Monday: Hili dialogue

December 16, 2019 • 6:30 am

Good morning: it’s Monday, December 16, 2019, and a cool 27°F (-3° C). And it snowed last night: the first serious snow of the year, though it wasn’t that much: about a third of an inch in our area. Here’s a photo of the snow-dusted street in front of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, which I pass each morning on my way to work:

I’m feeling a bit under the weather today, so posting may be light. And next week the serious holidays begin. But don’t worry: I’ll be here all month, folks.

It’s National Chocolate Covered Anything Day, which sounds good until you realize that “anything” could include owl pellets. It’s also Boston Tea Party Day (that “party” took place on this day in 1773; see below), the Day of Reconciliation in South Africa, and, according to Wikipedia, “The beginning of the nine-day celebration beginning December 16 and ending December 24, celebrating the trials which Mary and Joseph endured before finding a place to stay where Jesus could be born.” I didn’t realize this was a celebration. But it doesn’t interfere with Coyneaa, for which there are nine more shopping days.

Stuff that happened on December 16 includes:

  • 1653 – English Interregnum: The Protectorate: Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.
  • 1773 – American Revolution: Boston Tea Party: Members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians dump hundreds of crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
  • 1843 – The discovery of octonions by John T. Graves, who denoted them with a boldface O, was announced to his mathematician friend William Hamilton, discoverer of quaternions, in a letter on this date.

If you must know what octonions are (no, not a foodstuff), you can read about them here. It’s above my pay grade.

  • 1942 – The Holocaust: Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich Himmler orders that Roma candidates for extermination be deported to Auschwitz.
  • 1944 – World War II: The Battle of the Bulge begins with the surprise offensive of three German armies through the Ardennes forest.
  • 1947 – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain build the first practical point-contact transistor.
  • 1950 – Korean War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman declares a state of emergency, after Chinese troops enter the fight in support of communist North Korea.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1485 – Catherine of Aragon, Spanish princess, later queen consort of England (d. 1536)
  • 1770 – Ludwig van Beethoven, composer (d. 1827)
  • 1775 – Jane Austen, English novelist (d. 1817)
  • 1863 – George Santayana, Spanish philosopher, novelist, and poet (d. 1952)
  • 1899 – Noël Coward, English actor, playwright, and composer (d. 1973)
  • 1900 – V. S. Pritchett, British writer and literary critic (d. 1997)
  • 1901 – Margaret Mead, American anthropologist and author (d. 1978)
  • 1917 – Arthur C. Clarke, British science fiction writer (d. 2008)

Those who bought it on December 16 include:

  • 1859 – Wilhelm Grimm, German anthropologist and author (b. 1786) [He was one of the Brothers Grimm, the other being Jacob.] They made it at one time to the German 100-Mark note, to wit, a specimen from 1992:

  • 1965 – W. Somerset Maugham, British playwright, novelist, and short story writer (b. 1874)
  • 1980 – Colonel Sanders, American businessman, founded KFC (b. 1890)
  • 2007 – Dan Fogelberg, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1951)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor Hili shows her usual diligence:

Hili: There are many things I should do.
A: What are you going to start with?
Hili: With thinking of what I’m not going to do.
In Polish:
Hili: Jest wiele spraw, które powinnam zrobić.
Ja: Od czego zaczniesz?
Hili: Od myślenia o tym, czego nie zrobię.

And nearby in Włocławek, Leon hugs his new brother, Mietek. They have become fast friends!

An awesome hipster treat from Instagram, via The Laughing Squid:

A new man-bun hairstyle from Facebook, sent by Rick Powell‎ to Winging It! (Spider and Insect Meme Group) and forwarded by Mark Sturtevant:

From Merilee: A snowcat with a twist:

A tweet from Andrew Doyle, creator of Titania McGrath. I have no love for Boris Johnson but really, wishing him a horrible death because he’s a Tory?  Here’s a privileged white girl who flaunts her virtue: “I plan to be a doctor; I plan to actually care about people.” The “basket of deplorables” meme has clearly crossed the pond

Matthew proffers his favorite: the greeting of the day as the animals leave their barn at Marsh Farm. Today, says Matthew, there’s extras: a climbing cat and agitated fowl!

Three more tweets from Matthew. Note, in this first one, how the birds turn their heads to localize the seeds.

Do you think that the cat was planned here?

https://twitter.com/marinamiries/status/1205856343413809152?s=11

A proper response to an uninformed sign:

Two tweets sent by reader Barry. He captions this for one, “Don’t forget who’s in charge here.”

Ricky Gervais describes atheism in a nutshell, as well as the difference between faith and fact:

Three from Heather Hastie. The first one is both literal and figurative:

A cat who strayed, and the response:

 

37 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Must be Wednesday in camel land if you get the drift.

    We are having snow in Wichita also. More than Chicago but we hope that is not a trend.

  2. It’s National Chocolate Covered Anything Day …

    Milo Minderbinder tried serving the men of the 256th Army Air Squadron chocolate-covered cotton (after he had cornered the Egyptian cotton market) at the mess hall.

    It did not go over well.

    1. M&M Enterprises. Hope you don’t need a parachute. Did you go after my camel reference?

  3. I’m not sure where you were in your enviable and exotic travel schedule, but, for those of us that didn’t get to go, Chicago had more than three inches of snow at Halloween this year (the most on record).

    1. The 360 tour on the official Robie House website & the many interior 360/normal photos on Google Street view have gone [there’s 3 now – there used to be dozens] – the trust cashing in on the tours &/or the residents of the house [part of it is occupied now] seeking privacy? It’s extraordinary that there’s no virtual tour – they could even put the furniture back while recording it.

