Friday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

August 30, 2019 • 6:30 am

Is it already Friday? Yes, it’s August 30, 2019: the penultimate day of the month, and exactly one week since I was sliced open and manipulated with huge robotical surgical arms. (I’m healing nicely, thank you.)

Here’s Matthew’s report on the status of Britain’s constitutional crisis. He proffers just a tweet:

It’s National Toasted Marshmallow Day (I like mine burnt to a crisp), as well as International Day of the Disappeared, National Holistic Pet Day (what is that?), and National Slinky Day. Speaking of which, here’s a video of the famous “Slinky fall”, with an explanation of how this counterintuitive phenomenon works:

Not a lot happened on this day in history; the few events worth noting include these:

Presumably many of you have read Steve Gould’s book on the fauna, Wonderful Life. Though its thesis needs revision (many of the Burgess Shall fauna now are thought to reside in groups still represented by living species), it still was a remarkable find and an engaging book. Go see the Burgess Shall Fossil Gallery at The Burgess Shale site. Here’s Opabinia regalis (and a reconstruction), described as “a primitive arthropod with five eyes and a long ‘nozzle’ with claws”:

  • 1918 – Fanni Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, which along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for Red Terror.

Lenin’s injuries probably contributed to the stroke that killed him six years later. Kaplan was executed with a bullet to the head on September 3.

This is the status of the hotline today:

In 2007, the Moscow–Washington hotline was upgraded; a dedicated computer network links Moscow and Washington. The new system started operations on January 1, 2008.[4] It continues to use the two satellite links but a fiber optic cable replaced the old back-up cable. Commercial software is used for both chat and email: chat to coordinate operations, and email for actual messages. Transmission is nearly instantaneous.

  • 1967 – Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as the first African American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
  • 1984 – STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery takes off on its maiden voyage.
  • 1992 – The 11-day Ruby Ridge standoff ends with Randy Weaver surrendering to federal authorities.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1716 – Capability Brown, British landscape architect (d. 1783)
  • 1720 – Samuel Whitbread, English brewer and politician, founded Whitbread (d. 1796)
  • 1797 – Mary Shelley, English novelist and playwright (d. 1851)
  • 1871 – Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand-English physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1937)
  • 1884 – Theodor Svedberg, Swedish chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1971)
  • 1893 – Huey Long, American lawyer and politician, 40th Governor of Louisiana (d. 1935)

Long, a demagogue who could be considered the Donald Trump of Louisiana. His life is fascinating, and here is pushing a populist message (note the Louisiana accent). He was assassinated in 1935 at age 42.

  • 1918 – Ted Williams, American baseball player and manager (d. 2002)
  • 1930 – Warren Buffett, American businessman and philanthropist

Those who passed away on August 30 include:

  • 1940 – J. J. Thomson, English physicist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1856)
  • 2013 – Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1939)
  • 2015 – Wes Craven, American director, producer, screenwriter, and actor (b. 1939)
  • 2015 – Oliver Sacks, English-American neurologist, author, and academic (b. 1933)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Gosia, the former upstairs tenant, has returned for a visit, but Hili is wary to take her proffered “cat sausage”:

Gosia: Why are you so hesitant?
Hili: We are living in times when anything can turn out to be bogus.
In Polish:.

From Amazing Things (photo by @sasikumar_ksk [IG])

Reader Ken Kukec sent a diagram labeled “Current circumstances as a literary Venn Diagram”. But the diagram leaves out one novel.

Grania sent me this tweet on March 22 of this year, adding “very sweet.”

From Gethyn. This rescue of this beat-up old alley cat, and his transformation into a sleek and loving house moggie, should warm your heart:

From Paul, a kestrel keeping its head rock steady while its body is buffeted about. Many birds can do this, and it’s amazing:

From Heather Hastie via Ann German. I swear, Mr. Lumpy is the world’s most spoiled badger. A peanut butter barm cake!! (No wonder his bum is so big.)

Tweets from Matthew. A beekeeper with a tender heart:

Is this a joke, or a toy intended for sadistic children?

This woman has an eagle eye for fraudulently photoshopped pictures like this. And these are from a paper in the prestigious journal Nature (you can find it here). Let us see what happens!

This hognose snake fakes death as good as a mallard does:

 

37 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)”

  1. Knowing that fact about the hognose snake, I used to have no respect for it. (Plus that name. Completely undignified.) Then I encountered one and saw that it does a cool hooded display.

  2. We don’t encourage our local badgers, partly because we don’t want the cats trying to evict them from the premises. That and excavations in the lawn… rabbits: 1 to 2 inches, foxes: 2 to 3 inches, badgers: what lawn? Sight exaggeration, but once they decide there might be something tasty down there, somewhere in that expanse of grass…

    1. Whereas I throw my old bread etc out as it gets dark in the hope that the badgers get it, rather than birds nicking it before them.

      I leave the food in the place that is easiest to see from the spare room window, but sadly I only rarely check the window at the right time to see them.

      I need some sort of badger activity alarm…..

    2. Lucky you! It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. We were at the headquarters a few years ago on one of our cross country drives And the timing just did not work. Plus we had the dog with us and I’m not sure I could do the 12 hour or so round-trip hike anymore.

