Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

January 16, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Wednesday, January 16, 2019, and two days before I return to what will probably be a frigid Chicago (I see a big storm is predicted). It’s National Hot and Spicy Food Day and I am in fact going to have some. In the U.S. it’s National Religious Freedom Day, which, given that it’s celebrating Jefferson’s Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom, passed on January 16, 1786, includes freedom from religion as well.

It was not a huge day in history. In 1707, the Scottish Parliament ratified the Union with England Act, assuring that the two “states” would be part of the same kingdom and ruled by the same monarch. As noted above, it was on this day in 1786 when Virginia enacted Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious freedom, one of the three accomplishments he wanted chiseled on his tombstone (do you know the other two?).

On January 16, 1909, three men from Ernest Shackleton’s expedition reached the magnetic South Pole but not the geographic South Pole, which was “conquered” by Roald Amundsen’s team in 1911. Exactly ten years later, the U.S. formally ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, bringing prohibition into effect within a year. The prohibition of alcohol was rescinded when the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified in 1933.

On this day in 1945, Adolf Hitler moved into the Führerbunker as the Russans approached Berlin. He committed suicide there on April 30. Exactly forty years ago, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled from Iran to Egypt with his family. After surgery for cancer in New York and a brief stay in Panama, Pahlavi died in Egypt in 1980. Finally, on January 16, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia took off off for its 28th mission, but 16 days later it disintegrated due to heat-shield damage, killing all 7 astronauts aboard.

Notables born on this day include: André Michelin (1853), Eric Liddell (1902; remember him from “Chariots of Fire”?), Dizzy Dean (1910), Susan Sontag (1933), Sade (1959), and Kate Moss (1974).

Those who died on January 16 include Edward Gibbon (1794), Arnold Böcklin (1901), Marshall Field (1906), Carole Lombard (1942), Herbert W. Armstrong (1986), Andrew Wyeth (2009),

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a new experience: having to be patient.

A: I will see to you in a moment, but first I have to check my emails.
Hili: He is trying to catch up with lost time.
In Polish:
Ja: Zaraz się tobą zajmę tylko sprawdzę pocztę.
Hili: On goni czas utracony.

 

Leon is in southern Poland with his staff for their annual winter hiking trip, but there will be no hiking today:

Leon: I’m afraid that today’s weather is not conducive to hiking.
Leon: Obawiam się,że dzisiejsza aura nie sprzyja spacerom.
A cartoon sent by reader David, who found it on Michael Shermer’s Twitter feed (@MichaelSchermer).

And one from reader Brujo, who titles this cartoon “TSA Agent Moses,” and added, “Considering your recent unfortunate experiences with TSA, and that you come from Jewish forebears, I thought that you might get a kick out of this.”

Tweets from Grania, starting with a beautiful and friendly domestic mallard:

https://twitter.com/round_boys/status/1084877791261278210

Cat’s Paradise, or the feline version of the Garden of Earthly Delights:

https://twitter.com/arthurkflam/status/1085027178792644609

A nice man helps a thirsty pigeon (I may have posted this before, but it’s always good to see an act of kindness towards animals):

A male cedar expends much of its resources on pollen (from male cones) to fertilize distant female cones:

And a really nice video of cats and dogs escaping from confinement:

Tweets from Matthew. I’m not sure how this first one illustrates the point given that there’s an English translation:

This is some library! I wonder how Jenkyns found anything?

Another great example of a spider that mimics an ant (count the legs):

The first rule of Cat Fight Club: put the cat to sleep:

I’m not sure how much the whales are enjoying this, but the dolphins sure seem to be having a good time.

 

38 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)”

    1. And today’s lesson is: remember to hit the Post button when you finish typing!

      Either that or refresh the page before doing so 😀

      1. I was so looking forward to advising PCCE about the 6/8 thing that I was quite disappointed on scrolling down to find that all three existing comments were on the same subject.

          2. Shame :dragon: doesn’t insert a dragon… pasting them in is a pain on a laptop. This is especially galling when [colon]mrgreen[colon] produces :mrgreen: and I have no idea what this is supposed to be – it isn’t even a standard emoji, unlike all the Tw*t*t*r emojis that are supported.

      1. Wales is a bilingual country. All locals are expected to speak either English or Welsh. It’s not about tourists who can speak what they want.
        Same for Scotland, or at least the Galteachd part of the country.

        2. Seems to me, being bilingual could be quite uncomfortable, if say, half of your body did the trip in 6 minutes while the rest of you took 8.

  2. I’m not sure how this first one illustrates the point given that there’s an English translation

    6 seems to have become 8, so I guess it is quicker in Welsh 😎

  4. “This cedar tree virtually explodes with pollen when someone shakes it.”

    As this concerns dissemination of gametes, you can also describe it as an “ejaculation” 😉

  5. Interesting video of the animal escapes. A lot of people probably think it’s cute.

    Too bad it doesn’t show some of them subsequently being hit by cars or eaten by predators, or killing someone else’s animals.

    And, imagine thinking your pets are safe, only to come home and find them gone.

    There are good reasons for fences.

    L

    1. I winced at some of them, especially the dog trying to get over a tall fence which had some very spiky metal things on the top. It was cool to watch but I’d have found it hard to just stand there and film it when the dog looked like it might get skewered.

      1. I found the whole thing hard to watch.

        I have had livestock attacked by dogs, and it was horrible. That was over 40 years ago, and I vowed I’d never let it happen again.

        I have neighbors who thought it was cool to “let their dogs run fee”. They purport to care about their animals, but at least one of them got hit by a car. I know this because I found the remains when I was out walking.

        And, when I told them I didn’t want their animals over here, they got really mad and called me a liar.

        We have fixed that problem. We now have security cameras up, so whenever we get a dog on the footage, I just forward it to Animal Control.

        L

    2. It’s not just domestic animals that can figure these locks out. I once raised some chickens (for their eggs) and it took two different kinds of closures -one hasp and one bolt- to function as an effective raccoon deflector. They could figure out either one of the closures but some reason never got it that both had to be done to open the door. But it took ME a while to learn that I needed two at a time; in the meantime I lost several good layers.

  6. National Religious Freedom Day, includes freedom from religion as well. I doubt many religious Americans know that.

  7. Another cool thing about this species of ant-mimicking spider is that its rear end mimics the face of an ant. Alex Wild describes a similar species, and with that one when an ant approaches the spiders “face” to communicate, the spider… turns around.

  9. Early enough in my martial arts training for it to do me some good, the best piece of fight advice I ever got (besides the expression, “no plan survives a punch in the face”) was that size matters, but ferocity matters more (as anyone who has wrangled with a feral cat attempting to escape has learned the hard way.)

  10. I was surprised to see the news that Carol Channing died yesterday. I had no idea that she was still going strong and I hope she enjoyed reaching the grand age of 97.

  12. “It was not a huge day in history. In 1707, the Scottish Parliament ratified the Union with England Act, assuring that the two “states” would be part of the same kingdom and ruled by the same monarch.”

    You’ll forgive me if, as a Brit, I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that the creation of the United Kingdom wasn’t a significant day in history.

    1. Well since it has pretty much zero chance of seeing it’s quatricentenary … celebrate while it’s available.

  13. So, was Jefferson involved in the Boston Tea Party? Perhaps that is the explanation for one third of the ‘t’s going missing from the link to his Statute wiki entry.

  14. #Whales and #dolphins playing together in the Pacific Ocean 6:10 AM – Jan 12, 2019
    This merry clip reminds me of an amusing wordplay I once read somewhere:
    He watched the buoys and gulls playing in the water.
    .-

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