Saturday: Hili dialogue

December 28, 2019 • 6:30 am

Good morning on the last Caturday of the year: Saturday, December 28, 2019. It is the fourth day of Christmas (“calling birds”), the sixth full day of Hanukkah, and the fourth and antepenultimate day of Coynezaa. It’s National Boxed Chocolates Day, and thanks to the largesse of readers, I am now in possession of my favorite boxed chocolates (and America’s best commercial chocolates): See’s.

It’s also Call a Friend Day, International Jewish Book Day, and National Card Playing Day.

Stuff that happened on December 28 includes:

  • 169 BC – The menorah is lit to rededicate the Holy Temple of Jerusalem after two centuries of foreign rule and religious oppression and a seven-year revolt. The menorah burns for eight days without the sufficient fuel needed to do so, birthing the holiday Hanukkah.

I may be a secular Jew, but I don’t believe a word of it.

  • 1836 – South Australia and Adelaide are founded.
  • 1879 – Tay Bridge disaster: The central part of the Tay Rail Bridge in Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom collapses as a train passes over it, killing 75.

By all means read William McGonagall‘s poem on this incident, “The Tay Bridge Disaster.” McGonagall was one of the two worst poets in history (the other is Julia A. Moore, “the sweet singer of Michigan”), and this poem is a great specimen of his work.

  • 1885 – Indian National Congress, a political party of India, is founded in Bombay Presidency, British India.
  • 1895 – The Lumière brothers perform for their first paying audience at the Grand Cafe in Boulevard des Capucines.
  • 1895 – Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be known as x-rays.

For this Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded in 1901.

Here’s a 2.75-minute summary of that great game:

Finally,

  • 1973 – The United States Endangered Species Act is signed into law by Pres. Richard Nixon.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1856 – Woodrow Wilson, American historian and politician, 28th President of the United States, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1924)
  • 1882 – Arthur Eddington, English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician (d. 1944)
  • 1902 – Mortimer J. Adler, American philosopher and author (d. 2001)
  • 1903 – John von Neumann, Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist (d. 1957)
  • 1934 – Maggie Smith, English actress
  • 1944 – Kary Mullis, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2019)
  • 1954 – Denzel Washington, American actor, director, and producer
  • 1978 – Chris Coyne, Australian footballer and manager
  • 1979 – Noomi Rapace, Swedish actress

Those who ceased to exist on December 28 include:

  • 1937 – Maurice Ravel, French pianist and composer (b. 1875)
  • 1945 – Theodore Dreiser, American novelist and journalist (b. 1871)
  • 1983 – Dennis Wilson, American drummer, songwriter, and producer (b. 1944)
  • 1984 – Sam Peckinpah, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1925)
  • 1993 – William L. Shirer, American journalist and historian (b. 1904)
  • 2004 – Susan Sontag, American novelist, essayist, critic, and playwright (b. 1933)

The September 23 issue of The New Yorker has a free online review by Janet Malcolm of a new biography of Susan Sontag written by Benjamin Moser. It’s well worth a read to learn about this fiercely smart and deeply complex, self-deprecating woman. A quote:

“I loved Susan,” Leon Wieseltier said. “But I didn’t like her.” He was, Moser writes, speaking for many others.

  • 2016 – Debbie Reynolds, American actress, singer and dancer (b. 1932) [As I noted yesterday, Reynolds died just a day after her daughter Carrie Fisher.]

Speaking of Ravel, this is one of my favorite pieces by him: the “sunrise” (“Lever du Jour”) segment of his ballet Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2. Tell me if it doesn’t evoke all the emotions of watching the sun rise. In fact, it sounds like the sun rising, even thought that happens silently (the birds chirp, however, and you can hear them in the flutes). I’m no classical-music expert, but to me this is one of the most beautiful pieces of that music ever written. (Yes, others will disagree. Take a number. . . .. )

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  Hili is taking it easy:

A: The holidays are over.
Hili: Not for everybody.
In Polish:
Ja: Święta się skończyły.
Hili: Jak dla kogo.

