Monday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

October 14, 2019 • 6:30 am

Well, a week from today I’m off to Chile and then Antarctica. Remember that posting will be almost nonexistent for over a month, but, barring my ingestion by an orca or leopard seal, I’ll be back.

It’s Monday, October 14, 2019, and National Dessert Day. It’s also Columbus Day, but since he was a colonizer it’s been changed for many to Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  And it’s World Standards Day, National Kick-Butt Day (Action This Day!), National Chocolate-Covered Insect Day, and, for Jews, the beginning of the one-week autumn holiday of Sukkot.

There are supposed to be three animated Google Doodles today, but I see only one, and it’s not even animated (maybe it’s my browser). If you click on the picture below, you go to a bunch of links honoring Joseph Plateau, a physicist born on this day in 1801.  In 1832, Plateau invented the phenakistiscope, an animation device that produced an illusion of movement.  What I see is the first picture.

But The Verge has a gif showing what’s supposed to happen if the disk was in a phenakistiscope:

Lots of stuff happened on October 14, which includes these things:

Here’s the Battle of Hastings as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, supposedly embroidered only a few years after the battle. This bit is supposed to depict the death of Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England. He was supposedly done in by an arrow in the eye, and the Latin above him says, “Harold the King has been killed”.

And, just for grins, here is the whole tapestry, scheduled to be on exhibit in England next year—the first time it’s left France in 950 years! It’s 68 meters long and was “owned” by Heinrich Himmler during World War II.

  • 1322 – Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats King Edward II of England at the Battle of Old Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland’s independence.
  • 1586 – Mary, Queen of Scots, goes on trial for conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth I of England.
  • 1656 – Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
  • 1888 – Louis Le Prince films the first motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene.

The film runs for only 2.1 seconds, and here it is several times over:

  • 1908 – The Chicago Cubs defeat the Detroit Tigers, 2–0, clinching the 1908 World Series; this would be their last until winning the 2016 World Series.
  • 1912 – Former president Theodore Roosevelt is shot and mildly wounded by John Flammang Schrank. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Roosevelt delivers his scheduled speech.
  • 1926 – The children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne, is first published.

I loved Milne’s books, which I was given on a childhood visit to London on the way to Greece. Here is my spirit animal:

  • 1943 – World War II: Prisoners at the Sobibór extermination camp in Poland revolt against the Germans. [JAC: read the story at the link]
  • 1947 – Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to exceed the speed of sound.
  • 1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis begins when an American reconnaissance aircraft takes photographs of Soviet ballistic missiles being installed in Cuba.
  • 1964 – Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence.
  • 1968 – Jim Hines becomes the first man ever to break the so-called “ten-second barrier” in the 100-meter sprint with a time of 9.95 seconds.
  • 1977 – Anita Bryant gets a pie thrown in her face at a news conference in Des Moines by gay rights activist Tom Higgins for her anti LGBT commentary. 

Here’s a video of the homophobe Bryant getting pied. I object to this kind of thing, of course, but I also object to her homophobia. Note how Bryant prays after she gets smacked. (She’s still alive at 79.)  Curiously, the pie-thrower didn’t face charges:

  • 1994 – Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the establishment of the Oslo Accords and the framing of future Palestinian self government.

It didn’t work, like all the peace initiatives. Very sad.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1644 – William Penn, English businessman who founded Pennsylvania (d. 1718)
  • 1882 – Éamon de Valera, American-Irish rebel and politician, 3rd President of Ireland (d. 1975)
  • 1888 – Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand novelist, short story writer, and essayist (d. 1923)
  • 1890 – Dwight D. Eisenhower, American general and politician, 34th President of the United States (d. 1969)
  • 1893 – Lillian Gish, American actress (d. 1993)
  • 1894 – E. E. Cummings, American poet and playwright (d. 1962)
  • 1906 – Hannah Arendt, German-American philosopher and theorist (d. 1975)
  • 1938 – John Dean, American lawyer and author, 13th White House Counsel
  • 1946 – Craig Venter, American biologist, geneticist, and academic
  • 1974 – Shaggy 2 Dope, American rapper and producer

Those who died on October 14 include:

You probably know that Rommel, implicated (perhaps wrongly) in the plot to kill Hitler, was given the choice of being tried (and of course convicted and his family shamed), or committing suicide with a cyanide capsule, followed by a state funeral and no damage to his family or staff. He chose the latter. Here’s the announcement of his death in the Nazi paper “Bonzer Tagblatt” on October 16 of 1944. It says that he died of head injuries following a car accident, and that Hitler ordered a state funeral:

  • 1959 – Errol Flynn, Australian-American actor, singer, and producer (b. 1909)
  • 1977 – Bing Crosby, American singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1903)
  • 1990 – Leonard Bernstein, American pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1918)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili makes a wise connection:

Hili: Such are the results of revolving around the Sun.
A: What do you mean?
Hili: Leaves are falling down.
Photo by Sarah Lawson
In Polish:
Hili: To są skutki kręcenia się wokół Słóńca.
Ja: Co masz na myśli?
Hili: Liście opadają.

