Monday: Hili dialogue

May 13, 2019 • 6:45 am

It’s Monday, May 13, 2019, and National Apple Pie Day. If you’re near a Costco, pick up a huge one for only ten bucks; it’ll feed at least ten people.  It’s also International Hummus Day for those of you who abjure sweets. And, in Dorset, England, it’s Abbotsbury Garland Day.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) celebrates the life of Georgios Papanikolaou, born on this day in 1883 (died 1962), a Greek cytologist who invented the “Pap smear” (didn’t you wonder where the name came from?). He discovered that one could detect uterine and cervical cancer cells in a swab as early as 1928 (he’d moved to the U.S. by then), but the technique wasn’t widely adopted until the 1940s. And here’s his photo:

On this day in 1787, the “First Fleet,” commanded by Captain Arthur Philip, left Portsmouth, England; it consisted of eleven ships full of convicts sent to establish a penal colony in Australia. In 1830, Ecuador gained independence from Gran Colombia. On May 13, 1912, the precursor of the Royal Air Force, the Royal Flying Corps, was established in the UK.

On this day in 1917, three Portuguese children reported their first sighting of Our Lady of Fátima in Fátima. Here are the kids who perpetrated the scam:

(From Wikipedia): Lúcia dos Santos (left) with her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, 1917

And a newspaper reporting the sighting, along with the credulous worshiping during one of the several reported appearances of Mary:

One this day in 1940, the German army crossed the Meuse, beginning its conquest of France. On that same day, Winston Churchill gave his famous “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech to the House of Commons, and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands fled to Great Britain while Princess Juliana and her children fled to Canada. On May 13, 1958, Richard Nixon’s car was attacked by anti-American protestors when he visited Caracas, Venezuela (I remember that!). On the same day, according to Wikipedia, ” Ben Carlin [became] the first (and only) person to circumnavigate the world by amphibious vehicle, having travelled over 17,000 kilometres (11,000 mi) by sea and 62,000 kilometres (39,000 mi) by land during a ten-year journey.”

Finally, on May 13, 1995, 33-year-old British climber Alison Hargreaves became the first woman to summit Everest without the aid of oxygen or Sherpas. (She died in an accident on K2 that same year, living by her motto, “It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand days as a sheep.” Indeed!)

Notables born on this day include Maria Theresa (1717), Arthur Sullivan (1842), Georges Braque (1882), Joe Louis (1914), Jim Jones (1931), Bruce Chatwin (1940), Ritchie Valens (1941), Stevie Wonder (1950), Stephen Colbert (1964), and Lena Dunham (1986).

Here’s Braque with his kitty (artists seem to like Siamese cats):

 

Those who passed away on May 13 include Cyrus McCormick (1884), Sholem Aleichem (1916), Fridtjof Nansen (1930), Gary Cooper (1961), Dan Blocker (1972), Mickey Spillane (1977), Chet Baker (1988), Joyce Brothers (2013), and Margot Kidder (2018).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili plays Hamlet on the stairs:

A: Are you going up or down?
Hili: That is the question: to go up or down?
In Polish:
Ja: Idziesz na górę, czy na dół?
Hili: Oto jest pytanie, czy iść na górę, czy na dół?

From Facebook:

And another from Facebook:

I made a tweet! (The other day we had a tweet about a speeding pigeon caught by police cameras, but this is a speedy DUCK!)

Tweets from Matthew. The caption tells all:

From reader Blue—who informs me that she used to be a truck-stop waitress (and that truckers are awesome tippers)—we have a trucker cat.  Sound on!

From reader Barry: Maajid Nawaz gets threatened by Pakistan four years after he posts a Jesus and Mo cartoon:

Tweets from Grania. Look at these crafty and thieving cats!

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1127367215718850560

Instead of fat-shaming these obese bears, we should fat-praise them, for they’ll have plenty of reserves to get through hibernation:

Yes, this perfectly captures universities’ concept of “inclusivity”:

Tweets from Matthew. I have no idea why this is that puzzling:

Sheep may safely graze, while cats may softly laze:

https://twitter.com/ddoniolvalcroze/status/1126619346728394753

This is a case of mis-phoresis:

And a badass wild dog plays dead:

 

37 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Those cats getting into the fridge may look cute on video, but I hope their owners are doing something about that.

    If they got in there and the door closed on them, they could suffocate.

    L

      1. That’s assuming they want to get out right away. The longer they stayed in there, the colder they’d get, and the less oxygen they’d have.

