Monday: Hili dialogue, Mietek & Leon monologue, farm rush hour and tweets

November 25, 2019 • 7:35 am

by Matthew Cobb

Apologies for the late posting – I have been on the picket line (see below).

In Poland, Hili demonstrates that there is no such thing as free will, even for a cat:

Hili: Do you like to admit that you were wrong?
A: No.
Hili: So why do you do it?
A: Because I was wrong.
Hili: Czy lubisz przyznawać się do błędów?
Ja: Nie.
Hili: To dlaczego to robisz?
Ja: Bo jestem w błędzie.
Mietek is healing nicely now. In the photo he and his brother Leon are sniffing comfrey roots collected by Elzbieta.
On the farm Monday is the same as any other day. What a rush!

An encounter on a trail; I’m not sure who was more frightened:

Paul Bronks has found some well-behaved ducks (I’m sure we’ve hand this before, sans Bronks’s wit):

A partially leucistic European robin (very different from the US version):

An amazing photo from Alex Wild:

A new word for me – “deimatic”. It means an alarm or warning behaviour but when I went to look in the OED, *it wasn’t there*…

I’m sure many of us can sympathise:

Looks like fun, though maybe not for the sheep:

An amazing discovery off the coast of South Africa – a coelacanth! The divers’ excitement is infectious. Although this is deep for a scuba diver (68 metres), it is very shallow for one of these fish, found only off the coast of Madagascar and (a separate species) off Sulawesi:

Devil’s fingers fungus…

 

As I said, I was on the picket line this morning (we are striking over pensions, pay and employment conditions – this is a national strike), before going to a rally (inside, because the weather – unusually for Manchester – is unpleasant):

 

20 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue, Mietek & Leon monologue, farm rush hour and tweets”

    1. I thought Fungi came from spores ,not eggs ?

      And the ducks crossing the road ,there is a clip of a cat on youtube waiting for the cars to stop for him at a Zebra crossing .

  2. Kid with the garbage can has a poor understanding of wind and how to pull a can, not push. Did he learn anything…unlikely.

  6. In several of the photos of Mietek and Leon together, Leon Leon is crouching near Mietek and seems not simply to be watching Mietek, but watching over him in a concerned and protective manner. Perhaps I’m anthropomorphizing but it seems so to me.

  8. Ahh– the lovely Phallales! Is everyone here familiar with Henrietta Darwin’s “war” on the stinkhorms at Down Cottage?

    “She waged a bizarre little war against the so-called stinkhorn mushroom (Phallus Ravelenlii) that still pop up in the woods around the Darwin estate. Apparently, the similarity of the mushroom to the human penis was bit much for poor Etty. As her niece (Charles’s granddaughter) recalled years later, “Aunt Etty…armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves,” would set out in search of the mushrooms. At the end of the day, Aunt Etty “burned them in the deepest secrecy on the drawing room fire with the door locked—because of the morals of the maids.”

      1. MISS Darwin, later Mrs. Richard Litchfield — Henrieta was Darwin’s 4th child and eldest daughter to reach adulthood. She was quite bright, helping edit her father’s books, but very much a Victorian.

        The stinkhorn story is recounted in quite a few mushroom manuals — I first read it in David Arora’s admirable _Mushrooms Demystified_.

    2. There’s a reason for the “horn” in the name of the “stinkhorn”.
      They’re apparently good eating, if you get them before they go over. you can tell their salient characteristic once they’ve turned from the “stink” part of “stinkhorn”. But you literally need to get up early in the morning to get that.

    1. Comfrey products meant for ingestion are banned in some countries. Google pyrrolizidine alkaloids. I remember the kerfuffle when it was banned in Australia.

  10. Rant ,rant ,rant ,been awake since 4.45AM my cat Misha was making a lot of trips to the litter boxes and not leaving anything .
    Went to the bathroom and he came and sat in the wash basin ,he left a bloody smear .

    Phoned the vets at 8AM and got an appointment to see the vet at 9.40 AM ,he has got that thing that fixed male cats get ,begins with the letter C .
    Also there were some some more wounds on his body ,little sod has been fighting again.
    While i was waiting to go to the vets ,he tried to squat in one of my slippers .

    Anyway ,the vet gave me three kinds of meds for him .
    Slowly going off cats ,bloody things are costing me a fortune .
    Rant over .

  12. An amazing discovery off the coast of South Africa – a coelacanth! The divers’ excitement is infectious. Although this is deep for a scuba diver (68 metres),

    68m is bloody deep. The diver is on open-circuit (bottom-left of the console), not sure on the dive gas, but to get down to a PP(O2) of 1.16 (sensor display on console) at 68m, then there has got to be at least 4% of non-oxygen in the tank. (17% oxygen, max ; or I’m doing my numbers wrong). In 9 minutes of dive time (the timer normally comes on at a couple of metres depth) he (or she) has used either a quarter or a half of his tank (not sure if it’s a 200 bar tank, or 300 bar), and he’s got 3 or 4 decompression stops ahead of him to do off that tank. It’s pretty close to turn-around time.
    The Sulawesi population are a medium-brown compared to this Comoros species’ dark-blue. Both are similarly spotted.
    They don’t call this “technical diving” without good reasons.

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