In Wloclawek, Leon and Mitek are cuddling again. They are best buddies! Mietek is recovering from his broken knee, and has completely healed from his abdominal injuries.

Leon: Is Christmas over already?

In Polish: Już po Świętach?

This dramatic sneeze of a deer was posted on Facebook by Beth:

A clever d*g photo from Jesus of the Day:

From Amazing Things:

Again we have a full set of tweets from Matthew. First, Smudge the Cat is impeding the rush hour at Marsh Farm Barn:

At last!:  the daily flight of the fowl from Marsh Farm Barn to the outside world. The birds get a lovely breakfast today:

And a special view of Marsh Farm ducks ducking:

Two “big cat” tweets. First, a jaguar on a camera trap:

Is this really the world’s biggest cat? See below the tweet for the answer.

Well, it’s the rarest subspecies of big cat in the world, not species. It is the Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), a subspecies of leopard that has a population of about 90 individuals.

This is your cat on drugs:

https://twitter.com/mr_meowwwgi/status/1210493391575953409?s=11

And this is your cat at the barber:

It’s very sad that this species is now extinct; read more about it here (it hasn’t been seen in over a decade).

 

This tweet will take you to an amusing thread of bad places people had to sleep when visiting others at Christmas:

And another brain dump by the loon that we have to call our “President”:

96 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Awwww, Mitek and Leon are so sweet together.

    Also, fun fact: In German x-rays are called Röntgenstrahlen (Röntgen rays), we even use the name as a verb.

  2. The 1958 Baltimore Colts must have been around the time I started paying attention to football. Hard to remember much at 8 years old. It was a different kind of football with little money and not that many teams. I remember the names – Johnny Unitas, Alan Ameche, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore & Gino Marchetti.

  3. Re: Trump’s nuts rant about wind energy:

    As Mary McCarthy said of that other grande dame of American letters, Lillian Hellman: “Every word [he] says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

      1. There’s no denying her writing talent, and she and Dash Hammett stood tall during the Red Scare, but by nearly all accounts Ms. Hellman possessed a disagreeable personality.

          1. That would like being north of the north pole or denser than a black hole or what comes after eternity. The Donald, in this respect anyway, is incomparable. 🙂

    3. God what a fucking liar. Every single thing he says is either an outrageous distortion or an outright lie. And I say that quite confidently without checking one fact, because I’m sure – I’d be willing to bet money – that fact checking would substantiate that. Just as I’m sure that the theories of flat earth loonies or moon hoax conspiracists are crazy.

      If tRump had the slightest concern with seeming credible, I wouldn’t be able to say that. He either doesn’t care about credibility – which implies utter contempt for his audience – or he’s completely unhinged and should be in a carefully supervised care facility.

      cr

      1. I suspect he does it on purpose to piss off people like you and me. His base also knows it’s a performance, but they love it as such, and they get a kick out of the fact that it frustrates the hell out of people like you and me.

        1. Also 45 doesn’t have a funny bone nor the ability to formulate a witty riposte, thus if he wants to get his [more ignorant] base to laugh along with him, he’s reduced to pointing at a target & making school yard level gestures & remarks – often revolving around some irrelevant, personal weakness he perceives. [2015, Serge Kovaleski the NYT reporter with arthrogryposis comes to mind & all those women he attacked in terms of their appearance – Carly Fiorina, Megyn Kelly, Arianna Huffington, Rosie O’Donnell, Heidi Klum etc etc etc]

          1. That’s his way of reminding the mouth-breaters that he’s not PC. He’s a very small man who craves the limelight. I think that’s why he wanted a big showy trial in the Senate. He wants big ratings even if means being seen as a fool.

