Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 22, 2018 • 6:30 am

First of all, if you’re in America, HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Enjoy this photo of mimicry for the holiday; and don’t forget to eat! (Today would have been a fasting day for me, but I’m postponing it until tomorrow.)

h/t: Merilee

This is today’s Google Doodle for Thanksgiving: a celebration of family and feasting shown with mice:

Thanksgiving was celebrated in Canada October 8 (this is new to me), and here was Google’s celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving, which I’ll add here:

It’s going to be a cold Thanksgiving for much of America, but, thanks to the First Moron, we can put the weather into a soothing and larger picture (h/t: Nilou). Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, here’s the Tweet of the Week:

Yes, Thanksgiving is upon us, and because I’m abjuring turkey today in favor of Chinese food, posting will be light so you (or at least youse Americans) can enjoy the yearly feed. It’s Thursday, November 22, 2018, and National Cashew Day. It’s also the earliest possible day on which Thanksgiving can fall, since it’s the third Thursday in November.

On this day in 1718, British pirate Edward Teach, aka “Blackbeard” was killed in a battle with the British Navy.  And, in 1869, the clipper Cutty Sark was launched in Dumbarton, Scotland. It’s the only one of these fast ships that survives in its entirety: here it is, reposing in Greenwich, England:

On this day in 1928, Ravel’s Boléro premiered in Paris. In 1954, the U.S. Humane Society was founded.

And, of course, you’ll remember November 22, 1963, as the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald. All of us who were alive and sentient then remember where we were when we heard the news: I was in junior high school, and the news was announced over the public address system by the school principal. (You may not know that both Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis died on that same day.)

On this day in 1968, the Beatles’ White Album was released (formally known as “The Beatles”).  On November 22, 1990, Margaret Thatcher withdrew from the Conservative leadership election, confirming the end of her tenure as Prime Minister. Finally, on this day 13 years ago, Angela Merkel became the first female Chancellor of Germany.

Notables born on this day include Abigail Adams (1744), George Eliot (1819), André Gide (1869), Charles de Gaulle (1890), Hoagy Carmichael (1899), Andrew Huxley (1917, Nobel Laureate), Terry Gilliam (1940), Billie Jean King (1943), Jamie Lee Curtis (1958), and Scarlett Johansson (1984).

Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on November 22 include Blackbeard (1718; see above), Jack London (1916), Arthur Eddington (1944), Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis (both 1963; see above), Mae West (1980), Hans Adolf Krebs (1981; Nobel Laureate), and Lynn Margulis (2011).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili demands attention (nothing new there):

Andrzej: I don’t know what to do with this mail.
Hili: Ignore it. Take care of me.
In Polish:
Ja: Sam nie wiem co robić z tym mailem.
Hili: Zignoruj go, zajmij się mną.

This is a freaky tweet sent by reader Mark Sturtevant. Who knew baby owls could look like aliens?

https://twitter.com/Daily__Owls/status/1062648564596252672

Tweets from Matthew. In the first one, you can see a bobby letting Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, into his home at 10 Downing Street.

We featured this caterpillar before, but not in a video. And this is an amazing example of mimicry: a larva pretending to be parasitized by a wasp (those cylinders are fake wasp egg cases) to fend off attacks by other parasitic wasps. I know of no similar examples.

Bathtime for hedgehogs (and Germany):

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1064605474220384258

Goodnight, sweet ‘scope. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest:

Tweets from Grania. First is a beautiful and eerie ribbon eel:

https://twitter.com/Docteur_Drey/status/1063363367828639744

A cat and a money-counting machine. The translation is “Accountant in charge of our company.”

Could the answer be 42? Not if it starts with a “t”:

https://twitter.com/SupaGirlZombie/status/1062869432479952896

Because Grania likes d*gs, she gets to contribute a d*g tweet:

https://twitter.com/FluffSociety/status/1063265531925430272

Finally, a synchronization video (remember the one with the flying bird?):

28 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “It’s Thursday, November 22, 2018, It’s also the earliest possible day on which Thanksgiving can fall, since it’s the third Thursday in November.”
    21 November?

    1. Nope.

      Mon 1st,
      Mon 8th,
      Mon 15th,
      Mon 22nd,
      Mon 28th

      The earliest date for Thanksgiving is November 22nd. The latest date is November 28th.

  3. I was in high school biology class when principal’s announcement of assassination came over the school’s speaker system (afternoon east coast u.s.) it must have been a friday and the high school football games were played on schedule that night.

  4. Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, here’s the Tweet of the Week …

    He’s the loud-mouthed, uncouth ignoramus at your Thanksgiving family dinner — and also the soi-disant “leader of the free world.”

    1. Until Trump came to power, as a citizen of the free World but not the USA, I never really questioned that phrase “leader of the free world” as applied to the US president.

      I think he’s abdicated that responsibility and I think he’s done it deliberately.

  5. I was in the 8th grade in Scottsdale, Arizona when the assassination took place.

    Yes, tell us first moron how cold it will be in Palm Beach, Florida. In Wichita, Kansas today it will be 61 degrees F. or 16 C. I’m sure it will be cold somewhere.

