Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 29, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s a soggy Sunday, September 29, 2019, and we’ve had two straight days of heavy rain. Even the ducks have fled the pond during the storms, and we haven’t seen them for over two days. I hope they return to say farewell, but I never know when it’s a final goodbye for the year.

It’s National Coffee Day, but isn’t every day National Coffee Day? (I’m drinking a homemade latte as I type this.) It’s also Goose Day (when is Duck Day??), National Biscotti Day (cultural appropriation), and World Heart Day.  And, if you’re religious, it’s Michaelmas (aka National Poisoned Blackberries Day; while if you’re spiritual and philosophical, it’s Confucius Day (in Hong Kong).

Stuff that happened on September 29 includes:

  • 1789 – The 1st United States Congress adjourns.
  • 1918 – Germany’s Supreme Army Command tells the Kaiser and the Chancellor to open negotiations for an armistice.
  • 1923 – The British Mandate for Palestine takes effect, creating Mandatory Palestine.
  • 2004 – Burt Rutan’s Ansari SpaceShipOne performs a successful spaceflight, the first of two required to win the Ansari X Prize.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 106 BC – Pompey, Roman general and politician (d. 48 BC)
  • 1758 – Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, English admiral (d. 1805)
  • 1895 – Joseph Banks Rhine, American botanist and parapsychologist (d. 1980)
  • 1898 – Trofim Lysenko, Ukrainian-Russian biologist and agronomist (d. 1976)

Lysenko, of course, was the Russian charlatan to whom Stalin gave immense power over Russian agriculture and genetics. Lysenko expelled real geneticists from their positions (some were killed or put in camps) and foisted his “acquired inheritance” theory of genetics on the Soviet Union, to both its agricultural and scientific detriment. Here’s John Maynard Smith 1920-2004), whom I knew, discussing the cognitive dissonance of his own mentor, the famous J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis but also a Marxist and admirer of the Soviet Union.  The interviewer sounds like Richard Dawkins.  Maynard Smith was also, for a time, a member of the Community Party.

  • 1907 – Gene Autry, American singer, actor, and businessman (d. 1998)
  • 1934 – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian-American psychologist and academic
  • 1935 – Jerry Lee Lewis, American singer-songwriter and pianist
  • 1943 – Lech Wałęsa, Polish electrician and politician, 2nd President of Poland, Nobel Prize laureate
  • 1956 – Suzzy Roche, American singer-songwriter and actress.

Here’s The Killer in 1964 singing some of his greatest hits. Still alive at 84, Lewis is one of the few remaining icons from the earliest era of rock and roll (he suffered a stroke earlier this year).

Those who bought the farm on this day include:

  • 1910 – Winslow Homer, American painter, illustrator, and engraver (b. 1836)
  • 1930 – Ilya Repin, Ukrainian-Russian painter and illustrator (b. 1844)

“Barge Haulers on the Volga” (1870-1873). I saw this painting in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and spent a long time standing before it. It is a very great painting. Burlaks: 17th to 20th century.

Most burlaks were landless or poor peasants from Simbirsk, Saratov, Samara, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir, Ryazan, Tambov and Penza areas.[citation needed]

Burlaks joined up in an artel (typically from four to six, sometimes ten to forty, and occasionally up 150 people) mainly in winter, despite that at this time clients paid the lowest price, because in winter burlaks were often otherwise unemployed. The final payments were in autumn, after finishing work.

With the coming of the Industrial revolution, the number of burlaks declined: in the beginning of the nineteenth century about 600,000 burlaks worked on the Volga and Oka rivers; in the middle of nineteenth century, 150,000, and by the beginning of the twentieth burlaks had all but disappeared.

The characters are based on actual people Repin came to know while preparing for the work. He had had difficulty finding subjects to pose for him, even for a fee, because of a folklorish belief that a subject’s soul would leave his possession once his image was put down on paper. The subjects include a former soldier, a former priest, and a painter. Although he depicted eleven men, women also performed the work and there were normally many more people in a barge-hauling gang; Repin selected these figures as representative of a broad swathe of the working classes of Russian society.

For two other great paintings by Repin, see here and here.

