Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 2, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, May 2, 2019, and once again I must to go downtown this morning to have my iPhone battery installed. After making an appointment a week ago for an iPhone 5s battery replacement, I showed up downtown to find that they didn’t have the battery. Oy! They now have it.  Ergo, I’ll be out of action much of the morning, and posting may be light. As always, I do my best.

It’s National Chocolate Truffle Day, and a scanty day for other national holidays. All I can report is that it’s Flag Day in Poland.

On May 2, 1536, Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, was arrested on charges of treason, incest, and adultery. She was beheaded only 17 days later.  On this day in 1559, John Knox, back from exile in Scotland, became the leader of the Scottish Reformation. Exactly nine years later, Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped from Loch Leven Castle to England. She was never to regain her throne, and was executed in 1567.

On this day in 1611, the King James version of the Bible was first published in London. Then we skip ahead several centuries: to May 2, 1945, when the fall of Berlin was announced by the Soviets.

On this day in 1952, the first regular jet airline service began, with the De Havilland Comet 1 making its maiden flight from London to Johannesburg. The jet had first been flown in a test three years earlier. Here’s the test plane:

On May 2, 1955, Tennessee Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his superb play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Here’s a scene from the movie, with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor as Brick and Maggie the Cat. What a handsome couple, but they fought like, well, cats and d*gs.

On this day in 2000, Bill Clinton announced that GPS technology and access would be made accessible to the public and not just the military, for which it was designed.

Finally, on this day in 2011, according to Wikipedia, “Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI’s most wanted man, is killed by the United States special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.” But yesterday the same announcement appeared on Wikipedia for May 1, 2011: “War on Terror: Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is shot and killed by U.S. Navy seals.” Which is it?

Notables born on this day include Catherine the Great of Russia (1729), Hedda Hopper (1885), Manfred von Richthofen (1892), Benjamin Spock (1903), Satyajit Ray (1921), Englebert Humperdinck (1936), and David Beckham (1975).  Here are some goals from Beckham at the height of his career:

Those who passed away on on May 2 include J. Edgar Hoover (1972), Lynn Redgrave (2010), and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (2014).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej claims Hili’s tail shows that she’s assertive, but I thought a vertical tail was a sign of happiness:

Hili: I’m a very assertive cat.
A: I can see that.
Hili: How?
A: By your tail.
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem bardzo asertywnym kotem.
Ja: To widać.
Hili: Po czym?
Ja: Po ogonie.

From Facebook, a woke d*g is expelled:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. I share her love of kakapos:

I wonder if this chair is comfortable:

From reader Nilou: A man and his fat pet procyonid:

https://twitter.com/raccooons/status/1123013345194512385

Tweets from Matthew. This first one is the first tweet in a very long thread about geese and ducks hatching at the National Geographic Building in Washington D.C., and how the staff leads them to water. Watch as many of them as you can:

. . . it goes on, and wait till you get to the Canada geese! And here’s a lovely tweet:

Lordy, lordy; what is going ON across the pond?

Tweets from Grania. She calls these “the little ducklings that could”:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1123639388548636672

A lovely rendition of a classic movie song:

. . . and a skillful cat:

35 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Just to note that the King James bible was very heavily based on the earlier translation by William Tyndale. Many of the most famous biblical phrases come from Tyndale, who should be far more famous than he is. Melvin Bragg’s BBC4 documentary about him is well worth a watch.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible

  3. As a wild guess, maybe the Bin Laden raid was on May 2 in Pakistan, and May 1 in the USA, due to the time difference.

    1. Yes. Operation Neptune Spear, officially started in the early-morning hours of May 2, Pakistan time [the afternoon of May 1, Eastern Daylight Time]

  4. once again I must to go downtown this morning to have my iPhone battery installed. After making an appointment a week ago for an iPhone 5s battery replacement, I showed up downtown to find that they didn’t have the battery. Oy!

    See, the problem Jerry is that it didn’t break hard enough. 🙂

    I had my 5s battery break a couple years back. It expanded until the casing on the phone broke. I took it to the local Apple genius bar, where they promptly replaced the whole phone with a new one for the cost of a battery replacement. They transferred all my pics, programs etc. over too. The reasoning they explained to me was: (a) battery replacement on such a broken battery is dangerous, so as a policy they don’t mess with things like what I showed them, and (b) nobody’s buying the 5s any more anyway, so they have a stock of them sitting around not getting sold.

    1. I got my iPhone 6 replaced that way. I was going to give it to my dad because I got a new iPhone and just as I was about it, I noticed that the battery swelled up so I took it in and they replaced the whole phone. They don’t want to work on phones that are swollen like that. So, my dad pretty much got a new iPhone.

    2. Jerry would not get a 5S as a replacement though would he? The 5S has a nicely small 4″ screen & only the SE has that small size today in the Apple range [SE still avail sometimes in “clearance”]. The nearest is the 7 or 8 with a 4.7″ screen.

      1. Sometimes Apple has the old phones around like they did with my 6 (they hadn’t made it in years) but if not, they’d probably give him the later one. I think the reason I actually got the deal without a hassle is simply because of timing – Apple was in trouble for a battery issue and they probably just didn’t want anymore bad press.

  5. I always thought of a cat’s upraised tail as a greeting. Sometimes there’s an insouciant curve at the tip, sometimes not, depending on how happy the cat is to see me.

