Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 11, 2019 • 6:30 am

We’ve arrived at the weekend for those lucky folks who don’t work on Saturday and Sunday; yes, it’s Saturday, May 11, 2019. It’s also National “Eat What You Want” Day, which is a conundrum in two respects.  First, why the scare quotes? Are they only joking when they say you can eat what you want, and you’re supposed to eat something you don’t want? And, speaking philosophically, one could make the case that you always eat what you want, but I’ll leave that aside and pass on. I’ll just add that the moribund HuffPost is “infuriated” by this day, since it makes a mockery of “the problematic relationship between food and shame.” Click on screenshot:

Won’t this site die already?

It’s also World Migratory Bird Day, which gives me extra cause to celebrate my ducks. But I hope there’s a counterbalancing World Nonmigratory Bird Day so that penguins, ostriches, and quetzals don’t feel slighted.

On May 11, 868, the first known book that was both dated and printed (in wood-block print), was created in China:  a copy of the Diamond Sutra, much beloved by Jack Kerouac and his pal Gary Snyder. On this day in 1846, President James K. Polk requested a declaration of war against Mexico, which was approved by Congress on May 13 (no President goes this route, which is the one specified by the Constitution). This began the Mexican-American War.

On May 11, 1949, Siam, which was previously known as Thailand between 1939 and 1945, changed its name back to “Thailand” again. Let’s hope it stays this time, though “Siam” is more romantic.  On this day in 1960, four agents of the Israeli Mossad captured fugitive Nazi Adolph Eichmann, who was living in Argentina under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was tried in 1961 and executed the next year. (I don’t approve of executions, even of Nazis.) On this day in 1996, the Mount Everest Disaster took place, in which a series of missteps and miscommunications led to the death of eight climbers. You may have read about this in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. 

Finally, it was on this day in 1997 that the supercomputer Deep Blue, playing against Garry Kasparov, beat the human in the last game, becoming the first machine to win a match against a world chess champion in the “classic match format.”

Notables born on this day include Baron Munchausen (1720; the fictional character was based on a real one called  Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen), Cheng and Ang Bunker, the conjoined twins (1811), Irving Berlin (1888), Salvador Dali (1904), Phil Silvers (1911, and speaking of Sergeant Bilko, read this hilarious article), Louis Farrakhan (1933), and Eric Burdon (1941).

Those who died on May 11 include William Pitt (1778), Lester Flatt (1979), Bob Marley (1981), Douglas Adams (2001), and Floyd Patterson (2006).

In honor of Marley’s death, here’s a live version of “Lively Up Yourself”. It’s good to see him again.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili ponders an issue I’ve often thought about: the fact that humans are the only species whose members know of their own mortality:

Hili: Do you realize that these lilies-of-the valley will wither?
A: Of course.
Hili: It’s good that they don’t know it.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy zdajesz sobie sprawę z tego, że te konwalie przekwitną?
Ja: Oczywiście.
Hili: Dobrze, że o tym nie wiedzą.

Here is a church that will give you pareidolia:

And an unsavory religious meme:

From reader Barry, a turtle desperate for water (or maybe it thought the faucet was prey):

Tweets from Matthew. This one is incredibly sweet:

A helpful POST CAT:

It’s hard to believe that this one’s not a joke, but I think it’s real: kids, having no knowledge of rotary dial phones, can’t figure out how to use them. (Have you seen one lately?)

In a Spurs pub when Spurs win:

As Matthew says, this is “an oldie but a goody”:

Tweets from Grania. This d*g needs a trigger warning!

https://twitter.com/StefanodocSM/status/1126869562203492353

Translation: “Good days, bad days.”

I’m not sure the cat is really into this friendship:

I know the answer to this one: “Most of them DIE!”

 

39 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. There should be a corresponding video of an Arsenal (Spurs north London rivals) pub at the very same moment!

    1. I think it would be very boring. We Arsenal supporters don’t go round wailing and gnashing our teeth just because Spurs have a rare run of success. We are far more preoccupied with our own current poor form than what Spurs are doing.

      Also, they will likely get completely stuffed by Liverpool in the final (hopefully) and that’s what people will remember.

