Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 12, 2019 • 6:45 am

It’s Sunday, May 12, 2019, and it seems as if May began just a few days ago. Thus time’s wingéd chariot draws near. . . .

It’s National Nutty Fudge Day, as well as International Nurses Day, celebrating an honored and altruistic profession.  And, of course, it’s Mother’s Day! Here’s to all moms everywhere! A shot of my own duck mom and one of her brood:

And today’s Google Doodle is an animated duck cartoons, for of all the beasts of the air, water, and land, the mallard most truly exemplifies the caring mom. (Click on the screenshot to go to the animation.)

C|Net explains:

Following with Google tradition, this Mother’s Day the search giant turned to nature to represent the parent who bore us into this world; previous representations have included a cactus and dinosaur. This year, three buttons on the Doodle allow us to move among a series of lessons for life from a mama duck to her young offspring.

She tries to teach her young charges the proper way to waddle — not without dealing with some challenges — and that it’s sometimes necessary to change direction. And when their plans go south, she welcomes them back to the fold, err, flock.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms, regardless of species, who help teach us to spread our wings.

On this day in 1364, the oldest university in Poland, Jagiellonian University, was founded in Kraków.  But this doesn’t even put it in the top 10 oldest universities; can you guess the oldest? (It’s really old; see here.) In 1784, the Treaty of Paris, signed in September of 1783, took effect, finally ending the American Revolutionary War. On May 12, 1846, the Donner Party of pioneers heading to California left Independence, Missouri. That winter they got stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains during a snowstorm, spent the winter trying to survive, and had to resort to cannibalizing the dead. That was a great scandal then, but it seems expedient and not immoral to me. Of the 87 pioneers who set out, only 46 survived.

On May 12, 1932, ten weeks after the infant son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, his body was found in New Jersey close to the Lindbergh’s home. Bruno Hauptmann was eventually executed for the abduction and murder. It’s hard to overestimate the power of this story at that time.

On May 12, 1941, according to Wikipedia, “Konrad Zuse present[ed] the Z3, the world’s first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin.” Here’s a Z3 replica displayed in Munich’s Deutsches Museum:

On this day in 2002, President Jimmy Carter went to Cuba to visit Fidel Castro for five days—the first U.S. President to visit Cuba since the Revolution in 1959. Finally, four years ago a massive earthquake struck Nepal, killing 218 and injuring over 3800.

Notables born on this day include Edward Lear (1812), Florence Nightingale (1820), Otto Frank (1889, father of Anne Frank), Dorothy Hodgkin (1910, Nobel Laureate), Julius Rosenberg (1918), Yogi Berra (1925), Burt Bacharach (1928), and Frank Stella (1936).

Those who fell asleep on May 12 include John Dryden (1700), J. E. B. Stuart (1864), Amy Lowell (1925), Erich von Stroheim (1957), Nelly Sachs (1970, Nobel Laureate), Saul Steinberg (1999), and Perry Como (2001),

Here’s a Steinberg cat-themed cover of the New Yorker. Nothing to eat!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is wary of a new comestible:

A: Whar are you watching?
Hili: I’m wondering whether I like dandelions or just the opposite?
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, czy ja lubię te mlecze, czy wręcz odwrotnie.

Some tweets from Matthew:

The cryptic bird below appears to be some kind of potoo. The translation: “The nictibio urutaú is a nocturnal insectivore that always hunts from an elevated position. He spends the day perched upright on a tree stump, with which he mimics as if it were part of him The posture, immobility, and closed eyes make it hard to detect.

Nobody ever claimed that puffins are graceful. Even their flight looks labored and clumsy. But they are CUTE! Some day I shall see one.

Here’s an especially clumsy puffin:

Matthew calls this one “A very patient capybara. (Is there any other kind?)”. Translation: “The alleged Capybara figurine.” And there are DUCKS!

Learn this word, as there will be a quiz:

This is unbelievable, and I wonder how the person dealt with it:

Tweets from Grania. I love murmurations, but rarely see them over water.

https://twitter.com/ZonePhysics/status/1125351310197440512

A helpful raccoon for Mother’s Day. Translation: “I like your mother.” What???

A protective kitten. Translation: “Bad! Screwed!”

In Chicago this pigeon would get a $100 ticket:

When life imitates satire:

 

28 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Happy mother’s day to all species. Based on the date of the Treaty of Paris, it could be said the revolution lasted 9 years. I know some like to think 1776 as the beginning but we know it was 1775.

