Friday: Hili dialogue

It’s the end of the work week: Friday, July 19, 2019. Also, it’s National Daiquiri Day—Ernest Hemingway’s favorite drink—and, bizarrely, National Stick Out Your Tongue Day. Which reminds me of a Henny Youngman joke:

The doctor says to the patient, “Take your clothes off and stick your tongue out the window”. “What will that do?” asks the patient. The doctor says, “I’m mad at my neighbor!”]

It’s going to be in the upper 90’s in Chicago today, and muggy, with a heat-equivalent of about 106° F (41°C). And I have to schlep downtown to get a new iPhone because I put mine in the washing machine by mistake. (I am a dumbass.) Wish me luck. If there’s no posting tomorrow, you’ll know I’ve died of heat prostration.  I just fed the ducks at about 6 a.m., and after five minutes out in that weather, tossing goodies to my babies, I was drenched with sweat.

Today’s Google Doodle commemorates the Apollo 11 mission that put people on the Moon for the first time. If you click on the Doodle, below, you’ll go to a 4½-minute animation about the mission, narrated by Michael Collins, pilot of the orbiting command module. The Moon landing was 50 years ago tomorrow, and I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Stuff that happened on July 19 includes this:

• AD 64 – The Great Fire of Rome causes widespread devastation and rages on for six days, destroying half of the city.
• 1545 – The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982 the wreck is salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.

Read about the ship and the salvage at the link; it’s fascinating. The ship was commissioned under Henry VIII, and served the British Navy for 33 years. It had at least 18 guns, nine sails, and about 450 sailors (!).

And here are two pictures of the recovered ship, which is remarkably complete.

• 1553 – Lady Jane Grey is replaced by Mary I of England as Queen of England after only nine days on the throne.

She was executed on February 12, 1554.

• 1848 – Women’s rights: A two-day Women’s Rights Convention opens in Seneca Falls, New York.
• 1900 – The first line of the Paris Métro opens for operation.
• 1963 – Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 meters (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention.
• 1976 – Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal is created. [I hiked the park, which contains Mount Everest, both before and after it became a National Park.]
• 1983 – The first three-dimensional reconstruction of a human head in a CT is published.

Here’s that first CT scan:

Notables born on this day include:

• 1814 – Samuel Colt, American businessman, founded the Colt’s Manufacturing Company (d. 1862)
• 1819 – Gottfried Keller, Swiss author, poet, and playwright (d. 1890)
• 1860 – Lizzie Borden, American woman, tried and acquitted for the murders of her parents in 1892 (d. 1927)
• 1898 – Herbert Marcuse, German-American sociologist and philosopher (d. 1979)
• 1922 – George McGovern, American lieutenant, historian, and politician (d. 2012)

Those who began pushing up daisies on this day include:

• 1965 – Syngman Rhee, South Korean journalist and politician, 1st President of South Korea (b. 1875)
• 1980 – Hans Morgenthau, German-American political scientist, philosopher, and academic (b. 1904)
• 2002 – Alan Lomax, American historian, scholar, and activist (b. 1915)
• 2009 – Frank McCourt, American author and educator (b. 1930)
• 2014 – James Garner, American actor (b. 1928)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cherry harvest is in full swing, and it looks pretty good this year. Hili, though, doesn’t like it:

Hili: It’s the start of the harvest.

A: So?

Hili: The orchard is full of strangers.

From Facebook. The d*g didn’t nail it because that’s a jaguar, not a canid!

ABC Australia, which posted this picture on its FB page, added, “Is this the cutest version of the Australian coat of arms you’ve ever seen?”

So of course I had to look up Australia’s coat of arms. Sure enough, it has a kangaroo and an emu:

Voilà!

A tweet from Grania, sent October 28, 2018, with the note “Another one.” (I’d just sent her an email called “Cute kitten.”) Almost every morning when I woke up I found, in my email, a picture of a cute kitten she’d sent me.

The two of them are NEVER apart. https://t.co/noyRjCcUuf

— The Dodo (@dodo) October 28, 2018

I’ve written about the dangers of tourists going too near blowholes, which are located near very rough waters (that’s what makes the “blow”). Here, from Nilou, are two tourists who didn’t pay attention to the warning signs. Fortunately, the couple, who had also ignored the signs, survived.

SHOCKING VIDEO: Vacationers swept out to sea near Makapu'u Blowhole. Ocean Safety officials hope it will reiterate the critical need for beachgoers to adhere warning signs.https://t.co/6FZRQodZQn pic.twitter.com/WQ1CKzYBJJ

— KITV4 (@KITV4) July 17, 2019

In this tweet he called “strange cat behavior,” reader Barry added, “Car exhaust?!? Why isn’t the cat repelled by it? So bizarre. And disturbing.” You tell me!

https://twitter.com/AWorldOutOfMind/status/1140377832176136192

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. The first features a man that many women find irresistible, and I just can’t understand that!

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1150205727178256384

Heather says, “This is lovely,” and it is. How was this same-sex couple, now wed for 48 years, able to legally marry in 1971. Well, they did (watch the video to see how), and now they’re the longest-married same-sex couple in the U.S.:

Michael and Jack got married long before same-sex marriage was legal in the U.S. — 48 years later, they're sharing their heartwarming story pic.twitter.com/zeQL43FWX4

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) July 14, 2019

Three tweets from Matthew. He calls the first one “Don’t fly too close to the storks,” and the Spanish says that this stork caught a swift. Oy!

La Cigüeña, un gran depredador tras una tierna imagen, aquí la vemos capturando vencejos pic.twitter.com/L3fIXXpDze

— Salimos de Caza (@SalimosdeCaza) July 12, 2018

I am still not convinced that the Scottish wildcat is anything other than a group of feral tabbies rather than an ancient F. silvestris that lived on in Europe, but I’m willing to be convinced. Anyway: wildkittens!

surely they should be called wildkittens https://t.co/FcbWxjwap9

— kelly oakes (@kahoakes) July 16, 2019

This is, as Matthew says, “depressing”. And I don’t know any way that it can be stopped.

https://twitter.com/Environment2022/status/1150743333196750854