Friday: Hili dialogue, cat-full farm rush hour and some optimistic tweets

November 15, 2019 • 3:24 am

by Matthew Cobb

Hili is sniffing:

Hili: He smells like a kitten.
A: That shouldn’t be a surprise to you.
In Polish:
Hili: On pachnie małym kotkiem.
Ja: To nie powinno budzić twojego zdziwienia.
JAC ADDENDUM: Yes, that’s Mietek and Hili in the dialogue above. Malgorzata and Elzbieta sent two more pictures of Mietek, who appears to be recovering quickly from his trauma and operations. He will have a loving forever home.

Elezbieta says that Mietek is a “little bundle of energy”.  Good news! Also, Malgorzata adds this:

They are going fabulously well together. The only problem is that Leon must get his food in another room with door closed. Mietek immediately eats everything that happens to be in Leon’s bowl and Leon allows him, going without food himself.

Mietek lounging on a fur rug, overseen by his brother Leon:
JAC Duck Report:  As we had hoped, duck numbers are dwindling on Botany Pond as the weather gets colder.  We have two reports from yesterday by our Secret Duck Farmers:
SDF #1:  We had 7 ducks for breakfast; 4 males and 3 females. It was 28 degrees and cloudy this morning. The “open water” areas are larger today. We had 7 ducks for lunch, same as the breakfast group.
SDF #2: We had 6 for dinner last night until a big gust of wind and they all flew away with a great amount of quacking. I haven’t seen Honey lately, though with the shorter days I’m there in the fading light and it’s harder to tell ducks apart.

Down on the farm, rush hour involves lots of cats – how many can you spot?

Good news tweets:

https://twitter.com/CarlileNicholas/status/1195168375292321792

And some things to make you think:

https://twitter.com/physicsj/status/1195229826400931841?s=11

And the man Andy is laying the floor in my daughter’s bedroom!

28 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue, cat-full farm rush hour and some optimistic tweets”

        1. Yes & I notice that Caroline frames much better video shots than the farmer animal ‘ventriloquist’ chap – a better eye. Or he’s busy reading b/day messages off his phone perhaps.

  2. “Being an invertebrate means an octopus can squeeze through some pretty small holes”.

    The octopus ability to squeeze through small holes is indeed remarkable but simply being an invertebrate is not enough by itself to confer this ability.

    Many arthropods such as lobsters and land crabs would be hard pressed to pull of this feat. Even in the Mollusca there are countless species – a giant clam for example – that cannot do this.

  7. Lots of good photos from Poland. I am late getting around and must get ready. Hearings start in about half an hour.

  8. SDF #1: We had 7 ducks for breakfast; 4 males and 3 females. It was 28 degrees and cloudy this morning. The “open water” areas are larger today. We had 7 ducks for lunch, same as the breakfast group.
    SDF #2: We had 6 for dinner last night until a big gust of wind and they all flew away with a great amount of quacking. I haven’t seen Honey lately, though with the shorter days I’m there in the fading light and it’s harder to tell ducks apart.

    Doc ,doc ,doc ,get home quickly ,they are eating your Ducks ,hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

  10. Ok, I’ve just subscribed to a number of other posts just fine, but this one no. Just sayin’. A perfect Friday AM problem to solve… sort of.

  12. That brightness illusion is essentially a repackaging of a standard art principle. You can darken a canvas but you can’t brighten it. You can only create the impression of a bright spot through contrast.

  13. Metallyticus — wow! I am/was a beetle guy, and still needed a double- and triple-look to be sure it wasn’t a tiger beetle.

    But, is it in fact mimicking cicindelids? From this head-on angle, the nymph fooled me, but adults less so, and seen from above would might, just, confuse a dumb bird on a bad day,

    But — even if there are model Cicindela on bark of Malaysian trees — why would this be a model? To my knowledge, cicindelids would likely be scarkfed up by insectivorous vertebrates, if they could just catch them.

    Perhaps, if this is mimicky, it could be RoadRunnerian… Any tweetybird [or minicoyote?] who’s been outrun by a few cicindelids might not bother with this beauty, just anticipating being embarrassed once again.

    1. By the way, it’s a mantid. Not a cicindelid. Not a metal-rock star. The raptorial front legs are the tell-tale for the first. For the heavy-metal — I think they are mostly bipedal, aren’t they?

  14. Probably especially since I just had one (#4), that tube & octopus strike me as the direct opposite of a colonoscopy.

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