Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 6, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Wednesday, March 6, 2019, with 300 days left to go in 2019. It remains cold in Chicago, though the temperatures may get up to the freezing point today.  It’s National Oreo Day (watch for their limited special-edition flavors), and The Day of the Dude, stemming from the film The Big Lebowski, which I recently saw but didn’t much care for. It’s also the first day of Lent, so you have to give up Oreos.

In news for those of you who live in Oz or NZ and favor royalism, here’s an article from news.com.au about how the Royal Family is mistreating Megan Markle. Of course, nobody would have any interest in this, or in Prince Philip or Prince Harry or Prince Charles if these mundane people weren’t part of an anointed Special Class of People, unelected and unworthy, who get to live their whole lives in palaces and have servants prepare their food and wait on them.

On this day in 632, Muhammad is reported to have given his Farewell Sermon, which can be summarized as “Do what I told you to do!” On this day in 1521, Magellan and his fleet reached Guam. It was to be the end of the line for him, for in April he was murdered by natives in the Philippines.  And on March 6, 1788, the “First Fleet”, carrying convicts to Australia, hauled up at Norfolk Island to found the first convict settlement.

It was on March 6, 1836, that the end of the Battle of the Alamo came after a 13-day siege by the Mexican army.  All 187 Texas defenders, including Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, were killed.  On this day in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court settled the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The judges ruled that blacks could not be citizens, and the U.S. government could not regulate slavery in territories created after the founding of the country.  It is not, of course, regarded now as a legally binding precedent.

On this day in 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev presented his first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society. Here is his draft of the table and a transcription:

On this day in 1951, the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began. They were convicted and electrocuted on June 19, 1953.  And on March 6, 1953, one day after Stalin’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Georgy Malinkov succeeded him as Premier of the Soviet Union and First Secretary of the Communist Party.  He lost all powers two years later.  On this day in 1964, Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, rechristened Cassius Clay as Muhammad Ali.  Finally (and I remember this), it was on this day in 1970 that an explosion in a Weather Underground safe house in Manhattan killed three WU members.

Notables born on this day include Michelangelo (1475), Cyrano de Bergerac (1619), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806), Ring Lardner (1885), Lou Costello (1906), Alan Greenspan (1926, still with us at 93), Gabriel García Márquez (1927), Loren Maazel (1930), Kiri Te Kanawa (1944; she’s 75 today, see the celebration at Radio New Zealand), Rob Reiner (1947), Carolyn Porco (1953), and Glenn Greenwald (1967).

Here’s Dame Kiri (the honorific derives from Royal decree) singing my favorite operatic aria thirty years ago. The London Philharmonic accompanies:

Those who bought the farm on this day include Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett (1836, died in Battle of the Alamo), William Whewell (1866), John Philip Sousa (1932), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1935), Nelson Eddy (1967), Pearl S. Buck (1973), Ayn Rand (1982), Georgia O’Keeffe (1986), Hans Bethe (2005, Nobel Laureate), and Nancy Reagan (2015).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is in her usual state: ravenous.

Hili: We have a problem.
A: What problem?
Hili: We have to feed me.
In Polish:
Hili: Mamy problem.
Ja: Jaki?
Hili: Musimy mnie nakarmić.

A picture from Facebook:

From reader Barry, a sin-absolving app:

Heather Hastie says, “I hate humans for doing this”, and I have to agree that creating mutants that have medical or thermoregulatory issues is not the best idea. Behold the Gollum Cat:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1099781179665014788

Tweets from Grania. Here’s the first known species to go extinct because of climate change, but of course they mean anthropogenic climate change, as many species have gone extinct over evolutionary history because of climate change. Next: the polar bear.

It’s so sad that the species below is extinct, despite some ornithologists who think otherwise based on unreliable “sightings”:

Do you think this pigeon really is having fun, or is just dumb?

Let’s see this one again. What a nice man to not offer the peas until both ducks show up! If you snooze with such fast eaters, you lose!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1102094361997787136

Tweets from Matthew. The first one is a dime-sized spider nest, or, as Matthew calls it, “Spiderhenge”:

This is from March 2, and I don’t know who Cherry Wainer is, but Matthew thought this was noteworthy:

Ivan once was lost. . . but now he’s found (after two days):

I am fond of hamsters (the name alone make me smile), but I hope this one didn’t hurt its baby:

 

 

28 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. “In news for those of you who live in Oz or NZ and favor royalism, here’s an article from news.com.au about how the Royal Family is mistreating Megan Markle.”

