It’s Monday, June 3, 2019: National Egg Day. Have one or three, since they’re no longer seen by doctors as verboten food. Neither is butter, but now a daily aspirin (which I took for years) is. Why don’t they make up their minds? It’s also World Bicycle Day, though I haven’t ridden mine (a ten-speed Raleigh Competition) in years. Anybody want to buy it? I am a bad person with a big carbon footprint.
On this day in 1140, the French scholar Peter Abelard was found guilty of heresy. He later became a monk but, of course, his star-crossed relationship with Héloïse d’Argenteuil is one of the saddest love stories of history. On June 3, 1538, Fernando de Soto claimed Florida for Spain. And on this day in 1889, says Wikipedia, “The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States [was] completed, running 14 miles (23 km) between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Oregon.”
On June 3, 1942, Japan began its Aleutian Islands Campaign by bombing Unalaska Island. I had no idea the Japanese had a campaign up there, but they occupied two American islands for about a year before being driven off. A highlight for us mountain lovers: on this day in 1950, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal reached the summit of Annapurna, the first 8,000-meter peak conquered (it was 8051 m). Here are the Annapurnas, which I hiked around when I was in grad school, as well as a photo of Herzog at the summit, taken by Lachenal. The sight of these mountains from the valleys below is one of the most beautiful things on Earth. Only Everest in situ is prettier.
On this day in 2012, there was a pageant for Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee (60 years a Queen) on the River Thames. On June 3, 2013, the trial of U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning (then Bradley Manning) started in Fort Meade, Maryland. For her role in leaking classified material to WikiLeaks, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, a sentence commuted to time served by President Obama in 2017. But now she’s back in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury.
Finally, on this day two years ago, the London Bridge attack took place: eight people were murdered and many civilians wounded by Islamist terrorists, three of whom were killed by police.
Notables born on this day include James Hutton (1726), Jefferson Davis (1808), Raymond Pearl and Alla Nazimova (both 1879), Josephine Baker (1906), Alain Resnais (1922), Tony Curtis (1925), Raul Castro (1931), Larry McMurtry (1936), and Anderson Cooper (1967). McMurtry’s book The Last Picture Show was made into one of the best movies of our time, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
Those who shuffled off the mortal coil on this day include Johann Strauss II (1899), Ozzie Nelson (1975), Roberto Rossellini (1977), Anthony Quinn (2001), David Carradine (2009), Jack Kevorkian (2011), and Muhammad Ali (2016).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, today’s dialogue is a bit opaque, but Malgorzata explains: “Hili would love to get to the nightingale and consume it, song and all. And Cyrus knows that her admiration is not of the bird’s song but of the bird’s taste.”
Hili: Do you hear the song of a nightingale?Cyrus: You hypocrite!
Hili: Czy słyszysz ten śpiew słowika?Cyrus: Hipokrytka!
Poor kitty! (found on Facebook):
I found this pretty funny:
A field guide to Australian birds, probably from Facebook (I forgot). Give their real names!
From reader Diana MacPherson:
Tweets from Grania: She says, “It’s a gaming thing”, but even Professor Ceiling Cat recognizes Pac-Man. It’s pretty amazing that the Swedes would do this, though.
https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1132267540011474944
This is mesmerizing and then horrifying:
The absolute horror of this, it’s as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. pic.twitter.com/W8WfQfdsl5
— Daniel Holland (@DannyDutch) May 23, 2019
Write in your cat! (But where did they get cat-specific stickers?)
#IrelandSouth For all those wishing to vote for your cat… A voter made stickers to vote for their own cat! pic.twitter.com/xsdXkOdL89
— Alan Kinsella (@electionlit) May 29, 2019
Your Cuteness for Today:
https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1133538996921995265
This is an ad for Sky News, and it pulls no punches:
Trump getting the UK reception and coverage he deserves:
pic.twitter.com/qEiJMIgp02— Steve Marmel (@Marmel) June 1, 2019
Tweets from Matthew, the first a day-flying moth (most moths are nocturnal). The colors are one indication, though not a perfect one, that it flies by day, as those colors wouldn’t be visible at night. They may be “aposematic”, or a form of warning coloration indicating the insect is toxic.
Chalcosiine Day-flying #Moth (Chalcophaedra zuleika, Chalcosiinae, Zygaenidae)https://t.co/tWKRKW826e#insect #China #Yunnan #entomology #Lepidoptera pic.twitter.com/0aMeJKejaS
— John Horstman (@sinobug) June 2, 2019
I wonder if the cats accepted this beast as one of their own:
— Possum Every Hour (@PossumEveryHour) June 2, 2019
A cruise ship slams into a river boat and a dock in Venice, injuring five. See the story here. Perhaps they should stop landing cruise ships in an already overwhelmed city.
#Venezia #VIDEO la nave da crociera #Opera di @MSC_Crociere fuori controllo ha speronato stamattina il battello fluviale #Michelangelo e la banchina.
Qualcuno ci spiegherà perché le navi che salvano vite sono sotto sequestro, mentre queste #grandinavi sono libere di far danni. pic.twitter.com/mSyhCMvvZc
— Beppe Caccia (@beppecaccia) June 2, 2019
This evangelist really is insane. This video is mesmerizing and horrifying, even more so than the calligraphy video above. The guy is bonkers, and yet makes millions as a “prosperity gospel” preacher.
This … is incredible.
American televangelist Kenneth Copeland never foresaw that buying a private jet with money raised by his church would prompt difficult questions.