        Plenty of children have died in discarded refrigerators and freezers. They had the strength to get out easily right after they first got in, but the longer they stayed in there, the less their chances of survival. That is why removing the doors is recommended upon disposal.

        L

        1. I live in the US and remember an episode of some kids show back when I was a child that was about the dangers of getting locked in a discarded refrigerator. The kids were playing hide and seek and one of them hid in an old refrigerator and couldn’t get out. Of course, people eventually heard his cries for help and he was saved (this was US kids TV, not a German fairy tale!), but I wonder if anyone else remembers this and what show it was…

          1. “(this was US kids TV, not a German fairy tale!)”

            There you go with the Teutophobia again, BJ. 🙂

          2. Hey! I’ve never expressed any fear of or hatred for Germany! I mean, maybe the Germany that existed from about 1933-1945, but, other than that, I quite like Germans and German culture. I can’t wait to visit there one day, especially during Oktoberfest.

          3. Yeah, well, I’ve forwarded your comment to the German-American Bund; we’ll let them be the judge of that.

          4. Back in the day, refrigerator doors would mechanically latch when closed, kind of like car doors today. I recall PSAs alerting people to remove the doors of fridges no longer in use so the doors couldn’t latch shut and potentially suffocate a kid inside.

            Of course, most fridges today just hold themselves shut with magnetic striping, so would be much easier to open from the inside.

          5. Ah yes, the latches do sound familiar. The image I have in my mind is one of those white fridges with latches, and it was basically in a small garbage dump. But I don’t think this was a PSA; in fact, I’m almost certain it was an episode of some show, but I just wish I could remember which one…

      2. Not necessarily. In the video, they’re using their body weight and gravity to pull on the handle and open the fridge. If they were inside, they wouldn’t have either of those options and also might not know that they should only be pushing where the handle is on the other side. The farther they are from the handle, the more resistance they’ll have to push through to open it, and they’ll only have their own body strength to do it. And who knows what their footing is like in there, as most fridges have an even surface.

        1. They also would have stuff to brace against, and many containers/items to knock over and created noise coming from inside.

          But cats should not be trying this when no one is home or paying attention.

    2. If they have a video cam set up to record the action, pretty sure they’re trying to do something about it. (Have a friend who has tried most everything, short of a padlock, to keep her cocker spaniel out.)

  2. I guess the photographer thought it was more important to get a picture of the worshipers rather than the worshiped at one of Mary’s appearances.

  3. On May 13, 1958, Richard Nixon’s car was attacked by anti-American protestors when he visited Caracas, Venezuela (I remember that!).

    I was too young to be aware of that incident at the time, but I do remember the line from the Sixties that it was the only time Richard Nixon ever got stoned.

  4. Having read about Fatima before, I strongly suspect that it was the highly pious, and possibly psychotic, Lucia dos Santos who invented the story- perhaps she really did see the apparition herself. The other two, who were younger and possibly not as sharp as Lucia, were drawn in until they couldn’t really recant anymore. They also died a few years later, so we’ll never know what they really thought.

    I like to use this story when Christians claim the Resurrection of Jesus to be true because there were several witnesses. Do they also believe the Holy Virgin appeared in more recent days to the highly credulous masses at Fatima? That she handed out three divine secrets to the children?

    1. The Fatima incident reminds me of the Salem Witch Trials. The witch hysteria in Salem was sparked and flamed by the rantings of young girls. Ah, how the religious are gullible and seem particularly prone to give credibility to the testimony of children. Joan of Arc was a teenager.

      1. Note that Lucia was about ten when the alleged apparitions happened, but twenty-something when the first 2 secrets were made public.

        The second “secret” said that the Great War would soon end, but a second one would follow if people didn’t repent. It also called for the consecration of Russia. What a fantastic foresight in 1917, even before the Russian Revolution!

        Except that Lucia first published this revelation in 1941.

    2. Yes, Francisco and Jacinta would die two years later in the Spanish Flu pandemic. And the Lady of Fatima did not lift a finger to warn them.

  5. That badass wild dog deserves a BAFTA award. And to think Gielgud or Olivier or somebody said, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”

  6. “On this day in 1787, the “First Fleet,” commanded by Captain Arthur Philip, left Portsmouth, England; it consisted of eleven ships full of convicts sent to establish a penal colony in Australia.”

    In honour of which, a Pommie joke:

    Australian Customs officer, menacingly:
    “Do you have any infectious diseases? Smallpox, bubonic plague, TB, syphilis?”
    Pommie arrival: “No.”
    Customs officer: “Ever been a member of any subversive organisations? ISIS, Greenpeace, the Boy Scouts?”
    Pommie arrival: “No.”
    Customs officer: “Do you have a criminal record?”
    Pommie: “I thought they’d dropped that requirement.”