    Exsqueeze me? This is the usual popular-magazine bullshit, which is why I don’t read them. All written, I might add, in a sneering patronising tone that shows that the author, one Daniela Elser, doesn’t give a sh*t about Meghan Markle’s welfare or anybody else’s except her own ratings.

    Reading further, it becomes apparent that it isn’t the Royal Family mistreating Meghan, it’s Internet trolls on Tw*tter who have been attacking Meghan (and Kate too). (So what else is new, one might ask).

    The entire gripe against the Royal Family (or rather its communications officers) is that it’s been too slow to try and impose some sort of censorship on these trolls. (Somehow, I didn’t think this website was in favour of censorship).

    I’m not even sure from the article where this is supposed to be happening – “Today, the Palace released its ‘Social Media Community Guidelines,’ …..
    Failure to adhere to these rules will see users’ comments deleted, their profiles blocked or even being reported to the police.”

    I wasn’t aware that the Palace controlled Tw*tter, but then since I don’t Tw*t I’m not sure how it works.

    The usual response of the British Royalty to ridiculous trolls is to studiously ignore them. This does tend to work better than another head of state I could name. Meanwhile I count Daniela Elser among the trolls.

    cr

    1. Actually, to do minor justice to Daniela Elser, it isn’t the Royal Family she’s blaming (that’s strictly a PCC invention), Elser specifically says ‘Kensington Palace’ i.e. the bureaucrats.

      cr

    2. news.com.au is a Murdoch mouthpiece. It’s sort of the “webzine” equivalent of Fox News, another thing that I ignore.

      1. That would explain the sensationalist tone of the article. Womens’ magazines have to find some sensational dirt about celebrities, whether it’s the Royal Family or Hollywood movie stars. And if there isn’t something, they’ll invent it shamelessly.

        cr

  4. There seems always to be a Special Class of People. If you don’t have monarchs you get Kardashians.

    Well, I suppose you can get both in some places, but there is always a Special Class.

  6. Re the SINMO app ,glad to see the RC church embracing modern tech .

    Makes a change from altar boys .

  7. Love the Wainer clip! I don’t think I’d care to listen to this without video, but watching her is mesmerizing.

  8. Wow! How cool is that periodic table? It’s super cool. That’s how cool it is.

    My mother has always been fascinated by the story of the Rosenbergs.

    For those who haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, a hilarious film about a deadly serious subject (and from the writer/director of In the Loop, writer of The Thick of it, and creator and partial writer of Veep)! And, if you want to know just how closely it adheres to what really happened (pretty damn closely), you can watch this excellent video from one of the best Youtubers out there, History Buffs, who reviews historical films and researches their adherence to actual events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG-tG-Wo0Do

    1. The Rosenbergs’ execution was a cause célèbre for hearty Leftist besieged on all sides by the inequities of McCarthyism and the evil of HUAC in the 1950s.

      (Or so I’ve heard, BJ; I ain’t that freakin’ old myself, you know. 🙂 )

      1. Well, my mom probably didn’t even know the news existed at that time. It was only a decade or two later when she started becoming interested.

        1. It was also rife with antisemitism (the same antisemitism that drove much of the Red Scare) — made all the worse by being fronted by two Jews, prosecutor Roy Cohn and judge Irving Kaufman.

          “Scoundrel time,” as Lillian Hellman called that era.

  10. I’m with you on The Big Lebowski, though don’t tell anyone I said that lest I show my tragic unhipness. And, to paraphrase Dave Frishberg, when it was hip to be hep I was unhep.

    2. The movie just showed up recently on Netflix, so I watched it for the first time and I join in the chorus of those who don’t care much for it. It was not bad, but I fail to see what all the hoopla about “the dude.” is about.

      On the other side, I love Oreo’s. Recently tried some with lemon filling and they were pretty good. I just don’t want to know what the filling is made from.

  11. “On this day in 1964, Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, rechristened Cassius Clay as Muhammad Ali.”

    Rechristened? Really?

    2. Gosh, ‘Christened’ has become so secularised that, not only did I not notice the incongruity, but it took me a while to work out what your comment was about. 🙂

      In other words, like ‘God knows’, or ‘Hell’, ‘Christened’ no longer carries an exclusively religious meaning.

      cr

      1. If it were just a generic use I probably wouldn’t have thought too much about it – but the remarks were reminding of us of when someone got a new name *explicitly* based on a non-Christian religion.

  12. Gianni Schicchi, the opera that includes your favorite aria, is one of my my three favorites, all of which I first heard while playing horn in the pit orchestra (well, in rehearsal). The other two are Faust and Turandot.

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