Monday: Hili dialogue

February 18, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday, February 18, 2019, and National “Drink Wine” Day. Again we have the scare quotes, as if we’re only supposed to pretend to drink wine. At any rate, I’ll have to eschew the vino as it’s a fasting day for me.

We have three inches or so of snow on the ground, but the weather report says it’s pretty much done—and there will be no more snow this week. Unfortunately, I left my car on the street and so may have some scraping and digging to do.

Article of the day, from today’s Guardian, and sent by reader Chris. Click on the screenshot to read it:

News is a bit thin on this day. On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated in Alabama as President of the Confederate States of America. Then, in 1885, Mark Twain first published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the U.S., which Ernest Hemingway characterized as the source of all modern American literature.

There are two aircraft firsts today.  On this day in 1911, according to Wikipedia, “The first official flight with airmail takes place from Allahabad, United Provinces, British India (now India), when Henri Pequet, a 23-year-old pilot, delivers 6,500 letters to Naini, about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) away.” Then, jumping ahead 29 years, it was on this day in 1930 that (again according to Wikipedia), “Elm Farm Ollie becomes the first cow to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft and also the first cow to be milked in an aircraft.”

WHAT? A flying cow? Wikipedia adds this:

Elm Farm Ollie was reported to have been an unusually productive Guernsey cow, requiring three milkings a day and producing 24 quarts of milk during the flight itself. Wisconsin native Elsworth W. Bunce milked her, becoming the first man to milk a cow mid-flight. Elm Farm Ollie’s milk was sealed into paper cartons which were parachuted to spectators below. Charles Lindbergh reportedly received a glass of the milk.

You can read more about Ollie (that’s a man’s name!) at SquareCowMovers.com, where there’s a photo of Ollie about to enter the plane:

Backing up a year, it was on this day in 1929 when a very important event took place: President Hoover signed the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929. Sadly, though this got the protection of waterfowl underway, little money was appropriated for the effort. More was to come. Then, back in 1930, on the day that Ollie was milked in flight, Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh from looking at photographs.  Yes, it’s a damn planet! On this day in 1943, the Nazis did two things: arrested members of the White Rose movement, who were executed, and Joseph Goebbels delivered the famous Sportpalast speech in which he called for “total war”. You can see it below. The “total war” ended a bit more than two years later, with Goebbels’s wife Magda poisoning their children and then Magda and Joseph committing suicide.

It was on this day in 1954 that the Church of Scientology was founded in Los Angeles (sadly, it’s still going), and in 1970 the Chicago Seven were found not guilty of conspiracy to cause riots at Chicago’s 1968 Democratic Convention. On this day in 1972, in the case of People v. Anderson, the California Supreme Court invalidated the state’s death penalty, with all condemned prisoners having their sentence changed to life imprisonment (this included Charles Manson). This lasted twenty years until executions began again.

Finally, it was nine years ago today that WikiLeaks published the first set of documents revealed by the soldier Chelsea Manning.

Notables born on this day include Isaac Casaubon (1559), Ernst Mach (1838), Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848), Nikos Kazantzakis (1883), Wendell Willkie (1892), Toni Morrison (1931), Yoko Ono (1933), Cybill Shepherd (1950), John Travolta (1954), Vanna White (1957), Matt Dillon (1964), and Molly Ringwald (1968).

Tiffany designed what I think are the world’s most beautiful stained glass windows. Here’s one from the Tiffany site:

Those who expired on February 18 include Fra Angelico (1455), Martin Luther (1546), Michelangelo (1564), J. Robert Oppenheimer (1967), Harry Caray (1998), Dale Earnhardt (2001), and Alain Robbe-Grillet (2008).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is crowding Andrzej out of his chair:

A: You are taking more space than I.
Hili: Are you surprised?
In Polish:
Ja: Zajmujesz więcej miejsca niż ja.
Hili: Czy to cię dziwi?

A photo contributed by reader Merilee:

And a catty meme from Facebook:

A tweet from reader Barry, who says, “I’ve never seen a cat mesmerized like this before.” Indeed. And I may have posted this lovely video before, but it’s worth seeing again:

https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/931474634037497857

Interspecies love from Heather Hastie (via Ann German):

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1096254149719613442

Tweets from Matthew. The first has a cleverly camouflaged spider in it, but Matthew says he can’t spot it. Neither can I!

And, well, live and learn. This is great:

Matthew wouldn’t retweet this (neither would I) because he wasn’t sure whether the monkey was trained. I’m sure it was: a wild primate simply couldn’t get on a tiny bicycle and ride it. And if the monkey is trained, it’s sad. . .

https://twitter.com/Mr_DrinksOnMe/status/1095769043066208256

Now if you know the Beatles, you’re going to appreciate this a lot more than other folks. Did you have any idea? (And name the song!)

