Thursday: Hili dialogue

August 1, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s finally August: Thursday, August 1, 2019. It’s National Catfish Month, National Panini Month, National Peach Month, and National Sandwich Month. And today is National Raspberry Cream Pie Day.  It’s also National IPA Day, celebrating a beer that has fatigued my palate so much that I never drink it any more. It is the Beer of Hipsters.

And it’s Yorkshire Day, bringing up this classic skit of “Four Yorkshiremen”. I’m not sure exactly what stereotypes accrue to those from Yorkshire, but here it seems to be a claim of a hard life. Is that in fact the case?

Stuff that happened on this day includes:

  • 1620 – Speedwell leaves Delfshaven to bring pilgrims to America by way of England.

Speedwell met the Mayflower in England, and the two ships sailed on August 15, 1620. They arrived in Cape Cod (they were aiming for Virginia) after 66 days at sea.

  • 1774 – British scientist Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen gas, corroborating the prior discovery of this element by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
  • 1834 – Slavery is abolished in the British Empire as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 comes into force.
  • 1936 – The Olympics opened in Berlin with a ceremony presided over by Adolf Hitler.

Here’s Hitler rocking back and forth as he watches the games. Ironically, he resembles a Jew davening (rocking) during prayer.

It’s well known that Hitler was upset that Jesse Owens, a black American track-and-field star, won so many events, and ignored him. In fact that doesn’t seem to be quite true: Hitler saluted and waved to the four-time medalist. However, Wikipedia reports this: “Albert Speer wrote that Hitler ‘was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games’.” Goebbels, too, was enraged that a black man beat the Aryans. 

This video is a great documentary of Owens’s performance in the 1936 games.

  • 1960 – Islamabad is declared the federal capital of the Government of Pakistan.
  • 1966 – Purges of intellectuals and imperialists becomes official China policy at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
  • 1984 – Commercial peat-cutters discover the preserved bog body of a man, called Lindow Man, at Lindow Moss, Cheshire, England.
  • 2008 – Eleven mountaineers from international expeditions died on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth in the worst single accident in the history of K2 mountaineering.

Notables born on this day include (note W.D. Hamilton):

  • 1744 – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, French soldier, biologist, and academic (d. 1829)
  • 1819 – Herman Melville, American novelist, short story writer, and poet (d. 1891)
  • 1907 – Eric Shipton, Sri Lankan-English mountaineer and explorer (d. 1977)
  • 1931 – Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
  • 1936 – W. D. Hamilton, Egyptian born British biologist, psychologist, and academic (d. 2000)
  • 1936 – Yves Saint Laurent, Algerian-French fashion designer, co-founded Yves Saint Laurent (d. 2008)
  • 1942 – Jerry Garcia, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1995)

Those who expired on the first of August include:

  • 1977 – Francis Gary Powers, American captain and pilot (b. 1929)
  • 1981 – Paddy Chayefsky, American author, playwright, and screenwriter (b. 1923)
  • 2007 – Tommy Makem, Irish singer-songwriter and banjo player (b. 1932)
  • 2009 – Corazon Aquino, Filipino politician, 11th President of the Philippines (b. 1933)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is back posing in the flowers:

Hili: Take my picture.
A: There was a similar picture yesterday.
Hili: Never mind that.

In Polish:

Hili: Zrób mi zdjęcie.
Ja: Wczoraj było podobne zdjęcie.
Hili: Nie szkodzi.

No, this is not the future, as many people don’t put down their cellphones while sitting on the throne:

This comes from Facebook via Diana MacPherson, and boy, is it true! I fight these spatulas regularly:

And the way the world should be, from reader Debra:

A tweet sent by Grania on November 30 of last year, saying “It’s time for the Bad Sex Awards”, which are awarded by the Literary Society for the worst descriptions of sex in fiction. She also sent me the winning excepts in a screenshot. Have a gander (and see more quotes here).  Trigger warning: Salacious material, NSFW:

The last passage is by far the best (i.e., the worst):

 

 

This speaks for itself. Be sure to turn up the sound and watch:

Another tartigrade sent by Nilou. What’s it all about, Alfy?

A tweet from Heather Hastie; clearly just the sight of water scares some cats:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1155916240826880000

Three tweets from Matthew. Here’s what the residents of our 50 states are called. Read and weep, especially if you’re from Massachusetts:

Aww, they had to ruin the fun of this old dude. I should try this some time:

526 teeth extracted from and Indian boy! OY! Most were small and in a teratoma, though:

 

38 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Me ol’ Dad were from Yorkshire, and he’d always complain about how hard he had it as a lad, afore sayin’ “Mustn’t grumble though”.

    1. It has been observed that a well-balanced Yorkshireman is one with a chip on each shoulder

        2. For a USAian to understand Yorkshiremen think of a Texan with a superiority complex.

    2. if you want to know about your personal failings you will find a Yorkshireman very helpful.

  2. Slavery is abolished in the British Empire as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 comes into force.

    As Naomie Harris discovered, they replaced it with hijacking slaves from other nations’ ships and ‘liberating’ them to three years of indentured service in the Caribbean. Also, there was no mention of them being repatriated when their ‘service’ was over.

    1. They. It wasn’t clear to me if The Royal Navy blockade of West Africa was doing this or pirates.

      1. ‘They’ was lazy pharseology on my part.