  5. 1879 – Tay Bridge disaster: [and, of course] McGonagall […] one of the two worst poets in history

    I spent some months working with a motorbiking geologist from Dundee, who named his consultancy company “Topaz Geoscience”. Most people thought it was due to some personal dedication to aluminium fluorosilicates – geologists do things like that. But, no, it was a paean to the king of poets, William Topaz McGonagall.
    Why this son of a weaver was named for a mineral, I don’t know.
    From Wiki, on his stage acting, playing MacBeth : “Convinced that the actor playing Macduff was jealous of him, McGonagall refused to die in the final act.” – Ah, you’ve got to love attitude like that. True Dundonian “Awa bile yer heid” (*) character.
    More character : “Throughout his life McGonagall campaigned against excessive drinking, appearing in pubs and bars to give edifying poems and speeches, which proved popular.” That would be a very … interesting use of the word “popular”. “He read his poems while the crowd was permitted to pelt him with eggs, flour, herrings, potatoes and stale bread. For this, he received fifteen shillings a night.” Fifteen bob would have been on the order of a week’s wages for a factory worker at the time. A very particular meaning of “popular”, indeed.

    The worst poetry in the world is, of course, by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings (a thinly veiled reference to a schoolfriend of DNA and a Real Poet with a probability about 1:2^276709.

    (* In English, with a plummy accent : “Please be so kind as to go away and boil your head. Have a nice day. Don’t let the door hit your arse as you leave.”)

    1. McGonagall appears to have had just one rule when perpetrating ‘poetry’ – that the last words of each line should rhyme. He was deaf to metre, line length and stress, and totally oblivious to bathos.

      He was pretty slipshod with his rhymes, too, as evidenced by ‘buttresses’ and ‘confesses’, for example.

      cr

      1. That’s his genius – selective deafness.

        I’m just wondering if Trump has any of his collected works. Seems they’d get on together like a storm and a cast iron cross-brace.

        1. I’d better check the causes of the Tay Bridge disaster ; I think it was fatigue cracking.
          [Reads] Hmmm, quite a litany of problems, compounding each other.

          1. ‘badly designed, badly constructed, and badly maintained’ – if I recall the words from the Inquiry. That doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room.

            The locomotive of the train was fished out of the river and repaired (steam locomotives were *tough*) though for many years no driver would take it over the bridge. It finally crossed on the 29th anniversary of the disaster, on the ‘same’ Sunday evening mail. (I’d love to know more detail of that particular run. Was the driver bribed or just not superstitious?)

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBR_224_and_420_Classes

            (For a fascinating account of the history of British railway accidents – Tay Bridge among them of course – from the early days to the 1950s I can recommend L T C Rolt’s ‘Red For Danger’. Quite old now but I found it a fascinating read).

            cr

          2. I was quite into such things along with my Hornby kit. Then I got my shortsightedness diagnosed and discovered books.

  6. As always, the Hili dialogue is wonderful. I read and watch them most every day.

    PCCE, I respectively request you leave the trump stuff out of these entries to keep the flavor happy/fun/informative/truthful and not depressing/idiotic.😁

  8. Seeing the 10×8 portrait of Sontag (I’d bet it was one of Avedon’s) makes me sad for selling my 10×8 camera and its entourage of gear. In my book that’s real photography. Many happy hours spent under the red light breathing in the delicious fumes. Obviously not too good for my bone marrow and hence the need to sell it rather than leaving it as yet another problem for someone else.

    1. Ironies abound with Sontag and photography, among them: she penned “On Photography” and she certainly liked being photographed, but confessed that she didn’t own a camera. She was the lover of the famous celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, who published candid photographs of Sontag as she died of cancer.

      Another Sontag irony: she really, really, really wanted to be known as a novelist. To her, her essays were not nearly as important as her novels. She was one of those people who regard novels (and specifically novels, not short stories or any other form of imaginative prose) as the highest form of literature.

      Here’s a very short essay (less than a page) by her from the NYRB, 1973 titled simply “Photography.” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/10/18/photography/

      I checked Moser’s biography out of the library and it was so heavy that I almost needed a dolly to get it home (that’s hyperbole, but it is damned heavy in more ways than one.) Haven’t finished it yet but it’s engrossing. I’ve read a number of reviews and listened to interviews with Moser. I’ll also be interested in what people have to say about Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker piece since she ignites controversy.

      1. “Ironies abound with Sontag and photography, among them: she penned “On Photography” and she certainly liked being photographed, but confessed that she didn’t own a camera.”