  2. Wow. Kids trying to work a dial phone. Next they will attempt a manual transmission auto or worse, fluid drive.

    1. I way, way prefer manual transmission. I hate automatic transmission! Both my cars are stick shift. I hear the bad news that stick shift cars are harder and harder to get these days and cost more than automatic transmission cars. I sure hope that these two cars I have will be my last and I’ll never have to buy another car. I’m an old enough fart that there’s a chance that I’ll get my wish.

      1. Not in Europe, where most rentals are manuals. Probably something to do with the high cost of fuel (manuals are slightly more economical).

        I quite agree, by the way, I wouldn’t have an automatic. This does somewhat limit my options (here in NZ) in buying a used car that I like. But manuals are so much more controllable.

        cr

      2. I prefer manual transmission too. It allows you to ‘modulate’ your driving style, aggressive or fuel-sparing.
        The company DAF (Doorne’s Aanhangwagen Fabriek = Doorne’s Trailer Factory) had a completely gearless transmission system: ‘Variomatic’, which was pretty good, although it used leather belts that had to be replaced every 30 000 km or so.
        The company could never shake off it’s image of small ‘elderly lady car’ despite having quite some successes in gruelling rallies. They were pretty good, innovative cars.
        The car -but not their truck section- company was sold to Volvo, but the Variomatic system was bought by Mazda or Mitsubishi (I’m not sure there). They developed it further into a system not using leather belts, but they did not mass produce or market it ((afaik).
        The DAF Truck company (fused with Leyland) still exists and does pretty well, a substantial part of the heavy trucks in Europe are DAFs.

    2. It happens. We had rotary dial analogue phones until 1998. In 1986 or so my 10 year old nephew having just finished little league baseball practice at a field across the street from our house came in to call his parents to pick him up. I pointed to the phone in the den and he just stood frozen staring at it until we noticed and showed him how to dial. His family along with many others i guess, were early adopters of pushbuttons and we were his first encounter with the traditional dial phone.

    3. If by fluid drive you mean an epicyclic preselector gearbox with a ‘fluid flywheel’, I can just imagine the confusion the preselector function will cause.

      At least with a manual box, once you’ve learned to work the clutch, what you see is what you get i.e. the gear you’re in is directly related to the position of the gear lever. But any system that incorporates a delay or any other inconsistency becomes far more difficult to learn.

      Case in point – Prius gear selection. (One of our work Priuses had a large placard on the dash, “If you don’t know how to drive this, please don’t attempt to.”) The Prius ‘selector’ always flops back to ‘neutral’ after use, regardless of which ‘gear’ you’re in. Worse, it engages a ‘gear’ immediately it’s moved *except the first time after engine ‘start’, when you have to have your foot on the brake*. I sat in a car park swearing at it for five minutes pressing the ‘Start’ button (which doesn’t start anything) and banging the lever around before I could figure out how to get Reverse. A regular automatic stick gives feedback – it won’t let you move it out of Park until you get it right. The Prius lever just flops around with no indication of whether the message has got through.

      (Did I mention I hate Priii?)

      cr

      1. No, the old fluid drive that I knew was kind of a mix, standard transmission and automatic. I had a 1951 dodge 2 door coup with fluid drive. The car has a clutch which can be used to shift one time, either from first to second or from second to third. You can start out in first or second gear, then let up on the gas pedal and it will automatically shift to the next gear. The gear shift on the column has three positions. Position 1 is first and second. position 2 is second and third. position 3 is reverse.
        I expect this description is hard to understand but that is the way it works.

        1. I should say, you can look it up on line and see many explanations of it in detail better than mine.

          1. Actually I have and there are several contrivances by the name of ‘fluid drive’.

            In very recent times the little Honda City had a ‘Hondamatic’ which was a proper epicyclic with torque convertor but manual selection; you just manually selected one of three gears and let the torque convertor do most of the work.

            Earlier, there was the NSU Ro80 with its pioneer Wankel rotary; this had a torque convertor in front of a clutch and 3-speed manual gearbox; the clutch was disengaged by a vacuum servo linked to the gear knob. I assume for cost reasons they didn’t want to go full auto? I assume the torque convertor was to smooth out the Wankel’s lumpy idle in what was supposed to be a prestige car. In fact it succeeded in combining the drawbacks of manual *and* auto – no sporty driver wants a 3-speed with a slow but snatchy change, and no luxury customer wants to change gears themselves.

            cr

          2. There was nothing speedy about the fluid drive that I knew and drove. It was an invention of Chrysler back in the 40s that was overtaken by the full automatic transmission. However, it was very strong and almost no maintenance.