Tweets from Grania. Like the squirrels, this cat wants its dinner, but it’ll have to be satisfied with cat t.v.:

Check this out. Should we be scared?

https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1096387965222305792

Okay, somebody find out if this is normal pangolin behavior:

Sound up on this one, of course.

https://twitter.com/castellanosce/status/1095533417154994178

 

 

40 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

    1. You beat me to it! At the time it was released this did mystify me, however, goggle gives the full text of the poster with a complete explanation and context… I guess that is the benefit that the youth of today have, shame that today’s music is so lacking in mystery (GOML) 😀

  2. normal pangolin behavior?
    It seems to be normal behavior. I’ve seen two other videos of pangolins in the wild walking on their hind legs.

    1. Saw a documentary on pangolins recently. Definitely their normal behavior. The show featured one pangolin that was being kept as a pet by someone who rescues them. This one couldn’t be released into the wild for some reason. It was a surprisingly affectionate pet. They are wonderful creatures. It’s human was very dedicated, taking it on long walks to find its insect food.

  3. The Kc area has had just over 23 inches of snow this winter, with more on the way tomorrow evening. And this with a December that saw 60 degree days. Crazy.

    1. It would be interesting to see it unfold and take prey. The eyes are probably placed so that it views a fairly wide swath.

      1. From reading the Tweet I know this spider hangs out at the centre of the web where the strands meet, thus I expect it can get by without eyes for tracking prey. When I were a lad our family got by with just the one eye dug up from a rotted corpse & WE CONSIDERED OURSELVES LUCKY!

  6. I like the qualification that Ollie was first to fly in a “fixed-wing” aircraft, apparently a nod to those earlier cows who took flight in balloons and ornithopters.

      1. Actually, I’m not “anonymous” but “freiner.” I haven’t been by in a while to post. Has this happened to others lately?

        1. See the post put up here on Saturday.
          HERE’S THE LINK

          Some commenters say their browser is no longer keeping them signed in between visits to WEIT and/or browser not remembering/autofilling the name/email above the “Comment” box. Difficult to diagnose because only a subset of commenters have the problem & they don’t tend to offer useful info such as browser, browser version, exact description of problem, what they’ve tried.

          The easiest fix is to create an account at WordPress.com [you don’t have to open a site] and/or Create a GRAVATAR profile

      2. Sorry, I just noticed that my name and email address are not coming up(as they usually have) in the boxes above the comment section.

      1. Those are not original. The real Raleigh Chopper had three speed drum gears and a gear lever on the cross bar that would be guaranteed to take the rider out of the gene pool if they had the misfortune to fall off in a forwards direction.

        Proper Chopper

        1. Thanks – yes I knew that, but couldn’t be bothered to find one pic that clearly illustrated the ape handlebars & the “suicide gear stick” I mentioned in comment 10 below: “the Chopper [or wheelie bike] was a dangerous pig with a suicide gear stick & high centre of gravity. It also rusted out quickly – cheap, badly balanced crap”

  8. I was both surprised and delighted by the pangolin’s bipedality, but it’s apparently well known amongst the cognoscenti.

    Unless alarmed, the pangolin moves slowly and deliberately. It often walks only on its hind legs, the tail trailing behind as a brace.

    pp. 1240-1241 in Nowak, R.M. 1999. Walker’s Mammals of the World. 6th ed. 2 vols. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

  12. Isn’t every day a drink wine day?

    Is it a coincidence or a miracle that John Travolta was born on the same day Scientology was founded?

  13. The spine hinge is a great trait!

    Surely you are just pulling your legs:

    You should know know by now that in entomology the word “bug” is a term of art, referring specifically to members of the order Hemiptera, which includes creatures like aphids, cicadas, and leafhoppers. Things like “ladybugs” are really beetles, in the order Coleoptera.

    [ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/a-beautiful-bug/ ]

    it’s a damn planet

    Today’s sophistry:

    You should know know by now that in astronomy the word “planet” is a term of art, referring specifically to members of star orbiting differentiated bodies that clear their orbits, which includes bodies like Earth, Mars and Jupiter. Things like “damn planets” are really debris, of the type dwarf planets.

    2. In the days when Pluto was undeniably a planet, and from 1979 to 1999, it was a good pub quiz question. “Which planet is furthest from the sun?” “Pluto” “Wrong, Neptune!”

      Then the orbits uncrossed.

      cr

  15. Herbert Hoover was remarkably attuned to conservation on many fronts. I’m going to guess that it’s likely that he was lobbied on the Migratory Bird Act by his friend, political cartoonist and fellow Iowan JN “Ding” Darling who among other things designed the first duck hunting stamp (proceeds from which go to conservation efforts) in 1934.

  16. In reference to the fake AI generator.

    “When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.”

    We already have a President for that function.

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