        Also Sontag’s book of six essays on photography contained words only – not one pic to be found – reasonable enough given she expects her reader to know something already about the subject. I read it when it was published & I wasn’t as impressed as the reviewers seemed to be – she does a lot of asserting throughout without support & I’d come across all the general ideas before elsewhere although I didn’t understand many of the connections she made [life is too short for reading Proust rather than reading about Proust!]. I didn’t agree with her rather black & white opinions, nothing is that simple.

        I read years later that she got smacked on the wrist for one essay which was heavily plagiarised & I understand she changed her mind on some points. All that output makes me wonder if she faked a lot – perhaps she didn’t read Proust either, but happily quoted him nevertheless.

        1. I’m not very far along in the book and haven’t come across any references to plagiarism, on Sontag’s part; but I did do a bit of a google search, not deep or extensive (yet) and your hunch that there’s more is on the mark. Like you, I wonder just how much more. For one, I see that in her novel, In America, a researcher found “at least 12 passages in Ms. Sontag’s 387-page book that were similar to passages in four other books about Modjeska. They were presented without credit or attribution — other than a line in the preface expressing a debt to books and articles about Modjeska “for material and anecdotes used (and altered.)” No writers were credited by name in the novel.” http://movies2.nytimes.com/library/books/052700sontag-america.html. Check out the article for her tendentious and varied defenses, about which Patrick Nathan in … says “Rarely did Sontag ever sound so completely full of shit.” Wish I’d plagiarized that!

          Then, her husband is accused of claiming authorship of her first book and there are murky non-attributions in that book https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191011-Gutkin-Sontag.

          Must say that I’m not ‘into’ her writing and felt that she was, shall I say,unctuously gravid with gravitas, which was extremely off-putting but I am fascinated by Sontag as a cultural phenomenon.

          If I were tasked to write about Proust, I’d definitely start cribbing. The very thought of reading Remembrance of Things Past exhausts me. But I have a friend who loves Proust.

          1. I’m currently working my way, very slowly, about 5 pages/night, through the entire 7 volumes of the Proust, en français. I’m about 10% through vol.2 on kindle, which is great because of the built-in dictionary. The writing is delicious, but I don’t want to be quizzed at the end.

          5. I’m not Jewish but I tried it (kinda like some take the Ice Bucket challenge). Sad to say, I didn’t get very far; tedious going but absorbing nonetheless. I’ll do a few yomis here, a few there.

          8. Thank you for the two links – I’m reading them now. I’m also don’t like her writing – bloated & more for effect than communication, plus the connections she throws in to other works & thinkers aren’t useful – more a form of knowledge display. I notice that for someone who claimed to be a frugal aesthete she had a deep interest in acquiring other peoples money – a good nose for marks.

  9. Oy!
    The Tay Bridge Disaster poem is such a clinker,
    I could not read much of the stinker.

    If ever again upon it my eyes do dwell,
    I think I will turn and run like hell.

    2. It’s like any McGonagall poem
      You only have to read ’em to know ’em
      He only ever tries to make the last words rhyme
      And he never bothers about metre or the length of a line
      In fact it’s quite easy to imitate
      You just keep going until sooner or late
      r, you come upon a word
      That sounds like the one you just heard
      In fact the big difficulty is knowing what you ought
      To do when you have used up your last thought.

      cr

      1. +1
        love the
        late
        r

        kind of like the way our current newpaper editors allow their lines to be broken

      2. Competitive poetry – evolves
        To depths where one’s ear dissolves

        No, I can’t bring myself to descend further into this abyss.
        If I did, I would be quite remiss.

        I fear that you have lifted the lids
        Of some terrible cans of annelids.

          1. Some of us celebrate our inner Vogon in the appropriate artform. Fantastically-jewelled crab smashed to pulp just doesn’t cut it.

    1. There is also a recording of Theodore Roosevelt, which I believe is from his 1912 campaign running for president as a third party candidate for the Progressive Party (Bull Moose).

