Monday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

December 9, 2019 • 6:30 am

Good morning, and welcome to another week:  Christmas and the Coynezaa holiday is just 15 shopping days away. Yes, it’s Monday, December 9, 2019. It’s National Pastry Day, Christmas Card Day (if you’re one of those folks who still sends these), and National Llama Day (the species’ formal name is Lama glama; live and learn). The Google Doodle features a game today: “Loteria, a Mexican game of chance”. It’s like bingo, but played with beans. If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to the site to begin playing (I haven’t done it yet), and you can compete with other players from around the world. CNN gives more information about the game and the Doodle.

Stuff that happened on December 9 include:

  • 1425 – The Catholic University of Leuven is founded.
  • 1531 – The Virgin of Guadalupe first appears to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico City.

Here’s a photo I took of the Virgin’s miraculous shroud-image in Mexico City seven years ago. It’s blurry because you’re hustled by it on a moving sidewalk:

  • 1851 – The first YMCA in North America is established in Montreal.

How could I not post this?

  • 1905 – In France, the law separating church and state is passed.

And, back when my University had a football team, and a good one:

  • 1935 – The Downtown Athletic Club Trophy, later renamed the Heisman Trophy, is awarded for the first time. The winner is halfback Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago.
  • 1950 – Cold War: Harry Gold is sentenced to 30 years in jail for helping Klaus Fuchs pass information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. His testimony is later instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
  • 1958 – The John Birch Society is founded in the United States.
  • 1960 – The first episode of Coronation Street, the world’s longest-running television soap opera, is broadcast in the United Kingdom.
  • 1979 – The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two diseases that have been driven to extinction (rinderpest in 2011 being the other).

Here’s the last person to contact smallpox from a non-laboratory source (a British woman got a fatal case from a laboratory stockpile in 1978): Ali Maow Maalin, a Somali cook who got the disease in 1977. He survived, but then died of malaria in 2013.

  • 1987 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: The First Intifada begins in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
  • 1996 – Gwen Jacob is acquitted of committing an indecent act, giving women the right to be topfree in Ontario, Canada.

Now that it’s legal, do women in Ontario frequently run around topless? Surely not at this time of year!

  • 2008 – The Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is arrested by federal officials for crimes including attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1608 – John Milton, English poet and philosopher (d. 1674)
  • 1842 – Peter Kropotkin, Russian zoologist, economist, geographer, and philosopher (d. 1921)
  • 1868 – Fritz Haber, Polish-German chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1934)
  • 1883 – Joseph Pilates, German-American fitness expert, developed Pilates (d. 1967)
  • 1898 – Emmett Kelly, American clown and actor (d. 1979)
  • 1909 – Douglas Fairbanks Jr., American captain, actor, and producer (d. 2000)
  • 1912 – Tip O’Neill, American lawyer and politician, 55th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (d. 1994)
  • 1916 – Kirk Douglas, American actor, singer, and producer

Still alive at 103!!!

  • 1934 – Judi Dench, English actress
  • 1934 – Junior Wells, American blues singer-songwriter and harmonica player (d. 1998)
  • 1942 – Dick Butkus, American football player, sportscaster, and actor
  • 1957 – Donny Osmond, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actor
  • 1962 – Felicity Huffman, American actress and producer, jailbird
  • 1995 – McKayla Maroney, American gymnast and Person Not Easily Impressed

Those who breathed their last on this day include:

  • 1964 – Edith Sitwell, English poet and critic (b. 1887)
  • 1971 – Ralph Bunche, American political scientist, academic, and diplomat, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1904)
  • 1996 – Mary Leakey, English archaeologist and anthropologist (b. 1913)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili are having a chinwag:

Małgorzata: Why are you looking at me so angrily?
Hili: Because you are disturbing us while we are talking.
In Polish:
Małgorzata: Czemu tak na mnie gniewnie patrzysz?
Hili: Bo przeszkadzasz nam rozmawiać.

In nearby Wloclawek, Leon and his ward Mietek are hungry. But the answer to Mietek’s question is clear: roast meat!

Mietek: What are we going to eat?

In Polish: Co będziemy jeść?

Here are the articles highlighted on HuffPost’s “Personals” section yesterday. I can’t help but laugh, especially at the third one. What a site!

