Monday: Hili dialogue

September 2, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s still Labor Day weekend in America; in fact, today, September 2, 2019, is Labor Day itself, honoring the American worker and the power of collective organizing. Google honors the day with a Doodle, and clicking on it goes to a page about the holiday:It’s also National “Grits for Breakfast” Day, and that’s a fine holiday, for there’s no breakfast to compare to a good Southern breakfast: Eggs, grits with red-eye gravy, homemade biscuits with homemade jam, sausage, and lots of strong coffee. (I recommend the Loveless Cafe in Nashville., where you can feast on this breakfast. This in fact is what I ate there in 2012; Here was my breakfast at the Loveless in 2012: I insisted, when invited to give a talk at Vanderbilt University, that they take me here for breakfast. Voilà: ham with red-eye gravy, grits, and eggs.

Da biscuits! Da biscuits! Bread of the gods! (Served with homemade preserves). If you eat these, more will come. (Be careful not to fill up on biscuits before the eggs, ham, and grits arrive!) There is no better breakfast anywhere on the planet.

It’s also World Coconut Day, National Blueberry Popsicle Day (no, thank you), and Pierce Your Ears Day (no again, thank you).

Stuff that happened on September 2 includes:

  • 44 BC – Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion.
  • 1666 – The Great Fire of London breaks out and burns for three days, destroying 10,000 buildings, including Old St Paul’s Cathedral.
  • 1752 – Great Britain, along with its overseas possessions, adopts the Gregorian calendar.
  • 1898 – Battle of Omdurman: British and Egyptian troops defeat Sudanese tribesmen and establish British dominance in Sudan.
  • 1901 – Vice President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt utters the famous phrase, “Speak softly and carry a big stick” at the Minnesota State Fair.
  • 1945 – World War II: Combat ends in the Pacific Theater: The Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed by Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and accepted aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

My photo of where the Instrument of surrender was signed, taken in Pearl Harbor last year while touring the USS Missouri:

  • 1946 – The Interim Government of India is formed, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru as Vice President with the powers of a Prime Minister.
  • 1987 – In Moscow, the trial begins for 19-year-old pilot Mathias Rust, who flew his Cessna airplane into Red Square in May.

Rust was sentenced to four years in a labor camp, but served less than a year, and not in a camp.

More events on September 2:

  • 1998 – Swissair Flight 111 crashes near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia; all 229 people onboard are killed.
  • 2018 – The National Museum of Brazil is destroyed by a fire, with the loss of over 90% of the museum’s collection.

Notables born on this day were few; they include:

  • 1917 – Cleveland Amory, American author and critic (d. 1997)
  • 1948 – Terry Bradshaw, American football player, sportscaster, and actor
  • 1948 – Christa McAuliffe, American educator and astronaut (d. 1986)
  • 1964 – Keanu Reeves, Lebanese-Canadian actor, singer, and producer

Those who snuffed it on September 2 include:

  • 1910 – Henri Rousseau, French painter (b. 1844)
  • 1964 – Alvin C. York, American colonel, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1887)
  • 1969 – Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese politician, 1st President of Vietnam (b. 1890)
  • 1992 – Barbara McClintock, American geneticist and botanist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902)
  • 2001 – Christiaan Barnard, South African surgeon and academic (b. 1922)
  • 2005 – Bob Denver, American actor (b. 1935)

Here is Rousseau’s “The Tiger Cat“. Somehow this pleases me far more than the distorted cats of medieval artists, for this one is deliberately unrealistic. But it does embody pure cat-ness:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is unsatisfied with her single “cat sausage”:

Hili: If this sausage was so tasty why was there so little of it?
A: So you could dream that tomorrow you will get another one.
In Polish:
Hili: Jeśli ta kiełbaska jest taka smaczna, to dlaczego było jej tak mało?
Ja: Żebyś mogła pomarzyć, że jutro dostaniesz następną.

A gif for fun:

Some humor from the Facebook page  :

And from Jesus of The Day. This surely can’t be real, and yet I’m sure it is:

Grania sent me this tweet on April 5 of this year. One ctenophore engulfs another:

A tweet from reader Barry: a pussycat, pussycat put out to sea:

A surprised bouncy cat from Heather Hastie:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1166483352477667329

Reader Gethyn, who’s taking these claims at face value, he says, adds that they might be further evidence for “Enlightenment Now.” The thread goes on after this.

 

Three tweets from Matthew. The first is Trump pronouncing on the hurricane and, as usual, inserting his metatarsals into his gob:

This is heartbreaking as hell, and is one of the reasons why Matthew isn’t keen on social media these days:

https://twitter.com/twmentality1/status/1167983934568837120?s=11

And to lighten the mood, some SE Asian fireworks. This one’s amazing, and watch until the end.

https://twitter.com/zonephysics/status/1167620232120360962?s=11

43 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  2. What is the catch these days for tourism in Texas. Come on down it’s open season all year long. Open carry even to your church of choice. What freedom!

    Reply

  4. CAT 5 ATLANTIC HURRICANES:
    35 recorded ones since 1924, but it is no doubt true Dorian is the first one known to the Bullshitter-in-Chief

    THAILAND/LAOS WHIZZERS:
    Parachutes no less. The ROCKET FESTIVAL

    [Thai: Prapheni Bun Bang Fai, Lao: Bun Bang Fai] “is a merit-making ceremony traditionally practiced by ethnic Lao people throughout much of Isan and Laos, in numerous villages and municipalities near the beginning of the wet season.