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhlzdjPGxrs

      A recording of William Howard Taft from 1912 is also available. He speaks about the need for the world to settle conflicts peaceably. He was president at the time, but he lost the 1912 race to Woodrow Wilson (as did TR).

      https://www.c-span.org/video/?96805-44/william-howard-taft-audio-recording

    2. Here is a recording of William McKinley giving a campaign speech in 1896 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6ZUneyU7Vo.

      And here is “the oldest film footage of a U.S. President” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAesU_GOe_4. McKinley’s swearing in ceremony. The notes say that Grover Cleveland administered the oath to McKinley, March 4, 1897 so he was the first US President to be captured on film. I’l take it on ‘faith’ since the footage is very grainy and not taken close-up. With the horsemen wearing plumed Trojan-style helmets, the parade looks very European — Italian.

        1. Appreciate the corrections. I went by the Youtube description. I knew that was a drawing but I thought it was to represent what took place, when in actuality your correction makes it a representation what did NOT take place.

        2. Let Fuller take credit due him. I had a friend who set about a project to read a biography of every president. Last I knew he was well into the 20th century. I think that would be a great way to get a solid feeling for the sweep of American history. Not sure if I have the stamina. 😎

  11. We have an eighteen-year-old cat that we thought was going to give up the ghost on Christmas day. She was just lying on the floor, wouldn’t come when called, complained when moved, couldn’t walk right. She finally got up, and went under our daughter’s bed. We thought we’d have to take her to the vet the next day. Wrong. She was high off her a** from catnip. My daughter had gotten her a new toy, and I don’t know if that had Hindu Kush or Maui Wowie in it, but she was paralyzed, as grandma used to say.

  12. For anyone who’s not aware, a “windmill” is a grist mill that is powered by wind. A wind turbine is not a mill.

    1. Yeah but a wind turbine isn’t a worthy adversary for a great hero like Herr Drumpf. To go down in history ya gotta tilt at windmills.

      1. To go down in history ya gotta tilt at windmills.

        I don’t know. I think that Linda Lovelace has a better strategy for going down in history than Donald Trump.

  13. Is Mietek already out of his cast? I thought it was on the right hind leg, but maybe I’m wrong. At any rate, love seeing Hili every day and Leon and Mietek as often as they appear! Best wishes for a happy, healthy 2020 to all of them and their respective staffs. And PCC(E) and readers!

  14. I do believe I’ve had that exact same sneeze. I feel the poor deer’s pain, which is mostly abject embarrassment.

    1. That has to be a classic. Too bad deer don’t watch Youtube, they’d be chortling over it forever.

      A seal with hiccups:

        1. Poor seal indeed. For the life of me I can’t understand why it doesn’t just bounce off the rock.

          2. Pope Pius XII developed a protracted case of hiccups before he died (supposedly occasioned by injections of foetal sheep glands – gonads?). I wonder if he bounced like the seal?

          5. Pope Pius XII was receiving injections into his buttocks of “live cells” from the foetuses & glands of non-human animals, a very dangerous, stupid & utterly ineffective treatment that has never been shown to work. Apparently the pope started to hallucinate & went somewhat bonkers for a while & it is claimed to be because of these injections. IF this is true then I wonder if the live cells were infected with prions such as scrapie & they travelled to his brain – entirely my speculation, but if these are genuinely “live cells” then I don’t see how one can be sure there’s not unexpected little nasties lurking in & among the cells.

            The live cell treatments were developed in the 1930s by a Swiss doctor PAUL NIEHANS – the pope was very pleased with his work & made him a member of the Papal Academy of Sciences. LOL.

          6. Yes, Niehans. I knew about him but didn’t know that the pope had made him a member of the Papal Academy of Sciences in gratitude for his services. LOL! is right.

            Your Creutzfelt-Jakob disease hypothesis is tantalizing. “In theory, CJD can be transmitted from an affected person to others, but only through an injection or consuming infected brain or nervous tissue.”
            But what’s in the injection that’s mentioned here?https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/creutzfeldt-jakob-disease-cjd/causes/

            I’d known about brain or nervous tissue, also bone for BSE this is an interesting article https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/32/9/1348/291736.