      I gather the interior has hardly any FLW [or other] furniture & it’s regimented 40-min tours, tours, tours all day. One site claims there’s some tour times that are longer & show the now private part of the house. Some of the furniture is at the Smart museum nearby when the museum isn’t loaning it out to other museums.

      There’s a LEGO Robie House though.

        1. On campus is the Oriental Institute Museum [does guided tours] & the totally free David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art [has the original Robie House FLW dining room furniture IF not loaned out]. I fear I’d not enjoy being Robie House-herded with a crocodile of camera-toting, selfie-taking, CHATTERING bucket listers! The house is bare of breakables or anything to impede the human flow & I think it would be hard to perceive the space, light & the sound dynamics of the place. Perhaps grabbing the first tour of the day when there’s snow about cuts the herd down too a tolerable level.

          1. Perhaps the first tour of the day, then. But I have been and would go again to the Oriental Institute Museum. Thanks for the tips. You must have traveled widely to know so much about so many potential destinations.

    1. … I apologize but after rewatching this I must emphasize how good an introduction it is to these fascinating numbers.

    2. An simple exposition of what quaternions are and how they are used. Thanks for the link.

      I wonder what were the first practical applications of quaternions. Perhaps they came into their own with the development of re-entry missiles and rockets.

      1. There were no early practical applications for quaternions – computing power was needed to harness Qs. And I suppose other mathematical rotational representation/transformation schemes available at the time were also not that useful without number crunching.

        1. Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine was available in the 1820s to crunch numbers, but I think it crunched gears, too, too often.

          1. That isn’t quite true – no working Babbage engine was built in his lifetime for the gears to fail – his difference engine wasn’t built until around 40 years ago. All early mechanical engines were used for a single task [with no operator input after setup] such as making log tables, with “general purpose” mechanical & electromechanical machines, some using vectors, put to use for the first** time in WWII [gunnery, bomb aiming, torpedo off sets etc]. I don’t know when quaternion versors were used in mechanical/electromechanical engines, but it must have been after 1940.

            ** There was crude WWI semi-mechanised devices for naval range finding, but not classed as true mechanical computers as the operators had to real time update[aim]

          2. I always thought that Babbage’s engine was partially built, but that it was unreliable because of its complexity and the capability of the engineering of his day to provide the precision necessary.

            The Torpedo Data Computer used by US submarines during World War Two is a good example of a working electromechanical computer. It was a large machine crammed into a small vessel and its operator and maintenance guy took up a lot of space in a boat already cramped for space.

            http://archive.hnsa.org/doc/tdc/index.htm

  7. RE: Boston Tea Party, I heard somewhere that the Sons of Liberty were actually tea smugglers who were upset that the tax on legal tea had been lowered, and so lowered the demand for their illegal tea. They were America’s first drug cartel.

    1. A reference would be good but would it be surprising if it were true that tea smuggling was going on at that time, and that possibly one of the smugglers thought to themselves it might be a good idea to get in on the action?

      It might make a good Tarantino movie.

      1. Please, no more Tarantino alternate history movies! I haven’t seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet (only because I’m kind of dreading it), but I found Inglourious Basterds to be one of the most bloated and egotistical works of any auteur. Tarantino has fallen so in love with his own dialogue that it’s started to seriously damage his films. That opening scene with the Jews under the floorboard is riveting…for the first two minutes. Then Waltz keeps talking, and talking, and talking, and talking, and by the time he’s done, the scene has lost all momentum and suspense. What was a brilliant setup turns into a dull near-monologue. So much of that movie is just people saying what Tarantino thinks are really clever things for minutes on end. The movie ended up feeling like Tarantino masturbating for two and a half hours.

        Hateful Eight was better, but still had too many scenes of rambling dialogue that made it at least 1/2 hour longer than it should have/needed to be.

        I say all of this while having Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Kill Bill Vol. 1 on my “Favorites Shelves” in my 700 DVD/BluRay collection, and also being a pretty big fan of Jackie Brown and From Dusk Till Dawn.

      2. Tea smuggling of Dutch tea was done in England and the colony’s but I do not think that was the thing. The other facts of this historic event was that Gov. Hutchinson had two sons in the tea business and he wanted the tea brought in. All the tea coming into other colonies was stopped and turned around as the tea consignees bailed out. But not in Boston so we could blame the whole affair on Hutchinson.

  8. I like the snow cats, and the way that Leon cares for Mietek is adorable. He’s so solicitous and protective.

  9. I wouldn’t wish Boris Johnson a horrible death, but if he were to go fuck himself, that should be a spectator sport. Who knows,he’s such an arsehole (as the British say) he just might be able to accomplish that feat.

        1. You will be first up against the wall ,wots your name and address ?

          Wot about the guff on page 48 of the last tory lie sheet ,seems 2019 might be the last GE in good old blighty .

          1. Your comments, both wishing death on every Tory and the threat to JezGrove, are out of line and violate the incivility rules. You can either apologize to JezGrove, say that you were just joking and lay off the general death wishes, or, if you choose not to explain yourself and stop wishing others to die painfully, be banned.

            Up to you.

    2. I wouldn’t wish death on tories but definitely destitution. A few weeks sleeping rough in winter would perhaps teach them some compassion. But maybe not.

  10. I remember our first serious snowfall happening this past Oct 31st.
    I was stuck running around in it all day, what a mess!

  11. I remember our first serious snowfall happening on this past Oct. 31st. I was stuck out in it all day and it was a sloppy mess.

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