Sunday: Hili and Leon

54 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili and Leon”

1. “1967 – Kellyanne Conway, American political strategist and pundit, breathtaking liar.”

   History books will put it slightly more gently, but this will do nicely for now.

   1. And she works for a hell of a teacher.

   2. +1

   3. Kellyanne’s husband, George Conway, although a conservative, is a harsh critic of Trump, calling him a pathological liar. I wonder what this couple talks about at home.

      1. Yeah, reminds me a bit of James Carville and his wife Mary Matalin.

   4. Hey, how many times does KAC have to explain to you people? It’s not “lying”; it’s “alternative facts.” Got it?

      1. Well, in legal circles alternative facts are a well known consturct; anyone who defines them as falsehoods is wrong, so there!

         Mind you, the Guardian was peculiarly incapable of finding it defined online anywhere, so I have to say that I know which definition I subscribe to 😀

      2. Much as I dislike Kellyanne Conway, her “alternate facts” made a certain amount of sense. Presenting alternate facts is also known more negatively as “cherry picking”. Of course, it didn’t change the fact that Trump misrepresented his inaugural crowd size. He wasn’t cherry picking but lying outright.

         1. “Presenting alternate facts is also known more negatively as “cherry picking”.”

            This could only be true after ignoring all of many times that those “alternative facts” are actually false.

            1. I was talking about the definition of “alternate facts”, not about any particular such “fact” nor KAC’s truthfulness. She’s as much a liar as Donald Trump.

   5. Yes but the Nobel prize for lying goes to Sarah Sanders.

      1. And then of course there’s the hapless Ron Ziegler. “This is the operative statement. All others are inoperative.”

         cr

2. Some type of fiddler crab I think.

3. I rememberd Wickramasinghe from his interest in “red rain”; he had quite an interest in panspermia, in conjunction with Hoyle, and struck me at the time as a bit wedded to gods.

   Wiki would appear to confirm this view:

   Wickramasinghe attempts to present scientific evidence to support the notion of cosmic ancestry and “the possibility of high intelligence in the Universe and of many increasing levels of intelligence converging toward a God as an ideal limit.”

   1. Chandra Wickramasinghe: he’s become a minor league scammer. To maintain a high profile, so as to get mugs to send grants his way at his private university [Buckingham], he gets a story or two in the press every year about discoveries which he bends to fit his [& Hoyle’s] panspermia model. He still thinks two of the oldest Archaeopteryx fossils are forgeries – the creationists have been using his wrong headed idiocy for 35 years.

      I don’t recall him ever, ever backing away from his many false [some of them honest errors] claims. I despise the guy.

      1. Hoyle dissed the Archaeopteryx fossil that the Natural History Museum has, shame he didn’t live long enough to be proved wrong, by science… I think he also tried to cling to steady state long after everyone else, though I could be wrong about that.

         Chandra Wickramasinghe: he’s become a minor league scammer.

         I am not surprised. There was a program in the Horizon series that featured him pretty much to the exclusion of anyone with a contrary opinion during the “red rain” investigation, and my overarching impressions was a tub thumper with a fixed idea that evidence will confirm, one way or another. In particular was the organic nature of the redenning agent and its resemblence to biological cells. His instant response to the lack of cellular machinery was ‘unknown type of life’ rather than ‘interstingly shaped organic compound’.

         1. I should say conclusively proved wrong… I think the NHM did a fair job of brushing off his claims that it was a constructed fake after the original claim by Hoyle.

         2. Which steady state do you mean?

            1. Fred Hoyle didn’t believe in the big bang (to him it smacked of a creator), so he had a few mental gymnastics to reconcile a steady state universe with the galaxies moving apart – read about it on Wiki here.

   2. Chandra Wickramasinghe as a biologist??! I have to call *major* BS on that. He has been in the creationist camp and was in fact flown in to support the creationists in the McLean v. Arkansas creationism trial. He was quickly discredited by both sides when he first agreed (after questioning by the evolution side) that the Earth was far older than the thousands of years that young Earth creationists insist (inflaming the very people who paid for his flight), and then when it was pointed out by the evolution side that he had claimed that insects were actually smarter than people but they have been hiding that from humanity. Apparently, insects can’t fool Wickramasinghe!! His actual knowledge of biology is somewhere south of the 4th grade.

      Also note that he got his worthless musings published in the largely crackpot “Journal of Cosmology”, where he is an “Executive Editor”.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLean_v._Arkansas
      https://harpers.org/archive/1982/04/repealing-the-enlightenment/
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe
      https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology

4. JFK was the youngest elected president. I think Teddy Roosevelt was the only younger president when, as the sitting VP, he took office after the assassination of William McKinley.

   Kennedy was only the second Catholic ever nominated for the presidency by a major party. Former Democratic NY governor Al Smith was the first, and he lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928, widely believed because he was a Catholic, and there had been a whispering campaign against him about how he’d be beholden to the pope.

   IIRC, there’s been only one other Roman Catholic presidential nominee since, another Massachusetts senator with the initials JFK, John F. Kerry. (Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic nominee, also from MA, was, I believe, Eastern Orthodox, which is Catholic of a sort, I suppose, if you’re willing to overlook that little East-West Schism thing back in 1054. 🙂 )

5. The crab is a male fiddler crab. The outsized claw is used as a display to keep other males away from its burrow, and to attract females to its burrow. They can’t really pinch with it, or do much of anything else but wave it. They must feed themselves with the one tiny claw that they have.

   1. “They must feed themselves with the one tiny claw that they have.”