            When I first heard about Stanley Preusner’s work, before he won the Nobel, I phoned him and he graciously answered my questions.

            I’ve been curious about all those diseases since I first heard about them. George Ballanchine died of C-J disease https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/08/science/the-doctor-s-world-the-mystery-of-balanchine-s-death-is-solved.html. I heard that one symptom was that he could pirouette only in one direction but I forget which.

          8. But what was Pius trying to fix/cure with these injections? Certainly not the ability to pirouette, in his robes, in the opposite direction🤓

          9. You’re dogged about that, aren’t you; don’t blame you but now I have visions of long faced, long-nosed Pope Pius XII pirouetting like a Mevlevi dervish in his papal robes and mitre, but in one direction only, hiccuping all the while. His dom sidekick, Sister Pasqualina, hovers in the shadows, wringing her hands. This wasn’t what she’d expected.

          11. I wonder what seals do for salt excretion? If kidneys can do it, why did turtles find themselves developing hypertrophied tear glands as an additional salt excretion device?

  15. Navity scene? I guess it’s alright if the dog can’t spell.

    I’m with you on the Hanukkah myth; don’t believe a word.

  16. I’m surprised to see Susan Sontag described as “self-deprecating.” I’ve tried reading some of her stuff and found her style to be rather egotistical in the Camille Paglia style. It made me understand why Paglia was so bitter about being rejected by Sontag.

        1. You’re right, Michael. Terrific! Camille really is something else; sort of a female Jordan Petersen in the ego department,

        2. That’s great! Paglia’s a trip-and-a-half. So is Sontag. But I can’t find the rest of either video and I’d like to watch both. Paglia’s is from a longer interview with Christopher Lydon. I’ve found 7 minutes of the 1992 interview with Sontag. I love to hear them ragging on each other. That’s only a 3 min. clip from an interview with Christopher Lydon on WGBH. I can’t find the rest of it.

          My search was just interrupted because when I Googled Sontag and Christopher Lydon, when I typed the “C” into the search box, Christopher Hitchens came up first, so I took a look and a bunch of links came up. Haven’t had the time to explore but will.

          A number of years ago, I came across mention of one Camillo Paglia, a priest who became the Inquisitor of Naples (I forget the year0. I sent the information to Camille and told her I that he might be a relative. She was delighted.

          1. Camille Paglia announced on her fb in 2018 that a NYC play was due out written, directed & performed by Emily Allan & Leah Hennessey – includes a satirical re-enactment of the Susan Sontag versus Camille Paglia feud as it happened in 1992 and 1993 on Christopher Lydon’s interview program on WGBH-TV, a PBS channel in Boston. That might have been fun [but it isn’t, see below].

            The play is Slash & HERE’S A 10 MINUTE VIDEO of it called “Catwoman and Wonderwoman Slash Camille Paglia and Susan Sontag” – IMO it’s not satirical as I understand the term & it’s not witty – 10 minutes of not-my-thing-but-maybe-yours

            I watched the Susan Sontag interviewed by Chris Lydon, 1992 8-minute clip that you mentioned & I suspect it’s all you’re going to find – there’s probably nothing more of interest. Sontag is very much on the defensive & lies like a rug throughout. Amazingly prickly, defensive & a rather poor bullshitter! ANYONE INTERESTED CLICK THIS LINK

            The other Lydon interview is not yet digitised & it would cost some dollars for it to be done.

            I have also turned up Paglia’s piece Sontag, Bloody Sontag from her 1994 collection Vamps & Tramps – it’s too long to copy/paste here so email me [in my Gravatar hovercard] if you/anyone wants it. It will tell you all you need to know about this saga!

          2. Re “Catwoman and Wonderwoman,” I couldn’t stomach even 30 seconds of that dreck.

            As for the clip of the Lydon interview with Sontag, she delivers a bravura performance of haughty, studied ennui, and she does in Lydon and his inane questions with her sighs of tedium and boredom so let her lie like a rug, I loved the performance. She’s a great actor. Problem was that she treated numerous people in such a cruel manner. that seemed to be her style, and that I reject.

