Wednesday: Hili dialogue

February 6, 2019 • 7:00 am

It’s Wednesday, February 6, 2019, and National Chopsticks Day, blatant cultural appropriation when the utensils are used by non-Asians. It’s also the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation, Ronald Reagan Day (in California), and Waitangi Day in New Zealand (see below).

News of the day, revealed by the Washington Post. Uh oh. . . . .  If the Outrage Mob has its usual way, Warren now has no chance to be elected President in 2020.

As the Washington Post reported:

The Texas bar registration card is significant, among other reasons, because it removes any doubt that Warren directly claimed the identity. In other instances Warren has declined to say whether she or an assistant filled out forms.

The card shows her name, her gender and the address for the University of Texas law school in Austin, where she was working at the time.

On the line for “race,” Warren neatly printed, “American Indian.” She left blank lines for “National Origin” and “Physical handicap” and signed the document.

“She is sorry that she was not more mindful of this earlier in her career,” said Kristen Orthman, a Warren campaign spokeswoman.

Warren filled out the card after being admitted to the Texas bar. Warren was doing legal work on the side, but nothing that required bar admission in the state, according to her campaign.

On this day in 1819, Thomas Stamford Raffles founded Singapore.  And on February 6, 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, establishing New Zealand as a British Colony (Queen Elizabeth is still the Queen of New Zealand!).  On this day in 1918, the vote was given to British women who were over 30 and “met certain property qualifications”, which apparently were women “who resided in the constituency or occupied land or premises with a rateable value above £5, or whose husbands did.”

On February 6, 1952, Elizabeth II became Queen of England when her father George VI died. According to Wikipedia,  At the exact moment of succession, [Elizabeth] was in a tree house at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya.” I guess she wasn’t crowned until later.

I was in Boston when the Great Blizzard of 1978 occurred on February 6, burying cars up to their rooftops. The streets were blocked for days, and people were cross-country skiing in Harvard Square. (The snow removers also made a huge pile of snow in the Square, and people were skiing downhill on it!) Here’s a photo from Rhode Island (not mine):

Finally, on this day in 1988, again according to Wikipedia (Greg promises us an article on why Wikipedia is a failure), “Michael Jordan makes his signature slam dunk from the free throw line inspiring Air Jordan and the Jumpman logo.” Here’s the slam dunk, achieved as Jordan’s last (and winning) effort in a slam dunk contest with Dominique Wilkins. The famous dunk starts at 2:03, and it’s a doozy.

Notables born on this day include Aaron Burr (1756), Edwin Krebs (1834), Babe Ruth (1895), Ronald Reagan (1911), Eva Braun (1912), Mary Leakey (1913), Tom Brokaw (1940), Bob Marley (1945), Michael Pollan (1955), and Rick Astley (1966).

Those who died on February 6 include Joseph Priestly (1804), Isabella Beeton (1865), Gustav Klimt (1918), King George VI (1952; see above), Barbara Tuchman (1989), Salvador Luria (1991; Nobel Laureate), Danny Thomas (1991), Arthur Ashe (1993), and Max Perutz (2002; Nobel Laureate).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is birdwatching:

Hili: This bird is an invasive species.
A: Why do you think so?
Hili: It wasn’t present in our garden yesterday.
In Polish:
Hili: Ten ptak to gatunek inwazyjny.
Ja: Dlaczego tak sądzisz?
Hili: Wczoraj go nie było w naszym ogrodzie.

Tweets from Heather Hastie. First we have a wannabee Ceiling Cat:

https://twitter.com/SlenderSherbet/status/1092505579661213708

A seal on a whale!

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1092537163718156288

King of the world, Ma!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1092464585569902599

You know what this is, right?

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1092405674296791040

Tweets from Matthew. The first describes apparent Müllerian mimicry in moths: two toxic species come to resemble each other to “make it easier” for the predator to learn the feature (in this case, the sound made by the moth) and avoid both:

For the footie fans. Matthew adds this caution before you go to the full cartoon:

Squires’ footie cartoons are full of pop culture and footballing references that only he gets all of. The comments often clear things up. You may or may not wish to post the cartoon, I can’t help you explain it all. This one is all about Everton and their managerial history and the cat.