    1. Trump’s idiotic comment on climate change raises a question often asked about him: does he really believe in what he says (or even understand the issue) or does he say things simply to curry favor among his supporters? Perhaps it is both. Either way, he hinders the effort to reverse climate change. Amongst the myriad of dangerous legacies he will leave, this could be the worst.

      1. I agree. Screwing up the economy is bad enough. Millions could lose out. But the economy will always bounce back under better management. The heat budget of the earth, however, is like turning an enormous ship in a narrow channel. You can miss the critical point of initiation. The latest estimates say we only have about 10 years in which to initiate the turn.

  6. Guess that fathead f*ckwit of a president didn’t notice that while it might be cold in the northeast, here in the middle of the country it will be an unseasonably warm 61*F.

    1. Our Atmospheric Scientist-in-Chief not only shows us his inability to think globally, he proudly acts loco-ly.

  7. I’m abjuring turkey today in favor of Chinese food …

    Iz nu? You’re celebrating Christmas early this year? 🙂

  8. (You may not know that both Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis died on that same day.)

    Knew about Huxley; he shuffled off the coil tripping on acid, I believe. Read about it in an essay, I think by his wife, maybe as an intro to Doors of Perception.

    As for Lewis, Screwtape has its charms, but I never cared enough about the rest of his writing to know those kinda details.

  9. Wow ,you over did it with the freaky stuff today .Re the baby Owls ,i think i would have let out such as scream you could have heard it in Chicago ,plus i would have wet myself .

    You mentioned the Grantham witch ,only times she showed any human emotion was when the tory party kicked her out and when her wastrel son got lost playing in the desert

  11. My father adores most of Maurice Ravel’s music, but loathes and detests “Bolero”.

    =-=-=

    On the day of JFK’s death, I was in a Dallas, Texas classroom. Part of my k-12 private school (Greenhill) had burned down the previous summer and we were temporarily housed in Temple Emanu-El on Hillcrest in Dallas. The janitor came in at 11:00am to announce the news he had been shot and again at 1:00pm to announce his death.

    It bore directly on an experience I had 3 years later in England. A policeman was shot and killed in downtown London and it received almost the same amount of TV coverage as the Kennedy assassination had in the USA!! This was because gun violence of this kind was so rare in England!!!!!

    Had my parents transferred me to public school four months earlier than they did, then when Kennedy was shot I would have been sitting next to John Hinckley Jr. (to whom I lost an election for homeroom president in January of 1964).

    The conservative Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote an imaginary after-life dialogue between Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley. Kreeft is actually a good commentator on JRR Tolkien, but I have not been able to muster much interest in anything else he has written.

    1. Apparently Ravel himself referred to Bolero as a “piece for orchestra without music”. So your father does indeed adore all of Ravel’s music.

    2. Interesting, enjoyable post.

      “It bore directly on an experience I had 3 years later in England. A policeman was shot and killed in downtown London and it received almost the same amount of TV coverage as the Kennedy assassination had in the USA!! This was because gun violence of this kind was so rare in England!!!!!”

      I assume that was the Shepherd’s Bush shooting murders of three police officers in London. WIKI DETAILS I remember the intense media coverage. HERE’S a list of all British police officers killed in the line of duty since 1900 [it excludes ‘The Troubles’, the hundreds killed in the various WWII city Blitz bombings & non-crime accidental deaths].

      1. You are correct. I don’t think I remembered it clearly. (I was 11 at the time.)

        The wikipedia source you cite states
        “The murders caused outrage in the United Kingdom and there were calls for the reintroduction of the recently abolished death penalty and for an increase in the number of police officers trained to use firearms (British police officers are normally unarmed).”

        That list you cite is 250 names from 1900 to 2017. That’s a tad more than 2 police a year in the UK killed since 1900.

        In the United States, 48 police officers have been killed in 2018 alone. Granted we are a much larger country, but even correcting for per capita that makes the police deaths in America more than 10 times higher per year.
        (I only calculated on the basis of today’s populations, assuming the ratio of the UK’s population to the USA population is about the same.)

  13. Oh, the mention of Ravel’s Bolero has set it off wandering through my head! I’ll have to make an effort to think of another musical score to avoid going bonkers…

      1. Thank you! That’s wonderful, and my head now has something (slightly) better wandering through it…

      2. About that spit shield. Probably just more trouble than it was worth to remove it for the bird.

        1. On the other hand, you never know what a rubber bird might have caught in it’s throat. 😎

  15. It seems Cutty Sark was not just *a* clipper, but quite a noteworthy example. Clippers were built to be fast, and Cutty Sark had design features (in the hull shape) that made her one of the fastest.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutty_Sark

    Also, Cutty Sark was built from teak and rock elm, both hardwoods, which is one reason why she survived long enough to be preserved. Many of the clippers were built from softwood, which had a working life of maybe ten years, enough to comfortably recoup their construction cost carrying low-bulk high-value cargoes like tea.

    cr

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