            Whether or not she’s lying about herself in relation the things she professes and denies in the interview, I found quite a few things she said to be on point in the general and in the personal instance, personal meaning my person. For instance when she reproved Lydon for asking his idiotic questions and said she said she couldn’t answer them because she didn’t think that way. Not infrequently, I am put upon by such people, people who expect/demand that I respond to whatever they have to say, and I can’t understand what they’re talking about because my mind just doesn’t work that way and I have to tell them so. Usually, they don’t understand (because they don’t think the way I do) and they become as frustrated as I am by their questions. Sometimes they think I’m arrogant, sometimes stupid, sometimes both arrogant and stupid but it’s cognitively impossible for me to think in the way they think. I recall that the famed interviewer Barbara Walters invariably asked her interview subjects, no matter who they were, “What kind of tree would you be?” Sorry, Babs, couldn’t tell you and couldn’t make anything up because I just don’t think that way.

            I recall someone asking me what I thought about. WTF! I don’t go around probing the contents of other people’s minds, and I don’t have some mental list of thoughts that I cycle through. I shrugged my shoulders and replied, “whatever comes into my mind,” which is true, to which the other person couldn’t repress a smirk that told me she thought I was a doofus. Next time something like this happens, I’l tame my cue from the way Sontag replied to Lydon.

          3. Good grief! Barbara Walters… “What kind of tree would you be?”

            Not sure what I’d be, but I think you’re a sapwood. 😎

          4. That’s funny. I must confess that my memory was playing tricks on me. I could have sworn that she asked every guest that question but now I see that she asked it of only one person, Kathryn Hepburn, and it didn’t come out of the blue. Problem for her was that everybody thought it was hilarious she was teased about it all the time. https://www.today.com/popculture/baba-wawa-remembered-four-memorable-barbara-walters-moments-1C9904738. From the article: “What kind of tree are you? It’s perhaps the most famous goofy reporter question, but it wasn’t all Walters’ idea. She was interviewing Katharine Hepburn in 1981 and Hepburn compared herself to a tree, so Walters went there: “What kind of tree are you?” she asked the legendary actress, hastening to add, “If you think you’re a tree.” (Hepburn chose an oak, over a Dutch Elm disease-stricken elm.) She was never allowed to live down that question, with even Johnny Carson teasing her about it, and proclaiming that he would be a tumbleweed.”

            Embedded in the article is a short video of Gilda Radner doing her Babwa Wawa, and both of them talking about it. She was a good sport and came to love it. The video is delightful and awfully funny in itself so I post it separately

            https://www.today.com/popculture/baba-wawa-remembered-four-memorable-barbara-walters-moments-1C9904738

          5. JH: Email me if you wish & I’ll send Sontag, Bloody Sontag back to you. I don’t mind that Sontag was such a thorough b**tard to so many throughout her career, but I do mind her dishonesty & her manipulative schemes. She cudda been much more in the last 25 years of her life, following the Rushdie affair, but instead she tread water & did a bit of “hip posturing” [Paglia] – sitting comfy in her Sarajevo Holiday Inn, producing that ridiculous play, coming home as someone who mattered [she didn’t] & firing out trite, useless aphorisms like a cheap Dorothy Parker.

  17. Regarding 28 December, it is known here in Adelaide as Proclamation Day. The public holiday is on 26 December (Boxing Day), but a ceremony is held on 28 January in what is now called Glenelg under the ‘old gum tree’ where Governor Hindmarsh read the original proclamation. Interestingly, the proclamation deemed that the traditional owners of the land should be treated the same the same as the English (settlers, invaders, colonists — chose your preferred descriptor). Sadly this did not happen, but the intent was there! My concert band provided the music this year, so I was there. Thankfully it started to 9:00 am so we finished before 11 and the maximum temperature for 40C in the afternoon.

  18. Probably shouldn’t be laughing at the train disaster but the convoluted writing in the poem is funny:

    Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
    At least many sensible men confesses,
    For the stronger we our houses do build,
    The less chance we have of being killed.

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