How can you photograph them when your camera is covered with them. Twitter’s translation: “The cameraman will come closer to the animal system, but this is the strongest I’ve ever seen.”

Tweets from Grania.  The first one demonstrates that cats know perfectly how to make themselves comfortable.

In the tweet below, is Shappi referring to this Instagram post? Or maybe this one?

I don’t think this cat bathroom is woke enough, as it shows only two genders:

 

 

51 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. In the past, when being White was privileged, people would try to pass for White. Nowadays, when being anything-but-White is privileged, people try to pass for being non-White.

    1. Voting with their feet, while the intelligentsia proclaim all the privileges available on the other side of the Berlin wall.

  2. The 1970s was a great time to grow up in a place with snowy winters if you were a kid. I remember the blizzard of ‘77 as I just made it home from school and my parents narrowly missed being stranded at work. I am Gen X so at 7 I had a key to the house. These days, they’d put you in jail for allowing a child to walk home (in a blizzard no less!!) and then stay at home unsupervised for an hour until an adult came home. Here is the blizzard of ‘77 Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_of_'77

    1. I was in college in Rochester, NY, for the blizzard of ’77…mostly just remember the high winds and bitter cold of that one. Transferred to Syracuse the next year, just in time for the blizzard of ’78. In that one my car was buried in a snowbank in front of my apartment building for a month!

  4. Thanks for the remainder of the Northeast blizzard of 1978. I was working an overnight shift at a group home for autistic children in Seekonk, MA and was trapped with other staff for three days straight. My longest ever work shift. The roads were unpassable and no one could get to the house to relieve us.

    Also, I am not sure why Elizabeth Warren listed herself as an American Indian, but she was already a tenured full professor at the University of Texas by 1986. So I don’t know what this document says about her.

    SV

  6. I think that for E. Warren to claim “Indian” heritage is at least a mistake.
    Now, I cannot understand how anyone who voted for or supports Trump could make a big issue out of it. The saying about the speck and the beam in the eyes comes to mind.
    I must say, in this times of perennial outrage, I marvel at the inconsistency and lack of proportion and symmetry. I mean, I’m sure that many republicans who looked the other way for the “pussy-graber”, adulterous, pants-on-fire liar, morally corrupt Trump will have a field day with this minor transgression from their opponent.

    1. True. But, Trump seems to have acquired a Teflon coating. He’s protected by multiple layers of the callosity of low expectations.

    2. The problem is that conservatives see loyalty in spite of imperfections as a virtue and so they are able to shrug off petty attacks to keep their people in power. Liberals seem to think it is virtuous to be so committed to their ideology that they would be willing to destroy one of their own to maintain the purity of the movement. It’s virtue signaling and strikes me as a form of honor killing.

      1. Yes, they need to strike a balance. They don’t get many points with the American voters with their current attitude but, instead, lose some good politicians and help justify the false equivalence that these transgressions are made by both sides to the same degree and extent.

    3. Repeatedly claiming a bogus minority status in one’s climb up the ladder is a lot worse than a private locker room joke, but that’s just me.

        1. Yes, but with clarification. “Locker room” is obviously a euphemism here and Trump did not know he was being recorded.

          1. So what are you saying? He claimed to sexually assault women because he thought that would impress the person to whom he was talking but he was actually lying?

          2. No. I’m saying it was a braggadocio, vulgar, private routine that was never intended to see the light of day. In Billy Bush’s own words, months after he was already fired over the incident:

            “Of course he said it,” Bush added. “And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator. Along with Donald Trump and me, there were seven other guys present on the bus at the time, and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely we thought, none of this was real.”

            The only people characterizing this as “admitting to sexual assault” are the dishonest media and the gullible anti-trumpers who listen to them and don’t use critical reasoning.

          4. You didn’t answer the question. Was he lying or not?

            If he was telling the truth, he is somebody who routinely sexually assaults women and uses his position to get away y with it.

            If he was lying, you are still saying he is the sort of person who thinks it is cool to brag about committing sexual assaults and that makes him look better with other people.

            It doesn’t show the kind of judgement expected of a president, even if he was lying.

          5. Paul, to each his own. I personally give a ton of leeway to harmless private conversations and embarrassments that have been dragged into the spotlight. I think we would all want that leeway and I think the world’s a better place when we grant it.