Reporter does an AMAZING job.
The man actually looks unhinged. pic.twitter.com/JK0zwUdSvO— Jeremy Vine (@theJeremyVine) May 31, 2019
Copeland should not take questions. He is a deer in g*d’s headlights.
“Ok, ok, already, don’t shoot! I’ll take a couple boxes of thin mints.”
Nice animation of the life of a drosophila here https://twitter.com/i/status/1134982725339758592
Wow! The cruise ship video is terrifying. You can see people trying to flee the docked ship as the bigger vessel plows into it. It looks as if one person falls into the water and a second may have been pulled back aboard as the gang plank is torn away. The people walking away from the oncoming ship are not nearly frightened enough.
someone should make a film like that with sandra Bullock, Jerry’s beau!
…in space.
Though banning cruise ships from Venice would achieve nothing except possibly to ensure that such accidents happened somewhere else instead.
I say that because I can’t see how the location where the ship was docking would have any influence on the probability of such an incident occurring.
Presumably the ship lost engine power at a critical moment.
cr
True a ship can have problems docking anywhere, but Venice does have enormous problems associated with the large numbers of cruise ships sailing to it. Large numbers of people are disgorged off the ship and swamp the facilities of the town to receive them. It is the paradox of tourism – a beautiful place attracts ever more visitors until the pressure of numbers becomes such that the original charms of the place are despoiled. Some places manage these pressures better than others but I understand that Venice is increasingly finding that all the cash brought in by the cruise ships comes with a heavy cost.
I quite understand there may be good reasons to limit the number of tourists (and that might include banning cruise ships).
I just doubt if that mishap is a good argument for so doing.
(Re-reading, I’m not sure if there is any move to ban cruise ships other than an off-the-cuff comment by PCC that I may have read too much into).
cr
Nobody went in the water. two or three people were caught on the smaller vessel’s gangplank which detached from the dock, but remained attached to the vessel. Five people in their 60s/70s injured on the small vessel from falls while running – four of those released from hospital.
That Australian bird name thing is odd. I thought it was going into a riff on dangerous fauna, but then it took a turn to the random. Swans are flamingos, pelicans are geese? And toward the end it starts tossing in North American birds for no apparent reason, birds that to my knowledge have never been introduced to Australia, including a Bewick’s wren and a white-throated sparrow. WTF?
Copeland tried to “misogynist charm” the reporter. Complimenting her on her eyes and calling her various terms of endearment etc.
That was a frighteningly weird guy.
Jeeeeezus Christ.
Would you buy a used car from this man?
Though I guess there’s one upside to his cruising around in a private jet. Would any of us really want to be sitting beside such a seriously scary character for many hours on a commercial flight?
cr
An enterprising teenager with a lawnmower created a piece of lawn art to greet Tr*mp beneath the flight path that Air Force One was due to take as it landed in England this morning.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/trump-uk-visit-penis-stansted-airport-protest-climate-change-real-essex-a8941271.html
(Yes, it’s childish, but it’s also very funny.)
Kenneth Copeland has ironically given me some evidence for the claims of the bible.
Now I’ve seen a snake in human form.
You’re being very unfair on him. He couldn’t help but buy that jet, didn’t you hear him? Tyler Perry made it so cheap it would have been a sin not to. In fact, you might say it would have been un-Christian not to buy a fourth private jet.
What a wonderfully flexible religion.
I find sad love stories intriguing, so I had to look up Peter Abelard and Héloïse d’Argenteuil. I found it interesting that the church was just beginning to forbid marriage to priests and the higher orders of clergy – around 1120. Thus, public marriage would have been a bar to Abelard’s advancement in the church. Sad enough, but sadder still is the subsequent development of a supposedly chaste priesthood and all the corruption that has produced over the centuries. The unending hypocrisy alone is appalling. I was anguished to learn that Nickolas Copernicus had to give up his intimately friendly housekeeper because of disapproval by his superiors in the Church. How sad is that.
I love Diana’s contribution – that TVN shot is hilarious.
We’re dealing with Trump descending on our fair isle at the moment, and laying into the London mayor. Depressingly, predictably, Trump’s quite popular with a sizeable minority of the UK.
My country is in dire, dire need of a unifying voice for the Remain vote otherwise I can see a future where Trump’s mini-me, Farage, is not just an annoying fly in the ointment but actually prime minister. This man is being catastrophically underestimated by left-liberals, centrists, as was Trump.
As disorganised as liberal America is, as divided as it is, it has at least started to honestly examine the reasons why it lost in 2016, and has started to recognise the seriousness of the threat by the pop-right.
Liberal-left Britain is lagging way behind in that respect, and is still continuing as though the world is the same as it was in 2015. Too slow, too complacent, too pacific, too disjointed.
Copeland and his jets are old news here in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
FWIW, it was previously reported that his “ministry” employees are not allowed to make eye contact with him or his family members.
Yet he seemed so sane.
Will National Egg Day be celebrated all ova the USA?
The Psychedelic Son Of Satan (aka Rainbow Lorikeet) is well named. Their bill is needle sharp. I have a pair already sitting on eggs, in the middle of winter, and I am afraid to enter their aviary. I have lost pieces of scalp and ear-lobe to them, and they have an unceasing screech as they bite. Beautiful plumage, though.
One of my favorite lines in the American songbook is from the verse to Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things”: “. . . As Abelard said to Heloise, ‘don’t forget to drop a line to me, please. . . .” Listen to the Ella recording.