    3. Lucky you! It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. We were at the headquarters a few years ago on one of our cross country drives And the timing just did not work. Plus we had the dog with us and I’m not sure I could do the 12 hour or so round-trip hike anymore.

      1. I am guessing Merilee, that your thread comment at #2 is really meant for Janet at #10 🙂

          1. 12 Kitties I think. Middle candle looks evil. Love those rough tiles & great colour too.

          3. It’s my kitchen stove, Rick🤓I’d only show my bathroom if I were demonstrating to Diana the correct way to hang tp.

  3. Interesting Nobel Prize history from Thompson:

    “In addition to Thomson himself, six of his research assistants (Charles Glover Barkla, Niels Bohr, Max Born, William Henry Bragg, Owen Willans Richardson and Charles Thomson Rees Wilson) won Nobel Prizes in physics, and two (Francis William Aston and Ernest Rutherford) won Nobel prizes in chemistry. In addition, Thomson’s son (George Paget Thomson) won the 1937 Nobel Prize in physics for proving the wave-like properties of electrons.”

    Source: Wikipedia

  4. Avenging Narwhal logic: it’s impaling creatures cuter than itself hence Seal, Penguin & the generally non-aquatic Koala

    There’s also the Avenging Unicorn with impaleable Hipster, Banker & Mime. The original version had Hippy Lady rather than Hipster

    https://flic.kr/p/2h7NxaY

    My favourite is Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure – comes with 6 Cats!

    https://flic.kr/p/2h7Nxan

    1. The source for all these goodies was/is Archie McPhee’s Accoutrements range, although I doubt it began with them as these novelty stores copy each other.

      Or there’s AMAZON & eBay for discontinued – some high prices

      Another view of Crazy Cat Lady with a 7th Kitty draped around her shoulders. The dressing gown is on the road to ‘authentically crazy’ – needs ketchup for verisimilitude. Dude.

      https://flic.kr/p/2h7NNcX

      1. Those “action figures” are great. I have a magnetic crazy cat lady which sits on top of my stove with 7 or 8 kitties hanging from various parts of her body.

  5. I was at South Stack a few weeks back. The choughs were about and came close enough to be recognisable without optics.

  6. … a kestrel keeping its head rock steady while its body is buffeted about …

    Now, there’s a kestrel earns a tune from the Queen of Soul:

  7. Animal Farm should have been included in the Venn diagram, since we have our own betrayer pig in Trump.

  8. Don’t handle hognose snakes, since they have a toxic venom. Usually not a serious problem, but bites can have unpleasant side effects.

  9. Good for #50! Although I think the ref mighta let him and #0 slide on a three-second lane violation. And #0 still needs s little work getting back on defense after scoring a bucket. 🙂

  10. We hiked to the Burgess Shale deposit in Yoho National Park in British Columbia a few years ago. You have to make arrangements with rangers who take you up. Many of the prime fossils have of course been moved to museums, but they do have some fossils up there (under lock and key)to show climbers, plus it is awesome to view the site. Long steep climb but very cool.

  12. Considering that he was one of the idiots responsible for the referendum shambles George Osborne has a bloody cheek posting that cartoon.

    1. Sparks are probably flying at Harvard Med School this week. You’d think they would be smarter.
      The name of the rescued cat, I’m told, is “Winston”.

  14. Interesting to listen to Huey Long.

    Why is it populist? Isn’t he making the same claim as many on the left do today: that the elite 1% (or whatever) own far more than they should?

    It does seem to me to be a problem, then as now.

  16. Someone should make a film version of “It Can’t Happen Here”. The first attempts to do so were thwarted due to, well who knows? In 1936 MGM didn’t want to release a film that would upset Hitler.

    1. Researchers using biomedical images in their papers that are from other peoples work or their own work in a different study. It can be an error, or laziness or fraud. Retraction Watch has examples of this often!

      Careers depend on getting papers out there to build ones rep & people are prone to taking short cuts or making shit up – anything to have a significant, interesting & oft-cited paper to ones name. SEE HERE

      Spotting image chicanery is easy – makes me think there’s an even greater percent of garbage in raw data which is harder to check – selecting the stuff that fits the hypothesis etc etc

  18. It is great to see the Venn diagram put to such good use. Unfortunately set math is no longer taught in NZ schools: I taught to juniors in the seventies, but since, as is the way with math ed. someone thought that it was no longer needed. As for the novel not shown in the venn picture (no spoilers here) I would love to locate a copy.

    1. “As for the novel not shown in the Venn picture (no spoilers here) I would love to locate a copy”

      Eh? I don’t understand – there’s no availability problem at all. You can even get it shipped to the poles [almost] these days.

      Even if you want a first edition it’s out there waiting at between £50 & £300. If you just want the book for reading it’s been on the Penguin Modern Classics [£8, new paperback] list for a couple of years & the older Signet Classics too. There’s also the eBook or the audio book to choose from.

      1. Message received, with thanks, Michael. Will try the usual.And yes, it will be the modern classics version!

Comments are closed.