            That’s why I don’t think the private joke is disqualifying for a President, I think it’s FAR worse to publicly call tens of millions of American citizens whom you wish to lead “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” and “Irredeemable”. Now THAT’S disqualifying, pal.

            Jeremy, You’re not getting it. He was neither lying nor telling the truth, he was joking. When you watch Andrew Dice Clay do you often wonder whether he’s lying or telling the truth?

          6. Now we are all supposed to pretend that men have never been known to brag about their sexual prowess to other men in private. Men are never crude with each other when they think no one else is listening.

            We’re now a nation of schoolboys in the principle’s office.

    4. I marvel at the inconsistency and lack of proportion and symmetry. I mean, I’m sure that many republicans who looked the other way for the “pussy-graber”, adulterous, pants-on-fire liar, morally corrupt Trump will have a field day with this minor transgression from their opponent.

      tu quoque.

      Are you proposing that, until a politician’s transgressions equal or surpass those of trump, no one can critique them?

      FTR, I will be voting in the 2020 Democratic primary, and under no circumstances will I ever cast a vote in any election for Elizabeth Warren.

  7. What is that unknown creature in the Life Under Water clip? I am not sure, but I would suggest it is a kind of jellyfish that is momentarily upside down.

    1. I’m now inclined to think it’s not a living creature. Why? I enlarged the video and looked at some stop-motion shots. Something just doesn’t seem quite right: too perfect; and what could be the use of all those little ball-like appendages on what looked like weird latent limbs.

      I searched in vain for any kind of sea creature that had even a vaguely similar appearance found none. Then I clicked on the specific thread https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1092405674296791040 — where I found this comment, “Why would the camera guy be doing a perfect circle pan, holding perfect focus, on a macro shot. Good CG.” Knowing nothing about photography, I had no idea what this was all about but it seemed worth investigating, and I learned that CG means computer generated. Then I found this, https://www.creativebloq.com/3d/behind-virtual-lens-get-know-your-cg-camera-71412345. After reading the article, I’m pretty certain that it’s CG.

    2. I think it is computer graphics added into a real shot – the camera motion up & down while moving to the right & panning to the left to keep the jelly central is a peculiar thing for the shooter to do. It’s done a lot in CGI to make the 3D more real. Also the background seems wrong – there’s a hazy wobble as if the background rocks are behind a water flow. This looks like a real aquarium shot with superimposed jellyfish but with different depth of field for the two elements [aquarium & fish].

      I’m only 50% sure of the above – underwater is strange as a matter of course

      1. I agree with you about the background, and I know sea creatures can be exceedingly strange, but I’m not convinced that’s some sort of jellyfish.

        As happens whenever I search for pelagic creatures, I did come across many strange animals that I hadn’t known of before, such as a translucent pink jellyfish, a piglet squid, and sea pigs; but nothing that remotely resembles the object, which, whatever it is, I agree is superimposed.

          1. That ping pong ball fish in the link is weird too! I looked at a load of underwater camera shots & there’s nothing like the video we’re discussing [like – meaning the geometry & motion of the shooter near the sea bed] – I’m pretty well convinced the shooter is standing outside an aquarium tank & shot that while moving & added the fish later. I’ve downloaded the Twitter video to look at tomorrow.

  8. “If the Outrage Mob has its usual way, Warren now has no chance to be elected President in 2020.”

    It’s a shame. This election cycle promises to be as entertaining as a Fellini film and her candidacy would have fit right in.

    (Apologies, sort of, to those who take politics seriously.)

  9. The problem with Warren is not just that she repeatedly made this bogus claim in her past but that she’s been obstinately doubling down on it for years. Any B-level political strategist could have seen long ago that this was the easiest of all “scandals” to diffuse right from the start; Just make a candid statement along the lines of:

    “Look, this was told to me when I was a five year old and it’s always been a part of our family lore. I literally grew up believing what I was told as a child but can now see the reality is somewhat different. I never meant any kind of offense to the proud Cherokee Nation, yada, yada….”

    And that would have been it. She would have inoculated herself from any future attacks because the vast majority of people have family tales and lore that exist on the more shadowy banks of believability. Anybody attacking her after that statement would be making themselves look petty and bullying.

    But no, Warren clung to her lie in spite of this easy, honorable out. It strikes me as pathological. She’s toast and has been ever since releasing her laughable DNA video.