    I’ll get my coat…

    cr

  7. Why is it puzzling that the Sunset Limited is backing out of one platform road (track) at Huston Rail Station to go back in the other? Well, because both platform roads are served by the same island platform and (Google Satellite View says) both roads connect together into a single track at each end – so why does the Sunset Limited need switch from one side to the other?

    What I find more extraordinary is that this is apparently Houston’s main station. I heard US passenger rail service was run down but…

    cr

  8. To add to the sadness, Alison Hargreaves’s son recently died on Nanga Parbat.

    1. Yes – very sad. My cousin’s son died in a climbing accident a few years ago… his body was not recovered until the following spring I think.

  9. I once saw a pigeon poop on a synagogue (hate crime!), I’ve seen geese and ducks bite people, and I’ve seen geese poop everywhere. When will we start enforcing the law against these monsters? Speeding, public defecation, assault, and hate crimes?!? WHAT IS HAPPENING

    1. Is that where the idiom “as full of shit as a Christmas goose” comes from?

      1. There’s no bird as full of shit as a Canadian Goose. Ruined all my summer camp shores, not to mention many a baseball field and other areas of play.

        Seriously. Fuck geese.

  10. I had never heard of Ben Carlin or his quixotic journey, but it’s very interesting.

  11. The wild dog escaping from the lion produces anxiety in me as a would-be wildlife videographer. When I’m filming something like this I so often find myself losing concentration because of surprising events, as we see here. The camera drops down showing us a bunch of blurry grass as the videographer is caught up watching the action instead of tracking the action. It’s an awful feeling to realize that you just missed a great shot. 😬

  13. Funny how the Fatima (and other Catholic) miracles are greeted with indifference by Protestants…or claims they are the devil’s work.

    If you are Protestant, well your miracles are evidence for your faith; Catholic miracles or other religion’s miracles? “Meh, people will believe anything.”

    Reminds me of the common Christian apologist debate point that the accounts of Jesus coming back from the dead MUST have legitimacy because “legends of things like resurrections don’t happen that fast, within the lifetime of the contemporary reports…it takes hundreds of years!”

    Meanwhile, we have examples like the Indian God-man Sathya Sai Baba, whose many followers thought him to be divine. He died in 2011 and soon after many of his followers started reporting re-appearances.

    It’s been fascinating watching this resurrection Legend grow in real time.
    It tended to start with people having dreams of Sai Baba. And, well, Sai Baba didn’t “really die” and transcended his human body, so these dreams were reported as ACTUAL visitations in the dream by the real Sai Baba, and hence evidence he lived on.

    Then people would started reporting seeing Sai Baba appearances in public. But…it wasn’t Sai Baba in exactly the same form, but in a slightly different body (hence…some stranger). Sound familiar? Some of Jesus’ followers “didn’t recognize” the risen Jesus…but it was Jesus!

    At this point now we have “eye witness reports” of Sai Baba appearances. There are even Facebook pages devoted to detailing his re-appearances, with stories like:

    “One of the parents was last to eat, and while having her grub, she saw Swami clearly for 5-7 minutes and got tears in her eyes. She woke her daughter and asked her if she was seeing Swami too and She also confirmed that she did. Everybody woke up and had Swami’s Darshan. Swami gave His Darshan from 11.40pm to 12.05am. They all saw Baba in the usual form. Swami looked radiant and bright as always, bigger in size, hair fully grown in circle. He moved forward couple of steps and then backward. All them were crying with tears out of Joy. Then another group of people started coming in and Swami disappeared. The group realized that Swami had welcomed them to Puttaparthi with His Gracious Darshan! Sairam!”

    I mean…people could never IMAGINE they see a resurrected person, right? And certainly not more than one! It MUST BE TRUE!

    And yet even though we have, unlike for Jesus, direct modern, contemporary eyewitness accounts for these competing miracles, you can point this out to Christians and apologists, and you get nothing back but a shrug. (Or “maybe it’s demonic activity).

  14. The great thing about the new Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber (or as I like to call them, Sheerieber) song is that it’s exactly what you would expect. So even if you never heard it, you already did. A million times. (So you can safely skip it.)

  15. I’ve seen triungulins on flowers in southern Oregon — best chance to snag a bee. My bet is that the robber fly caught a meloe-infested bee and the larvae transferred over.

    Still a dead end for the larvae.

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