    1. Yep, that’s my experience/understanding too; tail up = “I’m here and want to interact.” Tail down = “busy, don’t bother me.”

      It makes sense given that an ambush predator (like most cats) sticking up their tail is giving prey an obvious visual as to where it is. Thus putting the tail up would be a horrible adaptation for a cat in ‘serious hunting’ mode.

      1. I have been staff to many cats over the years, and have observed a range of tail postures. My late Russian Blue held his tail upright – with the occasional twitch of the tip when he was happy to see me. He would lower it when he switched to hunting mode, and only dropped it, curling it under his rear, a week or so before he died. My Siamese carries her tail low, almost brushing the ground. She flicks it quickly from side to side when she is irritated from lack of attention or when hunting bugs. I wonder if some of this is learned behaviour. Are they experimenting with us?

    2. I think so too, though it seems to me it indicates a more general “I’m feeling happy, safe, relaxed, not alarmed and amenable to socialize” frame of mind.

      I’ve been engaged in a sort of on-going years long experiment with our current cat involving tail posture / state of mind. Its just one test subject but in her case it seems clear that I can reliably influence her state of mind by raising her tail up for her. When she is on edge for whatever reason, crouching tense posture and low tail, I can give her some reassurance fusses including stroking her tail upright and usually that will quickly relax her. In the same circumstances giving her reassurance fusses without stroking her tail upright is very noticeably less effective.

  7. “On this day in 2000, Bill Clinton announced that GPS technology and access would be made accessible to the public and not just the military, for which it was designed.”

    GPS had been available to non-military users for many years before 2000. I remember seeing a demonstration at an astronomy conference as early as 1984, using a receiver the size of a large suitcase. And I was given a hand-held GPS receiver as a leaving gift by colleagues in 1996.

    Until 2000, however, the signal available to non-military users was intentionally degraded by the DOD so that instantaneous position fixes had random errors of up to 50 metres. The GPS equipment used by the U.S. military was able to remove the random errors, giving positions with errors of only 1 to 3 metres.

    What happened in 2000 was that the random errors were removed from the public signal, meaning that everyone could now obtain GPS fixes with an accuracy previously only available to the U.S. military and its closest allies.

  8. … in 2000, Bill Clinton announced that GPS technology and access would be made accessible to the public …

    Thereby consigning the sailor’s sextant to a role analogous to the mathematician’s slide rule.

    1. And yet, the annual edition of The Nautical Almanac is still published by both the U.K. and U.S. Nautical Almanac Offices. It’s somewhat ironic that the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office is part of the U.S. Navy, which is also in charge of operating GPS.

      1. Still a good idea to keep a sextant aboard while crossing open water. You lose electrical power, it can be a big ocean out there.

          1. Yeah, always a good idea to keep a battery-powered GPS stashed next to the sextant, too. 🙂

  9. Something is wrong hereabouts:
    “On this day in 1559, John Knox, back from exile in Scotland, became the leader of the Scottish Reformation. Exactly nine years later, Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped from Loch Leven Castle to England. She was never to regain her throne, and was executed in 1567.”
    So, Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped 9 years after 1559, which would place her escape in 1568. That would be the next calendar year after she was executed in 1567. That was quite an escape!

    Also, one of my best pets, Silly, looked like that last dog picture. RIP Silly.

    2. The answer to the predicament was that she was actually executed 20 years later than stated, in 1587.

  10. Our tolerance has gone down:

    The Comet was involved in 26 hull-loss accidents, including 13 fatal crashes which resulted in 426 fatalities. Pilot error was blamed for the type’s first fatal accident, which occurred during takeoff at Karachi, Pakistan, on 3 March 1953 and involved a Canadian Pacific Airlines Comet 1A. Three fatal Comet 1 crashes due to structural problems, specifically BOAC Flight 783 on 2 May 1953, BOAC Flight 781 on 10 January 1954, and South African Airways Flight 201 on 8 April 1954, led to the grounding of the entire Comet fleet. After design modifications were implemented, Comet services resumed in 1958. [Wikipedia]

      1. Combined with the stresses on the fuselage caused by repeated pressurisation and de-pressurisation of the cabin. The corners of the windows were focal points for stress fractures. That’s why windows in passenger planes don’t have sharp corners.

  11. Daily Mail: The

    Former Freemason, 51, found drunk and naked […[ got lost while trying to hand out cheeseburgers to the homeless events occured Feb, 2018 in

    BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA not Blighty.

    1. True. But an understandable mistake — the headline does make one think of England.

      The headline from an Australian paper on the other hand, sounds far less phallic and perverted: ‘Former Freemason apologises after being found naked in broken pipe organ, surrounded by cheeseburgers’.

      That sounds more Australian to me. These things can happen.

    2. 7 out of the 10 goals shown were from free kicks. Bending in free kicks was his specialty.

  13. Love to hear that old Apple products will keep on going. Maybe get a second battery as another backup now before the 5S becomes “no longer supported”.

    1. The problem with batteries if they have a shelf life. So, keeping a battery around for years may will mean it isn’t very fresh when you need to use it. There are ways of storing batteries to extend their life but it’s probably not worth the trouble….often you can find the parts.

  14. Believe it is national prayer day. Didn’t see it referenced anywhere. Just trying to be through.

  16. Two of the ducklings ascending the steps appear to be right leg dominant and one appears to be left leg dominant. The observation is based on which leg they hoist themselves up by.

    Just saying.

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