Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

33 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)”

1. First line, 2018, a year behind.

   1. That’s ’cause our host beats on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

2. Re siblings day ,i care for my twin brother full time ,about time some one honoured me ,doubling the carers allowance would be a start ,rant over.

   1. While I haven’t seen my sister in years I do have a significant other whom I’ve been caring for to various degrees since 1993. I never got any sort of allowance, and the Office of the Aging in this county is useless.

      Now my Sweetie is in our local nursing home, and everyone has to work hard because nursing homes in general are so awfully understaffed. I go every day and help out whenever I can. I declare that if I were the Dictator of the Benighted States I’d triple wages, cut hours in half and hire a boatload of additional people so that nobody was worked half to death; and everybody would be entitled to a free massage every week.

      1. Hi ,sorry i was feeling sorry for myself .Workers in care/nursing homes are paid peanuts ,but the owners of care homes are ,or were raking in the cash .
         In the UK are lot of them are going bust ,or so i have read .

3. About the adder joke, there’s an additional punch line to it. Something about Papa Noah taking the two little snakes and putting them on a tree stump because adders can become multipliers if they use a log table.

   Surely someone else here knows that joke and can tweak my version of it. Something about what Noah puts the little snakes on.

   1. That’s brilliant!

   2. Yeah, there is the invention of the log table as the punchline. Always told this joke when I taught logs, to almost universal groans (except for the kids who didn’t get it, plus now they use calculators instead of tables…)

   3. My father’s version went
      So Noah took an axe and went into the forest and chopped down a large tree, and with the wood he made some tables. He gave them to the snakes, and said to them, ‘With these log tables, even adders can multiply.’

      1. Another good version🤓

4. “What would happen if there were no Moon?” is actually a very deep scientific question. It was answered back in the early 1990s by the French astronomer Jacques Laskar and colleagues, who carried out numerical simulations and demonstrated that in the absence of the Moon’s stabilising influence, the Earth’s axis of rotation would undergo wild variations in the angle of tilt to its orbit plane (the technical term is obliquity) over timescales of tens of millions of years. The Moon keeps that angle within a very narrow range of 22 to 24 degrees, thereby providing a stabilising influence on Earth’s climate.

   1. Also, we wouldn’t have tides (might have teeny ones, due to the sun, which would I guess be at the same local time each day). Which in turn means that much of our coastal scenery might be very different.

      And also, a whole chunk of popular songs would be missing from the genre. And we wouldn’t have lunatics.

      cr

      1. On reflection, the reason for the tides is due to the difference between gravitational pull at the nearest point (to the moon) and the median point i.e. the circle where the Moon lies on the horizon. Inverse square law of attraction applies. With the Moon, that’s a difference in distance of about 1.7%.

         With the sun, the difference is .004%. So I think any solar tides would be undetectable.

         cr

         1. I don’t believe that is correct. For one thing the tidal effect of the Sun is easily detectable. It’s the explanation of neap tides and spring tides.

         2. Actually, the sun’s tidal influence is a little less than half that of the moon’s. A calculation can be found here.

            http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tide.html

            1. Excellent link, and I stand corrected.

               Although the differential distance between the ‘near side’ of the Earth and the ‘far side’ is proportionally much, much smaller (in the case of the Sun), I just hadn’t allowed for the enormous difference in mass. Silly me.

               So sans Moon, we still would have tides, just half the size (roughly).

               Thanks again for that link.

               cr

      2. And the members of the 18th century Lunar Society would not have been able to find their way to and from Birmingham at night .

5. Cracking seems to be common with large bells. Presumably due to the stresses set up by contraction during cooling, but they were also very vulnerable to building fires.

   The biggest bell in the world also has the biggest crack. That is the Tsar Bell in Moscow, and its crack actually takes the form of a huge piece broken out of it. It sits on a huge plinth in the Kremlin, with the broken piece propped against it.

   Napoleon apparently contemplated nicking it while he was occupying Moscow, it would have been worth a fortune just as scrap metal, but it was too heavy to move.

   cr

   1. Of course the other famous cracked bell is the Liberty Bell, cast especially for Pennsylvania by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry (which was still in existence on the same East London site until a couple of years ago). I suppose it isn’t the last bit of dodgy stuff we’ve managed to palm off on the Yanks.

6. And sub

7. It is an interesting coincidence that Paul McCartney left the Beatles on the anniversary of the death of Stuart Sutcliffe.

8. Jerry, I don’t know if you ever noticed, but the Omar Sharif you see in “Lawrence of Arabia” bears an astonishing resemblance to my ex-husband. Too bad he didn’t look like Paul McCartney, but Omar Sharif is pretty good.

9. Am I the first to notice that “drake” and its apparent ancestor “andraca” are on the etymology chart? Drake as “duck king”? Weird.

   Also, capybara in the bathtub? Amazing that it fits – must be a young one.

10. The capybara shows signs of self awareness. Perhaps he’s (this is a male thing) ideal for a research model for studies of human consciousness.

11. OK, I’m going to give a pretty hot take here. While I absolutely adore David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the 40 minutes in the desert really kills the pacing. 15 minutes would have been plenty to demonstrate the desolation, loneliness, and extremities of their journey. Other than that, it’s basically a perfect movie.

    1. Am I remembering correctly that there were also a ton of subtitles (from the Ar@bic?) in white on the sand?

       1. Hmmm…Not on my copy, but, if that was the case with the original, they probably changed the color in re-releases and remasters.

          1. It’s also possible I’m misremembering…

    2. Lucky Lawrence ,he only spent 40 minutes in the desert ,Moses and his mob spent 40 years .

    3. Back then, it was another era, with a different time flow.
       In the same line, a friend of mine says that most of what was written before the TV has so slow plot that is almost unreadable.

       1. That’s true a lot of the time, but I think the people who made films got pacing down by the mid-60’s. Still, there are plenty of films with good pacing from well before then. Most of Lean’s best films are fine. Some older noir films can be an absolute chore to watch, but then you sometimes have a gem like The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon, to name two Phillip Marlowe films from the 40’s.

          1. TV is probably partly responsible for peoples’ 5-minute attention span. (Also the Internet). Just so easy to flick to another channel/website.

             Whereas people who have gone to see a movie have the option of sitting through it or walking out. Inertia is a wonderful thing.

             Speaking of pacing, my example would be Sergio Leone’s final spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West. For the first ten minutes over the titles, nothing much happens; three gunmen are waiting at a station for the train to arrive. I like the pacing, but one needs to have plenty of time to get ‘in the mood’. Also has the most haunting music score of any movie, I think. It was a hit in Europe; Paramount cut 20 minutes of it for the US release and it was a flop. One could read all sorts of things into that.

             cr

       2. Oh wait, The Maltese Falcon was Sam Spade, not Phillip Marlowe.

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