Saturday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

July 6, 2019 • 7:00 am

It’s Saturday, July 6, 2019, and today I head back to Oahu for one day, then to take the redeye back to Chicago. It’s National Fried Chicken Day, too, celebrating one of America’s great contributions to gastronomy (yes, I know that they fry chicken in other lands). Look for fried-chicken promotions in your area.

And that includes Australia. As Wikipedia notes,

In 2018 KFC’s Australian operations offered the chance to win free fried chicken for a year. The contest was entered by making social-media posts stating reasons why the entrant deserved the prize. The winning entry was by a 19-year-old who, together with her friend, got the KFC corporate logotype tattooed on her foot.

Here are those tattoos from news.com.au.  Sadly, even a year’s worth of chicken fades away, but a tattoo is forever:

Reader Jon informs us of this:

The Tour de France starts Saturday by the Town Hall on the Grand Place in Brussels to honor Belgian cyclist Eddie Merckx. [JAC: Merckx, born in 1945, is still with us, and is widely regarded as the best competitive cyclist ever. He won five Tours de France.] It’s the fiftieth anniversary of his first of five Tour victories. This year’s Tour is also the 100th anniversary of the iconic yellow jersey which was added in 1919 at the end of World War 1. If you missed last year’s Tour, here are some highlights.

Things that happened on July 6 include this stuff:

  • 1189 – Richard I “the Lionheart” accedes to the English throne.
  • 1415 – Jan Hus is condemned as a heretic and then burned at the stake.
  • 1483 – Richard III is crowned King of England. [He reigned for just two years.]
  • 1535 – Sir Thomas More is executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
  • 1885 – Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies on Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog.
  • 1917 – World War I: Arabian troops led by T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) and Auda ibu Tayi capture Aqaba from the Ottoman Empire during the Arab Revolt.

Here’s the scene from the movie, one of my favorite films:

And here is the real Auda, the Howeitat sheikh:

(From Wikipedia) Photograph of Auda abu Tayi, probably taken by G. Eric Matson (1888-1977).Tabuk, Hejaz 1921
  • 1933 – The first Major League Baseball All-Star Game is played in Chicago’s Comiskey Park. The American League defeated the National League 4–2.
  • 1942 – Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in the “Secret Annexe” above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse.
  • 1957 – Althea Gibson wins the Wimbledon championships, becoming the first black athlete to do so.
  • 1957 – John Lennon and Paul McCartney meet for the first time, as teenagers at Woolton Fete, three years before forming the Beatles.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1747 – John Paul Jones, Scottish-American captain (d. 1792)
  • 1887 – Marc Chagall, Belarusian-French painter and poet (d. 1985)

Here is Chagall’s “The Cat Transformed into a Woman“, (c.1928-31/1937), described by The Tate Gallery:

An illustration to one of The Fables of La Fontaine, the story of a man who so adored his cat that he was able to turn her into a woman and married her the same day. He thought, poor fool, that his wife was now a woman in every respect; but when mice appeared, she still gave chase. As we say in England, ‘a leopard cannot change its spots.’

  • 1907 – Frida Kahlo, Mexican painter and educator (d. 1954)

Here’s La Kahlo, another favorite of mine, holding a monkey and ignoring her cat:

  • 1921 – Nancy Reagan, American actress and activist, 42nd First Lady of the United States (d. 2016)
  • 1925 – Bill Haley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (Bill Haley & His Comets) (d. 1981)
  • 1946 – George W. Bush, American businessman and politician, 43rd President of the United States

Those who passed away on July 6 include:

  • 1415 – Jan Hus, Czech priest, philosopher, and reformer (b. 1369)
  • 1535 – Thomas More, English lawyer and politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (b. 1478)
  • 1614 – Man Singh I, Rajput Raja of Amer (b. 1550)
  • 1835 – John Marshall, American captain and politician, 4th United States Secretary of State (b. 1755) [They don’t mention that he was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court!]
  • 1893 – Guy de Maupassant, French short story writer, novelist, and poet (b. 1850)
  • 1916 – Odilon Redon, French painter and illustrator (b. 1840)
  • 1959 – George Grosz, German painter and illustrator (b. 1893)
  • 1971 – Louis Armstrong, American singer and trumpet player (b. 1901)
  • 1998 – Roy Rogers, American cowboy, actor, and singer (b. 1911)
  • 2003 – Buddy Ebsen, American actor, singer, and dancer (b. 1908)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is savoring rodential comestibles:

Hili: The mouse I ate here is history now.
A: Yes, sometimes we feel the taste of the past.
In Polish:
Hili: Ta mysz, którą tu zjadłam jest już historią.
Ja: Tak, czasem czujemy smak przeszłości.

