TGIF: Hili dialogue

March 1, 2019 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning, welcome to Friday.

It’s Beer Day in Iceland, which means we are all in the wrong country (unless you live in Iceland, of course).

In history today:

  • 1565 – The city of Rio de Janeiro is founded.
  • 1628 – Writs issued in February by Charles I of England mandate that every county in England (not just seaport towns) pay ship tax by this date. Yes, he’s the one who was executed some years later.
  • 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials.
  • 1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev finishes his design of the first periodic table and sends it for publishing.
  • 1901 – The Australian Army is formed.
  • 1936 – The Hoover Dam is completed.

Notable birthdays:

I suspect that Hili has noticed a correlation between trips to the shops and subsequent food.

Hili: Where have you been?
A: Shopping.
Hili: In that case I’m going back home.

In Polish:

Hili: Gdzie byłeś?
Ja: Robiłem zakupy.
Hili: W takim razie wracam do domu.

Today on Twitter:

You can’t trust scientists for anything:

Okay, maybe for this:

Cats are permanently in the Friday mood:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1101177742064795649

Must-have accessory of the 15th century:

Do octopuses dream of electric eels?

Well, it’s better than their attempt at cats and the babies:

And some happy dogs to put you in the mood.

Click through for all the photographs in this thread:

A baby flamingo:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1101033255967514625

 

Another smart felid:

Wait, what?

 

Hat-tip: Matthew

34 thoughts on “TGIF: Hili dialogue”

  2. Damn, I remember when CPAC was a forum for legitimate conservative thought. Sure, I disagreed with almost everything they had to say, but I enjoyed tuning in from time to time on one of the c-span channels, or catching a speech later on youtube, just to get the juices flowing.

    Now it’s deteriorated into a Trumpist infomercial, with the likes of Trump’s dumbed-down quasi-Nazi Dr. Strangelove, Seb Gorka.

    Reply

    1. Being a younger person, CPAC was always just a shill convention in my mind for the Republican Party/whoever it’s figureheads are at any given time. I never saw anything different from it. In what decade did it change? Because it’s possible it happened while I was still too young to know about it.

      Reply

      1. During Dubya’s two terms in office, CPAC acted as a cheerleader for many of his policies, but you also heard traditional conservative ideals — free trade, open markets, limited government, balanced budget, strict constitutional construction, maintenance of strong international alliances in opposition to Russian aggression, etc. — espoused at the annual conference. After all, such policies were congruent with much of what W had to say and what was set out in the Republican Party platform.

        With the election of Barack Obama, and the concomitant rise of Birtherism and the Tea Party, CPAC jumped the shark. Nevertheless, one could still hear traditional conservative speakers sprinkled among the wingnuts.

        That went out the window with the rise of Trumpism, since his positions stand traditional conservatism on its head. Hell, at last year’s conference, arch-conservative National Review writer Mona Charen got booed off the stage, and had to be escorted from the venue by armed security, merely for questioning Republican support for a credibly accused sex abuser like Roy Moore.

        Reply

  4. Stalin killed millions of his citizens, had an iron grip on what was considered to be a nigh-uncontrollable country, BUT HE COULD NEVER GET RID OF HAMBURGERS. But those socialist liberals? They’re finally going to do it if they get in power.

    Anyway, has anyone else been sucked into the snooker rabbit hole of Youtube? I don’t know the rules (although I have some sense of them now, after watching about 20 vides) and have no idea what’s going on, but I can still see that there’s a ton of strategy and skill involved and I end up watching 25 minute snooker videos. It scares the shit out of me that Youtube knew I would want to watch something I had never seen before, have zero experience with, and basically doesn’t even exist in my country.

    Reply

    1. In 1936, Joseph Stalin sent his food commissar, Anastas Mikoyan (portrayed by Paul Whitehouse in the movie The Death of Stalin) to tour the USA. He came back with some hamburgers, which were adapted as “kotleti” in the Soviet Union, and, legend has it, became a favorite of Uncle Joe’s.

      Take THAT Sebastian Gorka!