From Sylvester the Tuxedo Cat:

A cat meme from reader Karl:

From Jesus of the Day:

A tweet from reader Barry. I hope the moose who went down is okay:

From Florian: Have you heard the bad news?

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. Those cats were on the tiles the previous night!

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1202949523762495488

And there’s a surprise ending when a spider chases a laser dot (actually, it makes me sad. . . . ):

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1202587070662877184

Matthew keeps us up to date with rush hour at Marsh Farm this morning. And there’s a cat!

 

More from Matthew, who loves illusions. But I don’t even understand how they did this one!

Darwin bops yet another animal on the head. Yes, I know that was the practice for naturalists of that era, but I still don’t like it, and I especially don’t like Darwin doing it:

The bad news that everyone ignores:

That is a big fricking canid! (But it’s friendly.)

https://twitter.com/YougleFact/status/1202586876722307073?s=20

 

27 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)”

  2. A busy Dialogue today!

    The Darwin quote goes “& actu” and runs off the page. I wonder if that is “actually”, etc.

    I’m puzzled how the Lady Of Guadeloupe could be seen in a vision when it’s the Spanish invaders that brought the religion … time for me to have a dip in Wikipedia…

    1. Guns, Germs and Steel -> Anna Karenina Principle -> four tabs open…might not make it…

    3. The Lady of Guadelupe appeared miraculously in the mythology of Mexican Catholicism. However
      an almost identical painting by the Master of Osma (Spain) was produced about 100 years prior to the conquest of Mexico and this is where the image originated and was copied by a Mexican artist. A good summary of these apparitions can be found in Jacques Lafaye’s book “Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe”. BTW the half moon on which the virgin stands symbolizes the conquest of Christianity over Islam.

  3. I haven’t seen women running around topless in Ontario even in the summer but then I don’t get around much any more.

    I think the idea that they can if the ant to is enough.

  4. PCCE: A tweet from reader Barry. I hope the moose who went down is okay. “This is some fuckin National Geographic shit.” The guy’s accent was wrong for moose country – a dub, so I went looking for an unmolested copy & it shows both moose were fine with a winner & a loser. Goldenview Park, South Anchorage, Alaska. Recorded by local Bill Tyra, Oct., 2015.

    https://youtu.be/M26ug8MGYlY

  6. Beautiful wolf! I spent some time with young wolves, not full grown at about 70 lbs. They loved to steal things from people. The took both my classes and gloves. The glasses I wrestled back, but they ran off with the gloves and peed on them to claim them.

  7. TWITTER QUOTE from Friday afternoon: “Sean Feucht @seanfeucht. IN CASE ANYONE OUT THERE IS WORRIED ABOUT THE FUTURE OF AMERICA TODAY…. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸. WE’RE INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE RIGHT NOW 🔥🔥🔥🔥
    #WorshipTakeOver #DontLoseHope”

    This is obvious bullshit, the lanyards aren’t displaying White House passes, those are not the immediate surroundings to The White House & the facades of the WH & the WH Wings do not look like that – different style.

    Feucht claims he’s just been in the Oval Office & done the hands thing over Trump as per this REPORT, but I doubt Trump would be anywhere near that on a Friday afternoon!

    Sean Feucht is running for Congress as a loony Christian & I think he’s trying to get in good with the other Christian shysters who lay hands on Trump in his Oval [so to speak!]. Even Pence is bending the truth somewhat below as this is the place in the Feucht video, but its not the WH [Feucht is the longhair standing with the other ‘faith leaders’ [some famous] in the back of the room:

    https://twitter.com/VP/status/1203057227835285504

      1. Gaff? I googled it and it seems to mean feminine panties to be worn by cross-dressing men???? The things one learns on WEIT🙀

        1. LOL. I was not aware of that meaning! Probably appropriate for whiter-than-white Pence, who must have some edgy predilicktions [sic] under all that haughty fakery 🙂

  8. Just wanted to say a bit about Fritz Haber
    & his Haber process. “Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues [in 2008] originated from the Haber–Bosch process.[39] Thus, the Haber process serves as s”detonator of the population explosion”, enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.[40]” (from Wikipedia). Also, he was a patriotic imperial German nationalist, widely condemned for weaponizing chlorine gas in WW1. Complicated legacy.

    2. Ahhh – This is a Martin Gardner creation?

      He has brilliant paper tricks out there…

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