      Seems so sad…

6. The video of that “dignified” cat recalls the scene in the opening chapter of Ken Kesey’s third and final novel, Sailor Song, wherein a cat gets it’s head stuck in a mayonnaise jar.

7. I dunno. Looks like that Pangolin is climbing to me.

8. In addition to thus of history, ” 1961 – John
   F. Kennedy is inaugurated the 35th President
   of the United States of America, ” too,
   thus: 2017 – Donald J Trump is inaugurated.
   cuz, well, Americans, full – well knowing
   .who. he is, used their democratic right
   to vote him in. As their 45th one,
   ten presidents later.

   Same right, also full – well knowing .who.
   he is, as the northwest Iowans a couple of
   months ago voted in .again. “to serve”
   for them within the US House.

   Small town northwest Iowan and Pulitzer Prize
   Award – winner Mr Arthur Cullen’s take,
   with which I utterly concur, because:
   We Americans .did. this. We did.
   Full – well knowing so … … AS we did it:
   http://www.stormlake.com/articles/2019/01/18/king-must-serve.

   Cuz ? .That. ? .That. is .who. we truly are.

   Blue

9. There’ve been some famous cases where one partner expired during the act of sexual congress — Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Pryor’s daddy, come to mind — but those turtles 50 mya are the first I’ve heard of where both both met their end in flagrante delicto (at least that didn’t involve a jealous spouse and a firearm, anyway).

   1. Wait. Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Pryor’s dad were lovers?

      😉

      1. You heard it here first. 🙂

   2. The slight advantage is the female turtle didn’t have something depressing to get over.

      1. Spared post-coital tristesse? 🙂

         1. Precisely.

   3. Richard Pryor on his dad’s death: “he came as he went.”

   4. http://pbfcomics.com/comics/one-time-thing/

      😎

      cr

10. Does anyone know when the Lunar eclipse starts in places other than the UK? Skywatchers await ‘super blood wolf moon’ states

    The entire eclipse will be visible from North and South America, as well as parts of western Europe (including the UK) and north Africa.

    and in the UK it starts at 02:37 and ends at 07:48, which is a very long eclipse. Even the totality is from 04:41 to 05:43, so I might stand half a chance of seeing this one, assuming the North Sea doesn’t send cloud and mist down the Humber like last time.

    The last solar transit was similarly obscured for me, so I don’t have a good track record with infrequent astronomical phenomena!

    1. A clear view in the UK? Slim odds ~ pointless getting out of a warm bed on a Monday on the off chance. Here’s a chart of American times [each column is the local time for that column NOT UTC, GMT etc] for those interested:
       https://flic.kr/p/2cW5c9z

       1. Thanks… I knew someone would have a source to hand 😀

          I will probably get up and have a look – you never know your luck. The last transit looked promising and I had my sun projector all lined up and ready; clouds came in about 10 minutes before the transit started and remained throughout (well, I swear I saw the very end, but that could be wishful thinking).

       2. Thanks. The weather in my neck of the woods is likely to be overcast. However, the event will probably be visible on the web somewhere.
          This “Space dot com” article has several short films explaining the eclipse.

          https://www.space.com/43071-super-blood-wolf-moon-2019-weather-forecast.html

       3. About an hour ago the sky was clear and there was a very bright full moon. Now that the moon is around half eclipsed, the cloud is getting thicker and thicker. So, Michael, you were quite correct… I suspect in around 40 minutes at totality I won’t even see a hint of red in the sky 🙁

          1. I should have looked at the video ofthe weather forecast that is on the page I linked to above… around the critical time there is a thin tongue of cloud that sweeps across from Scandinavia and makes a beeline for us! At least my friends in North Yorkshire and Cumbria will get a good view.

             Ho hum, I am up now so I am certainly going to step outside in 30 minutes, just on the off chance 😀

          2. Same here – almost 5am & all is grey

             1. 05:51 I have just been out… mostly red with a small bright strip at the top, so it is the end of totality but at least the sky cleared in time to see someting of the actual eclipse.

                Thank you universe!

       4. At the moment we are seeing totality on Griffith Observatory:

          https://www.facebook.com/newshour/videos/296194531039632/

          1. Ta

          2. Morocco?

             1. Seems so.

11. Best. international. mash note. ever.

    and

    Best. horror novel. practical joke. ever.

    1. I have seen that same claim regarding the book being thrown into water (or otherwise disposed of) and a fresh copy being soaked (or other, relative to the initial disposal) and replaced several times over the years.
       The water has been a lake, a river, an ocean or sea; it has been tossed into a garbage truck (the replacement dumped into rubbish to coat it with various foul stains); it’s been burnt (the replacement charred); the reader has been a parent, a sibling, an in-law, a boss.
       I’m quite sure that it never actually happened, but it does make for a good story.

12. IMHO, the Shoebill Stork is more a living cartoon than a living dinosaur. Other bird species have more of the dinosaur look. All of them have the dinosaur genes, of course.

    1. “living cartoon”

       Precisely.

    2. That is a very good description… my first thought was of an original illustration by John Tenniel, though I can’t find one of a stork (illustrations from Carroll’s work tend to come up in search). I am sure I have seen one, I just can’t place where.

    3. It has that built-in self-satisfied smirk on its face.

       cr

13. Beautiful animals, both the living and the extinct. Hili is photographed from a nice angle. The puppies make one want a d*g.

14. I love pangolins. Totally cute. Looks like a cross between an anteater and a pine cone.

    cr

Comments are closed.