        From http://www.discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/against-slavery/freedom-from-slavery/liberation/:

        Campaigners finally achieved their aim with the Emancipation Act in 1833. This was supposed to free the remaining slaves. But, it did not automatically give the slaves their freedom. This was because the British felt that the slaves were not used to this kind of independence. They thought that the slaves did not have enough skills, such as working for themselves, managing a wage and a household budget, which they would need to live as free people. The system introduced to train the slaves in freedom was called Apprenticeship. It was seen by many as another form of slavery. The slaves had to work for a low wage for their old masters as apprentices. True freedom came in 1838, when the apprenticeship system was abolished.

        This makes no mention of the liberation from the slave ships of other nations but it sounds rather like an official system that was also used to generate new workers via ‘liberation’ from the slave ships of other nations. I have yet to find a description of the liberation system that was mentioned in the program that Naomie was part of.

        It certainly sounds like the slave owners hit paydirt, what with being compensated by the government for losing their slaves as well as being able to retain their labour in return for modest wages.

    1. I had no idea that IPA has become fashionable… I shall have to stop drinking it (after my last 5 bottles are consumed) 😀

      Personally, I just like an IPA as a bit of light relief from some of the heavier ales – current favourites are Proper Job from St. Austels and Hobgoblin IPA from Wychwood. Both recommended, should you aspire to the hipster lifestyle.

      1. I am as far from a hipster as one can get, yet I do like a good IPA.

        They liked beer on the Mayflower too, and one of the reason’s they landed when they did was because they were low on beer. “We came to this resolution,” wrote future Plymouth governor William Bradford, “to go presently ashore to take a better view . . . or we could not now take much time for further search or consideration, our victuals being spent, especially our beer.”

        1. That was beer which was brewed to (1) kill off bacteria in the water by boiling it, then (2) keep it sterile with the couple of percent of alcohol from the brewing.
          Barrelled beer for drinking on board was much safer than drinking barrelled water, because of item (2).

    2. A fashion beer? There may be many new brands appearing (it’s not my tipple), but the style of the beer was designed for brewing in India during the 1840s or so. There aren’t many fashions so long-lived.

  4. I thought he picked on Obama for using teleprompters and golfing. Must have been a different Donald Trump.

    1. Incredible name though. Incredible incredible. Very very incredible name. Incredible very incredible name incredible incredible very very.

  5. Today, 1 August, is the official birthday of all horses in the southern hemisphere.

    Happy Birthday, Horses!

    It’s 1 January in the northern hemisphere.

    >

  6. In Kurt Andersen’s book “Fantasyland”, the word “incredible” is used to show how language changed in the United States. In the video example of describing “George Wythe” (how should this be quoted?) as an “incredible” name, the word “incredible has two distinct meanings at the same time – the old meaning, being something like “difficult to accept as true”, and the morphed meaning of “amazing”… “amazing” being yet another such word. Undoubtedly, the intention of the speaker was for the latter, but the irony (?) is amusing.

  8. yes – those state names for inhabitants –
    Georgia = Georgians
    so Floridians should be from Floridia!

    No! It should be Floridans…

    1. I wonder if there are naming rules at work or if the names just arose out of usage.

  10. There are a lot of folk now that think the reason Hitler was behaving like that is that he was taking methamphetamine.

    1. According to a bloke what was interviewed in “The Nazis A Warning From History ” ,that was adolf’s way of showing excitement .He used to do it when a film was starting .

      Blitzed is a book about the Nazis on drugs .

    2. That’s hardly fresh news, though undoubtedly Norman Ohler’s controversial book “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich,” 2016(?), gave popular currency to this assertion though Ohler’s account has been disputed, for instance, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed-drugs-in-nazi-germany-by-norman-ohler-review. But earlier writers have speculated that he might well have taken amphetamines.

      Dr. Theodor Morell was Hitler’s doctor and he
      was known to have prescribed all manner of weird and harmful substances, including animal gonads, for Hitler to take, especially as time went on. But apparently Morell didn’t specify every drug he gave to Hitler and meth wasn’t specifically listed.

      However, methamphetamine use in the Nazi military has been well-documented, and given the panoply of drugs Hitler took and that were genrerally available. I don’t think it would be a stretch to speculate that Hitler took meth and started davening.

      1. I don’t think adolf was on meth in 1936 ,i think it only started during the war .

  11. Der Fuhrer was also reportedly very verklempt that the sons of a bunch of lumber jacks and miners from the Pacific NorthWest pipped his German team at the line to win the men’s eights rowing gold. I’m betting it wasn’t the color of their skins that bothered him though.

  12. I don’t think 1936 Americans could have paraded on that moral high ground, as implied here. After all, Hitler’s attitude was shared by many Americans at the time (he was also personally admired by many Americans). Of course black people were good enough to be exploited for national interests.

    1. I well remember buying PBR in Williamsburg, spring of ’71, for $1.09/6pk. The stuff was astonishingly good. But elsewhere across the land it was nowhere near as good. Years later I met a guy running a B&B who in his previous life had been a beer distributor. Recollecting on PBR, he immediately said that that had been Pabst’s problem – not being able to make a nationally consistent product from its many breweries.

      Anyway, around here the hipsters go for hazy New England ales, sometimes hopped, but never like the West Coast kind that I like even more.

      1. You might like Hazy Little Thing – Sierra Nevada. I think all IPAs are hipster everywhere else but Massachusetts. I don’t know the California beer history, though. I’ll enjoy an IPA anyway.

  14. this classic skit of “Four Yorkshiremen”. I’m not sure exactly what stereotypes accrue to those from Yorkshire, but here it seems to be a claim of a hard life. Is that in fact the case?

    Many of the Yorkshiremen I know take that sketch as an instruction manual to emulate, rather than as a description to be examined. It is a self-fulfilled policy.

Comments are closed.