And nearby on the site of his future home, Leon shows an uncharacteristic tenderness toward mice:

Leon: And the little mice are getting wet?
In Polish: A te myszki tak tam mokną?

From Facebook:

A tweet from ex-Musli Yasmine Mohammed. Be sure to watch the video on the tweet she references; it is very sad.

From Nilou, a tweet from science writer Philip Ball:

Reader Barry says, “This is not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

https://twitter.com/YougleFact/status/1146637305865809920

Three tweets from Heather Hastie:

https://twitter.com/SlenderSherbet/status/1146863418470817794

This is a true albino (look at the pink eyes), and I hope it’ll be okay.

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1146808832347086848

Mr. Lumpy got hurt! Someone should let me know if he gets better.

Tweets from Matthew. The first one is from Matthew himself, and his email note said “All this one kilometer down.”

In an unprecedented act of duplication, I am putting this tweet up two days in a row because it’s so awesome:

Two more tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first one shows how dogs were domesticated, except that the ancestor was the gray wolf and not the red fox:

As Matthew points out, this is an insect (see here):

 

31 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)”

  2. How many ways to cook chicken? Fried is a good one.

    A larger earthquake hits the same area and it is hardly on the news. And this one was very well predicted. Just more proof, if it doesn’t happen on the east coast or in the white house, who cares? Not the media.

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      1. And didn’t he also play an eskimo? Few actors look less inuit than Anthony Quinn, I’d say.

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    2. I find that scene quite unrealistic: a quite close ranked charge in a narrow valley and the defenders having heavy machine guns (as shown)? One or two heavy machine guns would have obliterated the charge.
      It cannot possibly be a faithful reconstruction of what actually happened.

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  8. Those “officers unable to locate the squirrel” might want to know that he was last seen near Richard Gere’s house.

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    1. That was a gerbil, man. Get your members of the Rodentia order straight; Hollywood people have their standards, you know.

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      1. Of course, it was a gerbil – what a stupid mistake on my part.

        I’m so embarrassed I’m squirming in my seat. I feel like I want to crawl into a dark hole and hide.

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  9. Re. those tattoos: does KFC actually check that they’re real, and not just temporary ones?

    Asking for a friend.

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  10. They don’t mention that he [John Marshall] was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court!

    Passing strange, that, given that the man held the position for three and a half decades and is widely considered the most influential CJ ever.

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    1. Yes, almost like just mentioning that Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant. Seemed to have potential in the financial world.

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      1. …who went on to worldwide fame when Kramer tried to convince Jerry to swap his van for Quinn’s t-shirt.

        I’ve said it before but 99% of everything I know about American culture before the nineties I gleaned from either Seinfeld or The Simpsons.

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        1. I learned a lot from Leave it to Beaver, The Life of Riley, and Happy Days. I can see we’ll never see eye to eye on politics. 😎

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        2. Pretty much everything I know about US politics came from The West Wing, which is why it came as a bit of a shock to me when Dubya got elected.

          Little did I know…

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        3. … 99% of everything I know about American culture before the nineties I gleaned from either Seinfeld or The Simpsons.

          Pretty much puts you on par with what we Yanks know of our own “culture.” Maybe even ahead of the curve. 🙂

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        1. Anthony Quinn was born Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn on April 21, 1915, in Chihuahua, Mexico. His paternal grandfather was Irish, and the rest of his family was Mexican. What’s not Greek-Inuit about that?

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          1. No I meant “mentioned that Anthony Quinn played Auda abu Tayi”.

            I’m going to have to dissect the frog: Thyroidplanet, up thread, triple posted this exact fact.

          2. Right. Well, Quinn was a crackerjack actor with something not quite specifically ethnic about him. He can play an Arab as well as an actual Arab, but he had better box office.

  12. While Jerry is at the beach, it should be noted that today in Women’s soccer (football) Sweden (2) defeated England (1) for the World Cup bronze. Now that was unexpected.

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