    Celebrations typically include preliminary music and dance performances, competitive processions of floats, dancers and musicians on the second day, and culminating on the third day in competitive firings of home-made rockets. Local participants and sponsors use the occasion to enhance their social prestige, as is customary in traditional Buddhist folk festivals throughout Southeast Asia”

    Lots of great videos on YouTube of happy people with their bamboo Catherine Wheel whizzers & other styles of bamboo rocket.

    This looks like a promotional video with a variety of the things in action:

    https://youtu.be/4bF1olVBp94

    Reply

      1. The thing is, his base, or at least the great majority of them, don’t remember from one week to the next what he’s said of failed to say. The others don’t care. He can say anything that pops into his head and it makes no difference…except *crosses fingers* to a small bunch of independents who might swing the next election.

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  5. Are those biscuits the same kind of thing that Americans are talking about when they refer to ‘biscuits ‘n’ gravy’?
    Biscuits in my neck of the woods are dry, crumbly things that you have one the side of your teacup, so I never understood how putting them in gravy constituted a meal.

    Are they like scones? Even then, having them with gravy sounds odd.

    Reply

    1. Yes: These are the biscuits of biscuits and gravy in the u.s. also we use them for sandwiches in place of bread or rolls, putting a fried chicken breast filet between the biscuit halves, or a sausage patty, or a chicken fried steak patty. Compared with a scone, the scone is sweeter with significant sugar in its recipe. A good biscuit requires simply a generous pat of butter. Can be served at any meal including as a side with fried chicken dinner.

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      1. And as a side with fried chicken, a generous helping of local honey often substitutes for butter between the warm biscuit halves.

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    1. Kind of an odd question. Do you not hear the gun fire. A guy with an assault rifle is killing and shooting people. I would not advise standing up and waving.

      Reply

  9. I’m afraid to advise Prof CC (emeritus) that he is clearly mistaken about the southern breakfast’s being the best in the world (BiW).
    Having just returned from a visit to Ireland, I can report that the BiW is indubitably the *Full Irish*.
    With Black pudding AND white pudding, it is the full multicultural …

    Reply

    1. And that sound you hear while eating the Full Irish is your arteries slamming shut.
      I lived in Ireland for a few months, but only made it through a couple of Full Irishes (or Ulster Fries, the NI equivalent).

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    2. It is best if you fry the rashers first and then cook the puddings, sausage, and eggs in the grease. Had a visitor from Belfast cook it that way at my house and it was wonderful. When I went to Ireland I was disappointed to find the black and white puddings basically dry.

      Reply

  11. The world’s first electrified road opened in Sweden – It’s the first I’d heard about this idea. Looks promising. With short stretches of road fixed up like this, you could probably drive every day of the week and not have to stop at a charge station. How cool is that!

    Reply

    1. In a way it’s the second Swedish electrified road. They have one with electrified wires running above that tall vehicles can access, thus lorries, coaches & buses can connect to it on the move in the manner of electric trams/trains. SEE HERE

      The almost Scalextric-style electrified road channel has my B.S. meter twitching though. I don’t believe it will save 90% on carbon emissions in the round – that rail idea is high implementation & high maintenance which has a carbon cost – overhead wires on clear straight stretches away from trees must be a significantly cheaper option. And when a section needs repair that’s going to be a problem, you’d need to direct cars off that lane a mile ahead & a mile after so you’d want a four lane road [two each way] to make that possible. Presumably the rail is only for the slow lane.

      I would be surprised if it saves extra carbon, compared to home charging – for that to happen you could make car batteries 1/3 the size making electric cars much lighter & force users to use ‘charge-as-u-go’ [my coining]

      Reply

      1. You had us all, until… force users. That doesn’t work in the US. Unless it tastes like Spam, or yodels like a prairie chicken, you can’t expect us to do much of anything forced. We pretty much live free or die. Looks like we’re determined to do the latter.

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  12. This is the fourth category 5 hurricane in the three seasons since Numbnuts-in-Chief took office. The three earlier cat 5 storms — Irma, Maria, and Michael — all made landfall in the continental US or its territories.

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  13. Good morning,

    I detect an error in the rank you gave to Alvin C. York. He was a Corporal when he performed his heroic acts. When he brought his prisoners in he was promoted on the spot to Sgt.

    I don’t see anything suggesting he was a Colonel.

    I love the work you do. Reading your daily missive gets my wheels going.

    Please keep up the outstanding work.

    Thank you.

    Dick
    Just another sunshiny day in paradise

    Reply

  14. Biscuits?? Those aren’t biscuits, they’re scones! At least they are known as such here in NZ. If you want really serious scones (aka biscuits in USA?) you would have to try ours, which in the average cafe would be 2-3x size of those shown in your pic.

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  16. May I suggest Another Broken Egg for breakfast? If you are ever in the panhandle of Florida do try this one. You will never find a better eggs benedict in the world. There is one in Nashville too.

    anotherbrokenegg.com/location/destin

    Reply

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