Saturday: Hili dialogue

February 23, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Caturday Saturday, February 23, 2019, and National Banana Bread Day. That comestible has one thing going for it: it’s not zucchini bread, which is what they feed people in Hell.

Today in Russia, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, it’s Defender of the Fatherland Day, celebrating the date in 1918 when the first mass draft into the Red Army took place.

On this day in 1455, it’s the “traditional date for the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type.” (Wikipedia).  On February 23, 1836, the Siege of the Alamo began in San Antonio, Texas. In 1896, according to Wikipedia, “Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of man-made aluminium, after several years of intensive work. He was assisted in this project by his older sister, Julia Brainerd Hall.” On February 23, 1898, Émile Zola was imprisoned in France for his famous “J’Accuse” letter defending Dreyfus and accusing the French government of antisemitism and railroading Dreyfus into prison.

On this day in 1903, Cuba leased Guantànamo Bay to the U.S.—in perpetuity. That decision was deeply regretted when Castro took over.  Exactly fourteen years later, the February Revolution began in St. Petersburg with demonstrations by workers. And a decade later than that, in 1927, Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli describing his “uncertainty principle” for the first time. In 1941, plutonium was first produced by Glenn T. Seaborg.

On February 23, 1945, in Iwo Jima, the famous photo of “raising the flag” took place when a Navy corpsman and U.S. marines raised an American flag atop Mount Suribachi during the battle for the island. Wikipedia describes the scene (my emphasis):

Rosenthal put his Speed Graphic camera on the ground (set to 1/400 sec shutter speed, with the f-stop between 8 and 11 and Agfa film) so he could pile rocks to stand on for a better vantage point. In doing so, he nearly missed the shot. The Marines began raising the flag. Realizing he was about to miss the action, Rosenthal quickly swung his camera up and snapped the photograph without using the viewfinder. Ten years after the flag-raising, Rosenthal wrote:

Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene. That is how the picture was taken, and when you take a picture like that, you don’t come away saying you got a great shot. You don’t know.

Sergeant Genaust, who was standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Rosenthal about three feet away, was shooting motion-picture film during the second flag-raising. His film captures the second event at an almost-identical angle to Rosenthal’s shot. Of the six flag-raisers in the picture – Ira Hayes, Harold Schultz (identified in June 2016), Michael Strank, Franklin Sousley, Rene Gagnon, and Harlon Block – only Hayes, Gagnon, and Schultz (Navy corpsman John Bradley was incorrectly identified in the Rosenthal flag-raising photo) survived the battle. Strank and Block were killed on March 1, six days after the flag-raising, Strank by a shell, possibly fired from an offshore American destroyer and Block a few hours later by a mortar round. Sousley was shot and killed by a Japanese sniper on March 21, a few days before the island was declared secure.

Several photographers were present, but the iconic photo was taken by Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it (and no, it wasn’t posed or faked). It is the photo on which the Marine Corps Memorial, across the Potomac from Washington D.C. is based

 

More from Wikipedia:

Sergeant Genaust, who was standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Rosenthal about three feet away, was shooting motion-picture film during the second flag-raising. His film captures the second event at an almost-identical angle to Rosenthal’s shot.

Here’s that video:

And the Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Virginia:

On this day in 1954, the first mass immunization of children against polio, using the Salk vaccine, began in Pittsburgh. Among all the deeds of our species, this incident offsets many of the perfidies, and Salk is a kind of hero to me. (He made no profits on the vaccine and refused to patent it, which wouldn’t happen today.)

Finally, it was on this day in 1974 that the Symbionese Liberation Army asked for $4 million ransom to return the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst.

Notables born on this day include Samuel Pepys (1633), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868), William L. Shirer (1904), Peter Fonda (1940), Johnny Winter (1944), and S. E. Cupp (1979).

Those who expired on February 23 include Joshua Reynolds (1792), John Keats (1821), John Quincy Adams (1848), Carl Friedrich Gauss (1855), Horst Wessel (1930), Nellie Melba (1931), Stan Laurel (1965), and James Herriot (1995).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is going over her guidelines:

Hili: Instinct, intelligence, experience, speed…
A: What are you talking about?
Hili: Nothing, I’m just repeating the rules of a hunter.
In Polish:
Hili: Instynkt, inteligencja, doświadczenie, szybkość…
Ja: O czym ty mówisz?
Hili: Nic, powtarzam regulamin myśliwego.

Two “memes” from Facebook:

From reader Barry, who says “Cat: ‘Boy, did I screw that up.'”

I have to add that this is an amazing display of one zebra helping another. Were they related? Who knows? And I bet that lion had a broken jaw, or at least a sore face.

https://twitter.com/Koksalakn/status/1098377635657367554

From Malgorzata, a big fan of Maajid Nawaz (aren’t we all?). You’ll have to click on the tweet to see the short video, which is apparently visible only on the Twitter feed:

A tweet from reader Nilou, who says, “This sounds about right.”

Tweets from Matthew. The caption says it all. All I can say is that I was at least this excited when I saw my first dolphin:

Blackbird singing in the dark of dusk. Sound up high on this one, for it’s the sound we need right now.

This could be a cool horror movie if you took a video and sped it up a million times:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1098757281502515200

Tweets from Grania. In this first case (yes, it’s Christopher Hitchens’s son), you can’t say that anti-Zionism is never anti-Semitism, for in this case it surely is. If you don’t have a subscription to the Times (the story’s paywalled), you can read about this at the BBC.

 

Living the dream! It’s like sleeping on top of a nice, rare ribeye steak:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/940763772976881665

Grania sent me this to cheer me up when I was feeling low. It worked!

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1095570670828670976

Somebody doesn’t want to share her nuts:

 

12 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. One of the Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi, Ira Hayes, was immortalized in the song “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” covered most famously by Johnny Cash:

  3. And it should be noted the flag raising took place long before the Island battle was over. Also the next Island battle for Okinawa took far more lives and the Marines still occupy many acres on this Island.

    1. Yes Randall, I didn’t know that two of those raising the flag on Iwo Jima got killed in battle later. Iwo Jima ‎(21 km2) was a speck of an island basically just a fortress, while Okinawa was/is an island with a serious size (1200 km2), the biggest island of a whole archipelago, with more than a million inhabitants. Of course there is no comparison.

    2. Iwo Jima was a speck of an island (21km2), basically just a fortress, while Okinawa is a serious island (1200 km2), the biggest island of an archipelago, with more than a million inhabitants. Of course the battle for Okinawa took much more.
      (my earlier comment somehow disappeared)

  4. “one zebra helping another”
    The speed and precision of the rescue zebra are quit amazing. I wouldn’t mind having her as a friend in the wilds of Africa.

  5. Yes, I guess most of us are fans of Maajid Nawaz. He grew in a rabidly fanatical religious sect, but got rid of that, and devotes most of his time fighting this rabid kind of fanaticism. How could we not be a fan?
    I’m very sorry about this unconscionable attack, but am very happy about Maajid’s reaction. Hallmarks of that what can make a society great.

  6. “Several photographers were present, but the iconic photo was taken by Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it (and no, it wasn’t posed or faked).”

    But – they did it twice, for the benefit of the several photographers present. I’d call that ‘posed’ at least.

    cr

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