  2. I wonder if certain thinkers out there have the …temerity?.. to inflate an outrage balloon over Mothers’ Day.

    1. Hah! With my tongue part way in my cheek I tease my daughter by coming on with a semi-pseudo-outraged rant complete with expletives about if we really cared about mothers we’d improve conditions for working mothers with proper maternal leave and subsidized daycare that doesn’t eat up such a sizable percentage of a woman’s income, etc. etc. all with rolling eyes and raised fist…

      This is also the beginning of National Nursing Home Week, and the nursing home where my Sweetie lives is celebrating. And I come on with my eye-rolling, fist-raising only semi-pseudo-outraged rant about the fact that with few exceptions nursing homes are horribly understaffed, and nurses and assistants are horribly overworked with some gnarly and unhappy consequences.

      The nurses are used to me howling, “When I take over and become the Dictator of the Benighted States I’m gonna cut hours in half and triple wages and hire a sh*tload of nurses and assistants so that nobody is overworked and there is always adequate staff on duty – and everyone gets a free massage each week.” And the nurses all howl back, “We’re voting for you!!”

      Sure, I’ll inflate my usual Outrage Balloon and I will act as if it’s a joke, but I do often have the feeling that Mothers’ Day is more like a token to make mothers feel good while problems are not solved and needs are not met. Ditto nurses and nursing homes…

      1. I was thinking- and I emphasize I am making satire here – Mothers’ Day Is sexist, and promotes the notion that females are supposed to raise children, and are supposed to produce children.

        Those ideas have cropped up in other discussions, and are worth taking apart.

        1. Well, we do have Fathers’ Day. Or is it actually Mere Sperm Donors’ Day? And I, too, am making satire along with you.

    2. I thought they appeared to touch down, some of them, on the water. What’s with that?

    3. Yep. They’re all either flying directly towards or directly away from the camera, thus presenting the minimum visual cross-section.

      cr

  4. No semiotic quotation marks enclosing “Nutty Fudge”? Paragons of punctuational consistency, those national-food-day people are not.

  7. … cannibalizing the dead. That was a great scandal then, but it seems expedient and not immoral to me.

    There seems to be a precept in such circumstances — the Donner Party, the survivors of the whaleship Essex, the survivors of the Uruguayan flight that went down in the Andes with the soccer players aboard — that one doesn’t eat one’s own relatives.

      1. Waaaah! You got me!

        Could NTNON ever get away with that these days?

        It was Mel Smith’s last line that cracked me up completely.

        cr

      2. Rugby players? Well, that explains it then.

        And those two ate the airline food?! One never knows what one might be capable of under such dire circumstances, but I like to think I would never sink to that!

    2. The archaeology of such sites of “survival cannibalism” has some commonalities.
      The first bits to get eaten are the ones that remind people least of, well, people. So it’s steaks from the legs and buttocks that go first, and boiled hands and heads last.
      It’s really not at all surprising, once you can get past the horror of the surrounding situation.

  8. Again, Google Translate provides a better (or more likely, IMHO) translation for the raccoon video:

    “Thank you for your mother.”

    2. Regarding the raccoon mother, I would translate the text as ‘mother is good’.

      1. I’d say “It’s good to have a mother,” for the raccoon mother, and “Stop! It’s mine! It’s all mine!” for the kitten.

  9. That potoo? Looked kinda like a snake with fangs.

    The 3 google doodles were just ducky🤓

  10. “A protective kitten.”

    That kitten eats like it’s done time in a penitentiary.

  11. Finally got to see puffins last month from a tour boat near the Blasket Islands in Ireland. They are much smaller than I thought. Did not have much luck getting photos of the birds from a rocking boat as we could not get too close or they flew away.

    1. You can get great views of them on Handa, an island off the west coast of Scotland.

  13. This is unbelievable, and I wonder how the person dealt with it:
    Hyperdontia x-ray; possibly Gardner’s syndrome or cleidocranial dysplasia

    The number of teeth in the oral cavity doesn’t seem particularly abnormal – you can see a number have filling. The rest, it is hard to tell if they’ve erupted or if they’re still in their formative capsules. If they were still effectively unerupted, the person would have had a decidedly lumpy face, and you’d have regretted punching them, but I’ve seen people with worse burn scars lumping up their faces.
    Consider the scale of operations that would be necessary to extract the supernumerary teeth.

    If it’s a one-in-a-billion developmental issue, then there are over a half-dozen people like this.

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