      2. Yes, but there is an indicator on the dash that shows what gear one is in! It’s never been a problem for me.

    4. I took my nephew round a museum when he was about eleven once (about seven years ago). They had an old switchboard with a rotary dialler on it. He had to ask us what it was.

      He can handle a manual transmission because, in the UK, everybody learns to drive with a manual transmission. I (aged 52) don’t know what you mean by “fluid drive”.

  3. Have I seen a rotary phone lately? I have three rotary phones, and yes, they do work. I answered a call on one recently. Only problem is that there’s no way to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish and 3 for Customer Service. Nor is there any way to change the volume or do any of the fancy-dancy things phones do these days. But the damn things still work! Other phones have worn out and broken down and died on me, but these three old rotary phones still work fine.

    1. Only problem is that there’s no way to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish and 3 for Customer Service.

      You need a DTMF encoder and speaker. Or a well-trained whistle – as per “Captain Crunch“.
      The devices are getting rarer. A decade ago, they were easy to find. Today, not so easy.

      1. I fond it an interesting minor paradox that the old phones used digital dialling, while modern phones use analogue tone dialling.

        cr

        1. It’s a nasty gluing together of different systems from different times with different compatibilities. As the old joke goes, “How to get from [here] to [there] … well, I wouldn’t start from here!”

  4. Penn Jillette’s take is that he still eats whatever he likes but what he likes has changed.

  5. Cheng and Ang Bunker, the conjoined twins

    I guess it’s no longer PC to call them ‘Thailandese’ twins.

  6. Teenagers trying to make a phone call looks totally authentic. One thing that bothers me though – haven’t they seen these old phones used in films? Perhaps they only watch films of the last decade with superheroes.

    1. One of the silliest things I’ve heard recently (a steep ask, it must be said) is that there are some people who will refuse to watch a movie because it is in black and white. Profoundly that is their loss, but to me it makes it more plausible that the afflicted youth haven’t ever seen a dial phone.
      In other news, I have actually seen a two-button phone box. I didn’t use it, but I believe it connected you to an AI called a “human operator” who then connected the call for you using voice-to-text capabilities.

      1. I like two buttons.
        The generation before dial, of course, was crank. Crank the handle and you could connect to an operator at a switchboard. Nowadays, you’re left on your own. Are we not going down hill?

  7. I’m not sure the cat is really into this friendship:
    This wild baby monkey is obsessed with a cat

    That monkey looks, on a number of occasions, as if it’s trying to climb up onto it’s (adoptive) mother’s rump to be carried around. Fine when you’re kitten-size, not so good when you’re about the same weight as “Mum”.
    Cat thinkz : “Willz dis kitteh neva grow up and go away?”

  8. Nowadays chess analysts just go ahead and check with their (laptop) chess “engines” to see what the best moves are. Because if they don’t, someone else will, and they will look silly for not.

  9. That turtle – is that a snapping turtle? Who would have thought the things could move that fast?

    cr

    1. It’s a species of soft shell turtle, though which one I cannot say. They are quite fast, excellent swimmers, and just as bitey as snapping turtles, probably due to a less fortified carapace than other turtles and like the snapping turtle, a reduced plastron.

    2. I do not think that snapping terrapin is thirsty, and not even that it ‘thinks the tap is prey’. I think it just likes to snap at basically anything that has some modicum of movement (well, admittedly that would kinda fall into the ‘prey’ category).

    1. Happy 101st! I shall celebrate by viewing some great interviews with him which are found on a certain video sharing platform, named in part after a piece of technology that, like the rotary telephone, is little used and mostly unknown by the youths of today.

  11. I remember that you could dial the number on old rotary phones by tapping rapidly on the little cut-off prongs.

    1. You reminded me of some kids and old people who used this method to dial after some family member had removed the rotary piece to prevent them from using the phone.

      1. Dialing by tapping the hook switch rapidly can in fact still be performed on any phone with a mechanical switch.

        The dial on a rotary phone simply breaks the line the same number of times as the number on the dial in an accurate, repeatable and convenient way.

        All copper landline phone systems still support this system which is technically called “decadic dialing”

  12. I’ve read the Huffpo article on “Eat what you want day” and I’m not really sure what the objection is to it. To me, they are saying in about a thousand words the same thing you conveyed in two sentences.

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