992), and Irving Penn (2009).

Here’s a well-known portrait of Truman Capote by Irving Penn. (By the way, get your copy of Capote’s ineffably beautiful short story A Christmas Memory now for holiday reading. The full text is also online.)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is messing with Hili:

Hili: Is there a monster in our river just like the one in Loch Ness?
A: No, ours is much bigger.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy w naszej rzece jest taki sam potwór jak w Loch Ness?
Ja: Nasz jest dużo większy.

Here’s a swell cartoon sent by reader Laurie:

Tweets from Matthew, the first showing a kea making a tool to open a treat-containing box:

This is pretty amazing—”liquefaction” of a town.

A deer gives a hunter what for, and, to my mind, this is just deserts for the killer:

https://twitter.com/SpillerOfTea/status/1048618854992289792

A cat after my own heart:

https://twitter.com/TheChickLivesOn/status/1048023218013925376

More animal revenge!

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1047433558439223297

Tweets from Grania, the first showing typical cat behavior (and a pusillanimous d*g):

https://twitter.com/CUTEFUNNYANIMAL/status/1048201421794041856

A strange but weirdly amusing cartoon:

I hope the kitten eventually got his waffle sandwich:

. . . and that this kitten got its fish:

To close, here are two more BFF kittens:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1047442640105590785

 

17 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. In hislater years, harry kroto was a tireless supporter of and contributor to k-12 science education. I met him in 2009 when he was keynote speaker at a middle and high school science teacher workshop in the rural virginia (usa) town of danville. Some 125 teachers were treated to a wonderful, entertaining and informative talk on nanotechnology from sir harry, a 1996 chemistry nobel laureate in that field. He provided many freely available online science education resources from his foundation in the uk. A wonderful example of a leading scientist giving freely of his time and knowledge to childrens’ education.

  2. I just recently learned about trigeminal neuralgia from a migraine FB group. God that must be horrible as having chronic migraines & suffering with the trigeminal nerve pain is just awful so having a condition where that nerve is like that all the time would be just hell on earth. I fear developing something like that with the spur on my neck that already gives me chronic muscle stiffness & probably does cause migraines sometimes too.

    1. For trigeminal neuralgia, especially if caused by Varicella Zoster, a Stellate ganglion block (low in the neck, the first thoraco-cervical ganglion, part of the orthosympathetic nervous system) is the most effective treatment, often spectacular.
      Note, there is a big difference between migraine and neuralgia.

  3. I just recently learned about trigeminal neuralgia from a migraine FB group. God that must be horrible as having chronic migraines & suffering with the trigeminal nerve pain is just awful so having a condition where that nerve is like that all the time would be just hell on earth. I fear developing something like that with the spur on my neck that already gives me chronic muscle stiffness & probably does cause migraines sometimes too.

    1. Now how did Diana manage to post with two different-coloured icons?

      I had a friend with trigeminal neuralgia. Very unpleasant thing to have.

      But I’m a bit – perplexed – by all these International obscure-complaint Awareness Days. I’m at a loss to know what they’re supposed to achieve. Other than being sympathetic on those occasions when I encounter someone with it, which surely just requires just common decency, how does my ‘awareness’ help anyone who’s got it?

      I’m not being snarky, just – puzzled.

      cr

      1. I think that having days that feature various maladies is a good way to educate and raise the awareness of the public about various diseases and conditions, and to me, the edcational opportunity is enough of a reason to have them, even if some of them give rise to very un politically correct chuckles and/or groans – is there a national Anal Fistula Day? A person, or an acquaintance of that person, might be exhibiting symptoms of some condition and not realize it until they read about it somewhere — it’s not always the physician who discovers something is amiss.

        That said re humans, when, prompted by the Pallas Cat calendar, I went to the Cheezburger site to peruse its offerings, and learned about a condition called “head pressing” that every cat and dog person should know about but probably doesn’t since there’s no animal disease of the month to call attention to it https://cheezburger.com/6776581/please-take-your-cat-dog-to-the-vet-if-theyre-doing-this-behavior-over-time

        One might imagine it’s a cute habit, but it ain’t.

      2. Being aware helps finding treatment. Specifically for Trigeminal neuralgia, it is medical practitioners whose awareness needs to be raised.
        [For some further info, the Trigeminal nerve is the 5th ‘brain nerve’ (there are 12) and covers the sensory innervation of the face. It has 3 branches , I: ophthalmic, covering forehead, upper lid and nose, II: the maxillary branch, covering cheek, lower lid and upper lip as well as teeth in the upper jaw, and III: mandibularis, covering the lower jaw and chin as well as teeth in the lower jaw.]

  4. Abu Abbas, the leader of the PLF, was captured in Iraq in 2003 and died in US custody a year later. So there’s that.

  5. According to comments on the attacking deer tweet, the deer is attacking a photographer, not a hunter, which might explain why there was another photographer standing just a few feet away.

    I was intrigued by the fact that the deer used its front hooves, rather than its antlers, in the attack. A quick internet search, however, shows a number of examples of deer “boxing” with one another, so this behavior seems to be in deer’s standard behavioral repertoire.

  6. I love that “sheep revenge” video. It took the abused sheep only a couple of seconds to think it all through. “Wait. I don’t have to put up with this.”

  8. I once saw a documentary on public television about Truman Capote. One memorable line of his as he stared at the camera (a captivating man): “I’m an alcoholic, I’m a homosexual, and I’m a genius.” Never forgotten that…nor “Mr. HaHa Jones”.

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