In nearby Wloclawek, Leon is befuddled:

Leon: What’s going on?

In Polish: Co się dzieje?

From the Purrfect Feline Page: If cats were bigger than we are.

From ScienceBlogs, the worst package design ever.  Is this even real?

A recent Doonesbury. You may have to enlarge it to see the candies:

I haven’t looked up this Forbes article, but this has to be the worst advice ever:

From Gethyn. Who says animals don’t have fun?

https://twitter.com/thehumanxp/status/1183103317892837376

From reader Barry, who adds, “I don’t get them, either.”

https://twitter.com/Mr_Meowwwgi/status/1183151631468322819

From Heather Hastie. I may have posted this before, but so what? This cat flunks the mirror test!

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1178080011800195073

And four tweets from Professor Cobb.  This one gets Tweet of the Week, as the Brits counted cats and dogs in their 1911 census. Enlarge and check out the cats!

Well, actually, this one is a tie for Tweet of the Week. Read the thread to see a nefarious malefactor mutt. It pushed kids into the Seine repeatedly and then rescued them, all to get beefsteaks!

 

47 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)”

  1. That the Bryant pie throwers didn’t face charges isn’t all that surprising to me. The consensus might be that America has moved toward understanding and leniency toward anodyne acts of disobedience and mock assault. If anything, I think we’ve moved closer to the book on anything that verges on assault or the perception of violence. Today anything that meets the dictionary definition of assault or battery is likely to be prosecuted. It was a lot different back then. People took things in stride.

    1. I’m opposed in principle to any kind of physical assault (which a pie-in-the-face constitutes legally). But, I gotta admit, I’ve always had a certain fondness for them, too. There is just something so juste about them as a gesture for taking the hot air out of the self-important (or even for testing the mettle of a friend’s sense of humor).

      Hell, I took one in the mug myself at a going-away party the restaurant where I was working held when I left to go to law school. Throwing them was an institution of sorts at the place, especially on such occasions (though I don’t doubt that some of my co-workers felt I had it coming as a comeuppance for having spouted half-baked but cocksure opinions from behind the bar, too). 🙂

      Or maybe as a kid I just watched too much Soupy Sales, who seemed to take one or throw one almost every show.

    2. As despicable as her cause was, I couldn’t bring myself to hate Mrs. Bryant after I heard her say, “Well, at least it’s a fruit pie.”

      1. Yeah, I’ve always seen Anita Bryant as the cynosure of bad sexual politics, but I gotta say she seemed to handle the situation with a certain sense of humor and aplomb.

    3. There’s also the fact of Bryant’s husband retaliating against the pie throwers by throwing a pie at them.

  2. 1947 – Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to exceed the speed of sound.

    Here’s the depiction of that event from Philip Kaufman’s film (adapted from Tom Wolfe’s book) The Right Stuff, with the late Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager:

    1. Only because the British govt cancelled the Miles aircraft project which Eric Brown would have flown ,not trying to wave the flag here.

      1. Also not counted, the Nazi projects which led to the UFO craze once brought over to Area 51 and led to a sudden advances in “US” technology.

        1. The contributions of Wernher von Braun to the US space program are recounted assiduously in The Right Stuff, both book and film.

          As Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying of the post-War German brain-drain and the US’s leaping ahead of the USSR in the race to the moon: “Our Nazis are better than their Nazis.” 🙂

          2. Do you happen to have a link so that I can see just what it looks like?

            BTW, please check Saturday’s Hili Dialog — the thread on the beaver, for the response from Peter Busher of Boston University, the expert on beavers I contacted. I was kind of surprised that he responded but he did!

          4. Thanks Colin. That’s the impressive von BRAUN SATIN HAIR 3, but Wernher never cracked the problem of the electrical flex [that’s electric cord you colonials] which made the exploitation of the Solar System rather difficult. I’ve found a pic of Wernher with the inferior von BRAUN SATIN FLEX 1 & as you can see he’s fudged the issue by leaving the flex out of the drawing entirely! [pic going up in a moment]

    3. Yeager was quite a character. He survived dog fights in WWII with his P-51 Mustang in part because he had such good eyesight he could spot the enemy 50 miles away and always managed to get the drop on them.