    1. Ya got a point there, fella, but a Trump fan calling another politician “pathological” — well, that there is gut-busting funny.

    2. Warren clung to her lie in spite of this easy, honorable out. It strikes me as pathological

      She didn’t just cling to her lies, she morphed them on the fly:

      * My high-cheekboned pawpaw was a Cherokee indian: proven FALSE
      * My grandparents had to elope cuz my maw maw was a Delaware indian: proven FALSE and FALSE
      – gets meaningless, insulting DNA test, then in campaign launch video repeats fable about non-indian grandparents’ non-elopement.

      * I never formally claimed to be indian: FALSE
      * I did but never to employers: FALSE
      * I did but only after being hired: FALSE
      * I did but never on an official form claiming legal minority status: FALSE
      * I did but my employers never announced it: FALSE
      * I did but never sought to gain from it: LMAO

  10. Historians someday will be amazed that Elizabeth Warren got drummed out of politics for claiming Native American ancestry at the same time as Trump costs the economy billions by shutting down the government for a fake crisis at the border.

    1. That’s about the size of it. Sad as it may seem, the president already deemed the worst in history, still stands a chance of being reelected.

  11. Also, everyone here (including myself) rightly rails against the specious Lefty claims of “cultural appropriation” that pop up all the time. However, if there’s ONE form of cultural appropriation that IS wrong and (at least potentially) harmful to minorities it’s claiming you’re a minority on official career documents when you’re not.

  12. It’s too bad about Warren. I feel like she’s the only one who takes regulating Wall Street seriously. Now she’s a laughing stock to the right and a Rachel Dolezal to the left.

    1. The insect is probably a day-flying moth: no club visible on the antenna and small head/eyes. They could be after salt on the photographer’s hands. Just a guess. The bright colors, diurnal activity, bumbling behavior, and large number suggest predators find them bad-tasting.

  15. That cartoon about Everton is very true, and very near the knuckle!

    I know that in the UK we don’t really get “weather” the way you do in the US; but I am old enough to remember the Great Freeze of 1962-3, when it first snowed in mid-December, then froze, then snowed again (a White Christmas, wheee!), and stayed frozen up to March. I recall going sledging with my mate at half-term in mid-February, and the local (gentle) hill was, by then, like an ice-rink. I doubt we’ll see anything like that again; our recent cold snap was a warm summer’s day compared with the stuff you’ve had to put up with in Chicago!

  16. The Twitter translation of the butterfly photo caption is incorrect, the caption translation should be something like “Animals often come closer to the cameraman, but this is the strongest I’ve ever seen.” (Or, if you want to be more literal, “It’s often the case that animals come closer to the cameraman … “). Makes more sense,too – you can’t really chase butterflies into sitting on your camera.

  17. Oh, and the cat toilet photo caption: “お先～” translates as “You go first” or “Excuse me for going ahead of you”, depending on the circumstances.

  19. On that registration card for Elizabeth Warren, just above the race question it says:

    “The following information is for statistical purposes only and will not be disclosed to any person or organisation without the attorney’s written consent”.

    On the assumption that Warren did not give written consent, how has the Washington Post got hold of it without a serious breach of confidence occurring?

  21. “If the Outrage Mob has its usual way, Warren now has no chance to be elected President in 2020.”

    If the ‘Outrage Mob’ is opposed to politicians who pathologically lie, then only belatedly drop their tail with an insincere apology after being caught red-handed in their lie, then where do I join up?

    As rustybrown points out, Warren continued to double-down and down again, altering her story with each new revelation. Only now is she motivated to apologize directly to Cherokees.

    Warren had the opportunity to speak to concerned Cherokees in 2012 during her campaign, and she ignored them. At no point did she simply acknowledge the genealogical research showing she had no ancestors to give her Cherokee membership, which is what matters to the Cherokees she insulted. Instead, she went and got a DNA test.

    As I’ve noted before, Warren’s pathological mendacity extends beyond her imagined ancestry. She’s made up stories about her childhood, about her law school days, and has grossly misrepresented the true nature of her legal work and the identity of her clients.

    Elizabeth Warren is a fabulist and someone who thinks the rules don’t apply to her. She is unfit for elected office.

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