      Reply

    2. I’m old enough to remember Ted Lowe’s snooker commentary from the days before colour TV really took off in the UK:

      “Steve is going for the pink ball – and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.”

      Reply

  5. The best rejoinder to Sebastian Gherkin’s assertion came from Sputnik News: “Gorka Grilled for Saying Stalin Wanted to Steal Americans’ Burgers.”

    Reply

  6. Other interesting news today, WA Gov. Inslee has entered the fray (running for President). I’ll be curious to see how it goes for him. The articles I saw this morning noted his lack of name-recognition: how does that fare with WEiT readers? Do you know who he is? What he’ll be campaigning on?

    Reply

    1. I know who he is, but that certainly isn’t indicative of general name recognition. I know a good deal about what he’s does as governor, but one can never know what platform someone will run on when they join the Great Race. We’ll have to wait and see. If I had to guess based on his time governor, it would largely be about economic issues like raising the minimum wage, bringing in jobs, etc, and a focus on environmental issues. But who knows?

      Reply

      1. He’ll be livestreaming the formal announcement in a couple of hours. Will be interesting! I forget, BJ, are you in the PNW? Or just particularly keyed in to lefty-candidates?

        Reply

    4. “… his lack of name-recognition …”

      Reminds me of when the little-known one-term Massachusetts US senator Paul Tsongas announced his 1988 presidential campaign. Molly Ivins said he had “great name recognition” in Texas — his last name was line seven of the eye charts there. 🙂

      Reply

  7. I think the nature photography of Nicolas Rakotopare (who took the photograph of the land mullet) is exceptional. Here’s a website http://lerako.net/.

    Hili’s pose today is also exceptional.

    Reply

  8. … Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts….

    Tituba is often referred to as ‘black’, implying African negroid, but she was Caribbean indian. (Of course, if the BBC ever did a series on the Salem Witch trials, half the magistrates would be cast as BAME or women.)

    An interesting hypothesis that has gained support is that the mass hysteria /possession was brought about by rye ergot poisoning, which mimics LSD. All the girls came from the part of town where a rainy season had damaged the rye crop (ideal conditions for ergot.)

    As a child, I lived in Danvers, what was once Salem Village. The port town, Salem, is where all the witch trial tourist stuff is, but they didn’t take place there. If you go to Salem, do visit the amazing Peabody Essex Museum, but at all costs avoid the tawdry Salem Witch Museum. The latter consists of sitting in a former church where wax figures are lit up while a forty-year-old tape of an hyperbolic and inaccurate narration of the events is played. (Although, like the Tiki Room at Disneyland, a good spot for a weary tourist to sneak in a nap.) You are then led slowly through the gift shop to a ‘history of witchcraft’ exhibit consisting of framed woodblocks of witching being tortured, etc.

    Reply

  10. Sebastian Gorka is one of those people that I immediately dislike on hearing his first sentence. The fact that he is no longer in the Trump administration (officially), means he probably committed some kind of crime with Trump and Trump wanted to distance himself from it.

    Reply

  11. Caught the Philip K. Dick reference in the “do octopuses dream of electric eels” line… thanks for adding in these sly allusions here and there!

    Reply

  15. I’m a little confused by the semi-identical twin flowchart, which I think has cheated a little. I guess my main question would be, why did each set of chromosomes get duplicated?

    Both sperm and egg have a haploid set of chromosomes. Normally the two combine to create a diploid set. By having two sperm enter, you now have 1.5 sets of chromosomes. The diagram seems to indicate that half of each haploid set merge to create three different types of cells. However that can’t happen as indicated as 1.5 divided by 3 means each of the three cells would be haploid. The only way this could work is if the cell duplicates all 3 components, so that you have two haploid sets of chromosomes from each sperm, and two haploid sets of egg chromosomes, that then combine as described.

    Have they sequenced the genome of the semi-identical twins? If not, wouldn’t it be more likely that they were identical twins, but a developmental error prevented one of the twins to follow the correct pathway in terms of gonad formation? eg. The “girl” is actually XY, but the Y signal failed. Or the “boy” is actually XX, but the Y signal was accidentally activated.

    Reply

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