    4. Jenny H. Here’s the only known picture of Wernher with his von BRAUN SATIN HAIR 1 models & the concept drawing [behind him on the wall] of a fleet of vBSH 1s returning from a lunar mission [note that Wernher’s hair is perfect, thus a partial success I suppose]:

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

  3. Yes that Tesco ‘Nutt Milk’ carton is real and dates back to 2014. Plenty of references on Google. It featured in e.g. the Guardian, Mirror, Sun etc and was rapidly withdrawn.

    cr

  4. 1994 – Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the establishment of the Oslo Accords and the framing of future Palestinian self government. It didn’t work, like all the peace initiatives. Very sad.

    Noam Chomsky provided some background. There’s no solution or peace because mainly the USA has no interest in it.

    ‘Since 1971, the US and Israel have been virtually alone in rejecting the standard interpretation of the withdrawal clause of UN 242. […] The US also blocked initiatives from Europe, the Arab states, the PLO and others. The last of the regular UN resolutions was in the midst of the Gulf conflict, in December 1990 (144-2).

    Through this period, the US and Israel were the leaders of the rejectionist camp, joined by increasingly marginal elements of the Islamic world, justly termed “extremist.” The conclusions being unacceptable, the facts have been “vetoed” along with numerous peace initiatives, buried deep in the memory hole together with Sadat’s “famous milestone” and much else that is inconvenient.’ — The Israel-Arafat Agreement, Noam Chomsky, Oct 1993

  5. “Harold the King has been killed”

    I thought when “est” is at the end, as it is here :

    Harold Rex Intervectus Est

    … it means “Harold King is ___(whatever intervectus means)___”

    … presumably “dead”…

    2. I ran it through Google Translate (with the v changed to an f because that is what it says on the tapestry and the answer is

      King Harold was killed

      At this point it is traditional to point out that the Bayeux tapestry is technically not a tapestry but an embroidery.

      1. Thanks

        But

        Unless it’s changed a lot, I’m not inclined to give Google Translate the final word on translations. It’s strongly suggestive but I still would like an explanation.

      2. I got “Harold was killed”

        … the thing is, I thought I learned long ago that when “est” is at the end, it means “is”.

        1. Are you doubting Google Translate’s unmatched wisdom?

          It would certainly be more natural to label the scene “Harold is killed”, at least it would be in English.

      3. Don’t know if it is right that it was owned by uncle heinie during the war ,i did read somewhere that adolf thought it held the key to how to invade England .

    3. From interficio: kill. Then in passive voice: interficior now put it in past perfect: interfectus sum and make it third person: intefectus est.

      I still see that translation as “was killed” rather than “has been killed” but meh it’s personal preference and I think the “has been killed” is probably better in this context of a tapestry.

      1. In other words, Latin forms its passive voice by taking the verb, adding some endings (for present, imperfect, future) or doing the easy thing when it’s perfect, pluperfect, etc taking the passed participle and adding the correct conjugation of the verb “to be” to it.

          1. I mean “past”. Good grief I clearly can’t read Latin and write English at the same time.

      2. Thank you!

        Perhaps one day I will understand….

        Maybe the example I learned was wrong… [ tries Google Translate] goodness, it is awful…

  6. hehhehheh ! = funny, funny link you ‘ve made,
    Dr Coyne, to your ” I’ll be back ” statement !

    Blue

  7. A top quality Anita Bryant quote*:

    “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail-biters”

    * I’ve looked around, but can’t confirm authenticity, but I hope it’s true. 🙂

  9. The cat and the mirror reminds me of the mirror-gay with Harpo and Lucy on the “I Love Lucy” show.

  10. How about a new feature for the website: readers’ spirit animals? Our host’s is Eeyore; it would be entertaining to see others.

    1. As overheard in a pub .
      First drinker ,
      “My dad you to call me donkey ”
      Second drinker
      “Why?”
      First drinker
      “Beats me ,eeyore ,eeyore he always used to .”

        1. Sorry that joke doesn’t transfer well to being written down ,believe me you would be laughing if you heard it in the flesh ,so to speak .

  11. That Doonesbury comic was quite good. Though I think he got the number of women who have accused Trump of sexual assault wrong. I think it’s upwards of 40, not 24. Not that anyone cares it seems.

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