Sunday: Hili dialogue and a duck-goose-cat farmyard rush hour

November 3, 2019 • 3:01 am

by Matthew Cobb

Hili is helpful.

Hili: I have to rake all this carefully.
Andrzej: I wouldn’t manage without you.

In Polish:
Hili: Muszę to wszystko starannie zgrabić.
Ja: Bez ciebie nie dałbym sobie rady..
My cats (Ollie, Pepper and Harry) refuse to pick up a rake and are snug inside, while outside it is very foggy: weather my kids used to describe as ‘the end of the world’, though whether that was because the fog hid everything so that it looked like there was no more world, or if they thought it was the apocalypse, I’m not sure.
At Marsh Farm, all the animals are ready to come out of the barn:

Look at these two tweets, showing  a new species of *mantis* that looks like a wasp. The linked in the tweets is open access, so anyone can read it. The video, showing how natural selection has shaped the mantis’s movement, is quite extraordinary:

Medieval and early modern European painters may not have been able to pain cats, but they could paint guinea pigs!

It’s not Friday any more, but who cares. Look at the size of those dinosaur bones!

You might find this horrific:

And if you thought that was creepy. Here’s the instrument that makes the noises in the films:

22 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue and a duck-goose-cat farmyard rush hour”

  1. The mantis certainly looks like a lot like an ichneumon wasp but that is a curious model for a mimic as these wasps do not sting. Presumably the model has some kind of repugnant taste?

    Alternatively, I suppose the mimicry could be seeking to fool wasps of the model species to approach for courtship – only to discover too late that they were entering a fatal trap?

    1. I would have guessed the wasps in question would be stingers. A curious choice. At least I would not pick it up.

  3. They could pretty much paint everything well except for cats. It make you wonder if somehow witches were involved in all of this.

    1. The horror instrument is called Mega Marvin by Morfbeats. You can buy a MICRO MARVIN for only $250, though it’s not going to rumble your internals like the MM.

      There’s also the Blaster Beam by a different outfit, which has been used in a lot of movies [Star Trek especially] – sounds great running through my HiFi, not so much on a ‘phone. Here:

      https://youtu.be/cj4f5z6nRhs

      1. My son-in-law would love one for Halloween. I wonder if this music is inherently scary or just that we’ve grown up with it in movies?

          1. Very interesting!
            I sometimes feel anxious for no apparent reason when I hear the wind howling. Nothing to do with fear of trees falling on the house.

            I was working in the lab late one night🎶🎶

      1. Theremins are very cool. I’ve seen/heard them played live a couple of times in operas and chamber concerts. Very weird to watch them being played.

  7. That gizmo for spooky sounds is awesome! Ages ago the old Disney-MGM Studios had a live show dealing with sounds effects. They showed all the different foleys used to produce sounds, then showed a brief movie with Chevy Chase and Martin Short, and invited members of the audience to come up, and use the foleys to provide the effects for the movie. Needless to say, the results from untrained and unrehearsed personnel were hilarious.

  8. That is a well painted guinea pig. So were they brought back by Spanish explorers after they took over Mexico? I had no idea they were kept as pets since the 1500’s!

    1. Not Mexico, which was not visited by Europeans until 1518. Most likely GPs came to Europe via the Caribbean three decades earlier than that by way of Spanish traders.

      The GP was domesticated as early as 5000 BC for food by tribes in the Andean region & according to THIS WIKI GPs were introduced into the Caribbean by “ceramic-making horticulturalists” from South America […] around 500 BC! On his first voyage Columbus bumped into the island of Hispaniola [modern day Haiti/Dominican Republic] in 1492 which had long had GPs by then. I suppose the first GP/European meeting must have been then & there.

    2. I suspect they were kept in Europe for that same reason that South Americans kept Guinea Pigs and Europeans kept rabbits : as food animals.

      Fur too, for the rabbits.

      Isn’t there a Ms Warren currently causing a stir in USian politics? Has anyone pointed out what her family name means? That’ll be pure electoral poison for some part of the electorate.

        1. A Warrener (or Warren [Keeper] as the name has descended most often) was very specifically the person charged with keeping the warren of nice fluffy bunnies for the lord’s pot and the furrier’s frame. It wasn’t unto the rising price of labour and then Enclosures Acts of the 15th and 16th centuries that rabbits got out into the British landscape and went feral.
          It’s not something that I give a flying fastidiousness about, but someone, somewhere is probably trying to work out how to make a political advantage out of a bunny killer.

  9. It’s not Friday any more, but who cares. Look at the size of those dinosaur bones! Yara for scale!

    I saw that tweet too. To my eye (but with only one viewpoint), that looks like two femora from the same side of an animal. Or, to be more precise, from two animals.
    That’s not wildly uncommon – getting several animals killed in a flood (or at a river crossing) which then disarticulate, then getting the bones sorted by size and shape is not unknown. I can’t recall a report of sorting at this size before, but it has been reported from bone beds with hundreds or thousands of hadrosaurines associated with volcanic ash-fall deposits.
    You can also see collapse of the bones length-wise from the acetabular process towards the mid-shaft. Quite common in large bones.

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