  • 1967 – Carson McCullers, American novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet (b. 1917)
  • 1970 – Edward Everett Horton, American actor (b. 1886)
  • 1973 – W. H. Auden, English-American poet, playwright, and critic (b. 1907)
  • 1975 – Casey Stengel, American baseball player and manager (b. 1890)
  • 1997 – Roy Lichtenstein, American painter and sculptor (b. 1923)
  • 2010 – Tony Curtis, American actor (b. 1925)
  • 2012 – Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, American publisher (b. 1926)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Sarah, who’s visiting, photographs and chats with Hili:

Hili: I’m afraid I look like an owl.
Sarah: Not at all, you look like a cat that resembles an owl a bit.
Photo: Sarah Lawson

In Polish:

Hili: Obawiam się, że wyglądam jak sowa.
Sarah: Wcale nie, wyglądasz jak kot, który tylko troszkę przypomina sowę.

From Amazing Things: Bonsai Forest by Masahiko Kimura:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Mark:

A tweet found by Simon. This one’s hilarious, but also true.

From Barry, showing the way things should be:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie, the first showing a useful d*g:

The world’s very best snack:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1175030430795468801

Tweets from Matthew Cobb. The first one can get me in trouble, but I can always fob it off on Dr. Cobb;

Kishi Station in Japan, where the famous calico cat Tama used to be the official stationmaster and chief operating officer.  After Tama died, she was replaced by Nitama, whom you see below. And look at the station!

Every couple of years I’d find one of these in my fly bottles; it’s due to the loss of an X chromosome from a female embryo in early development, making a fly that’s half XO (male in flies, largely female in humans), and half XX (female). It was always a treat to see these. The male side has a darker abdomen and a sex comb on the front leg.

21 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I don’t think the cat is going to speak Italian. I think he is merely pausing for effect while pretending to search for the exact phrase, and will continue in Jacob Bronowski’s voice and manner.

    —

    Here’s a link to the rest of the Maynard Smith interview, all, um… 102 segments of it, each of 2 or 3 minutes! WTF??? (I guess uploaded by someone with a very slow internet connection.)

  2. My sister’s visiting Japan and according to her Whatsapp account she’s already walked past two Puppy Cafes and an Owl Cafe on the journey from the airport to her hotel.

    They seem to treat the animals fairly well – she sent some photos – but the whole idea is so open to exploitation it sets alarm bells ringing.

    Mind you, she and my mother went to China recently too, and by comparison Japan is heaven for animals.

  3. I’m curious why Smith felt that Haldane was right to confine his criticisms of Lysenko and the persecution of Soviet biologists to discussions within the Party, while remaining silent in public.

    2. It’s a long post (all of his are), but trust me, it’s great and gets to the heart of what you’re asking.

      1. You’re right – this is an excellent defense of Soviet scientists who refrained from public criticism of Lysenko. But I don’t see how it applies to Haldane’s public silence in post-war Great Britain.

        1. I’m not defending him on those grounds. I’d defend him on those grounds if he was in the USSR. I’m merely saying that, in this case, the reason he did this is likely because of the political community/tribe of which he was a part. His thinking was probably that to criticize Lysenko publicly would make himself persona non grata in his own political circles.

    1. I wasn’t familiar either and spent a good hour reading about him and checking some of his paintings. Wonderful art and certainly Repin depicted the Russian people and their place in time beautifully.

  6. Repin’s paintings are very photo-realistic. Oddly they remind me of Rockwell, a similar tendency to caricature.

  7. Jerry, the description of the video at Youtube says that the “listener” in the John Maynard Smith video is indeed Richard Dawkins.

  8. According to Google (which is of course infallible), National Rubber Duckie Day is Jan 13; Lame Duck Day is Feb 6; Assumption College Duck Day (to welcome the ducks as they return to campus) was on 23 Apr; Donald Duck Day is June 9; and Dead Duck Day, to commemorate the first recorded instance of homosexual necrophilia in mallards, is on June 5: http://www.deadduckday.com

    Do any of these count?

  9. While browsing via Google Chrome on my PC I noticed a section where the inserted images, videos, etc. are missing. But Jerry’s text is present.

    Today the JC entries beginning at “A tweet found by Simon” have no images and continue missing to the end of that section.

    No problem in Safari on a Mac nor in Firefox on my PC. Odd.

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