Tuesday: Hili dialogue

January 7, 2020 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a cold but still unseasonably warm Tuesday, January 7, 2018. (It’s exactly at the freezing point in Chicago now, and will rise only few degrees during the day.)

It’s National Tempura Day, a blatant case of cultural appropriation if ever there was one! Do not eat tempura without proper obeisance to Japanese culture!  It also happens to be National Pass Gas Day, an appropriate sequel to yesterday’s National Bean Day, and, if it becomes too gaseous, it’s also I’m Not Going to Take it Anymore Day.

It’s also Christmas Day in some countries:

Some jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, including those of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Jerusalem, mark feasts using the older Julian calendar. As of 2020, there is a difference of 13 days between the Julian calendar and the modern Gregorian calendar, which is used internationally for most secular purposes. As a result, December 25 on the Julian calendar currently corresponds to January 7 on the calendar used by most governments and people in everyday life. Therefore, the aforementioned Orthodox Christians mark December 25 (and thus Christmas) on the day that is internationally considered to be January 7.

Finally, it’s “Harlem Globetrotter’s Day”, with the apostrophe misplaced. When I was a kid, I saw them play once, with the team including the famous Meadowlark Lemon; here’s a compilation showing their skills and tricks:

 

Stuff that happened on this day includes:

  • 1610 – Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able to distinguish the last two until the following day.
  • 1904 – The distress signal “CQD” is established only to be replaced two years later by “SOS”.
  • 1927 – The first transatlantic telephone service is established from New York City to London.
  • 1959 – The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
  • 1999 – The Senate trial in the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton begins.

Notables born on January 7 include:

  • 1800 – Millard Fillmore, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 13th President of the United States (d. 1874)
  • 1910 – Orval Faubus, American soldier and politician, 36th Governor of Arkansas (d. 1994)
  • 1911 – Butterfly McQueen, American actress and dancer (d. 1995)

You may remember McQueen, a black actor, as the slave “Prissy” in the movie Gone with the Wind, famous for saying “I don’t know nothing about birthing babies.” She couldn’t even attend the film’s premiere in Atlanta in 1939 because the theater was segregated. But she must have been an atheist too: Wikipedia says this (my emphasis):

McQueen died at age 84 on December 22, 1995, at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, from burns sustained when a kerosene heater she attempted to light malfunctioned and burst into flames.McQueen donated her body to medical science and remembered the Freedom From Religion Foundation in her will.

Here’s a short biographical video of McQueen:

More who were born on this day:

  • 1925 – Gerald Durrell, Indian-English zookeeper, conservationist and author, founded Durrell Wildlife Park (d. 1995)
  • 1946 – Jann Wenner, American publisher, co-founded Rolling Stone
  • 1957 – Katie Couric, American television journalist, anchor, and author
  • 1963 – Rand Paul, American ophthalmologist and politician
  • 1991 – Caster Semenya, South African sprinter

Those who began putrifying on January 7 include:

  • 1536 – Catherine of Aragon (b. 1485)
  • 1943 – Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American physicist and engineer (b. 1856)
  • 1988 – Trevor Howard, English actor (b. 1913)
  • 1989 – Hirohito, Japanese emperor (b. 1901)
  • 2006 – Heinrich Harrer, Austrian mountaineer, geographer, and author (b. 1912).

Harrer and a team of three others made the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland, a near vertical wall made even more treacherous with  patches of snow and ice. Harrer wrote an excellent book about it, The White Spider. Here’s that deadly North Face. It took the team four days to climb it: from July 21-24, 1938.

And the “white spider” snow formation at the upper left (can you spot it in the photo above?)

From Wikipedia:”Although physically exhausted by the time they reach that point, climbers must navigate the steep ice-field to reach the peak’s summit. The White Spider acts as a funnel, with rock and ice slides channelled through the ice field, putting the climbers in great danger while on the field.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Gosia, the former lodger upstairs, has come back to visit and greets the Princess:

Gosia: I missed you badly.
Hili: And I missed you too.
In Polish:
Gosia: Stęskniłam się za tobą.
Hili: Ja też.

From Busted Locals:

Posted by Seth Andrews on FB:

From Facebook:

What’s Titania up to? Here are two tweets from her. The first refers to this article:

Titania drags Junior Hanks at the Golden Globes:

Two tweets from reader Barry.  He thinks the cat in the first one looks like a rat. (The sound doesn’t seem to work.) What breed is that moggy?

https://twitter.com/BestVideosviral/status/1213566046294151168

I’m not sure it’s true that chimps can do this but we can’t, even with training:

Tweets from Matthew. When I heard that 3 billion figure I thought it was high for vertebrates, but also thought, “WHAT ABOUT THE INSECTS?” It turns out I’m not alone:

From the brilliant Georgina Mace, as Matthew called her: her take on John Maynard Smith on the 100th anniversary of his birth:

I don’t know enough about Star Wars to know if that’s Luke Skywalker the cat is nomming, but he’s clearly either despised or tasty:

36 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. I’m not sure if there is more to it than what can be seen in the chimp GIF, but if not then I’ve no doubt that I and most other humans can do what that chimp is doing.

    2. No. You and I can’t unless we have a photographic memory. It normally takes an extended amount of time to memorize the locations of the numbers, while the chimp does it in less than one second.

      1. Should have known better. I didn’t watch the entire clip. All I watched the first time through was the training of the chimp. That would be easy for humans I think because we can memorize pretty large patterns by rote. I didn’t watch to the point where they were doing the actual trials and the patterns changed each time.

        1. What blows my mind is how fast they are. As soon as the chimp touches the #1 the other numbers are masked, and the chimp must touch the #s in the proper sequence. They do it immediately.
          Imagine what it was like to be the first researcher to see this. Jaw dropping, really.

          1. Speed and nonchalance. Half the time the chimp isn’t even looking at the screen the whole time!

      2. Yes, it is species dependent – birds like parrots can estimate higher numbers than we. The hypothesis is, IIRC, that chimps has better working memories because they are less cooperative on average.

        But that version is particularly nasty to us, since we are trained to both count and order numbers. I find myself waste time during the memorization stage.

        A picture memorization may be fairer.

  3. Published studies have shown that chimps have much better short term memory than humans. It’s a real result.

    1. It would account for something I’ve noticed in chimps and other primates. They seem to have a kind of distracted attention, allowing their gaze to shift quickly around. I thought they were not concentrating. It could be that they simply have memorized the layout of things instantaneously and need not dwell on a specific part of the scene.

      1. In chimp society staring is a sign of aggression and is unwelcome. So could it be that this is just a consequence of an important social tactic (avoiding confrontation)?

        2. It’s that “What you lookin’ at?” thing. We’ve got it, too, and people get killed just because of an idle stare. When I’m in public places, I sedulously do the chimp thing and let my gaze shift quickly around as Rickflick has observed chimps doing.

  4. The Harlem Globetrotters better hope the Washington Generals don’t find out it’s “I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore Day.”

    And speaking of “I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore Day”: Never go full Howard Beale, man. Never.

    1. As the article says, only sort of – they changed the ingredients!

      Of course, one of the first times I had tempura was when my grade 6 teacher, Mr. Niiya, prepared potato tempura.

      It is complicated! 🙂

  6. Fables of Faubus is on Mingus Ah Um – probably a meaningful connection I hadn’t made before.

    A problem with the grades thing : they don’t pay math teachers enough, so the math majors go to tech companies and make more. Thus, mathematics education in public school is weak. That’s not my observation, it’s the observation of James Simons. But of course it doesn’t help when the school is in the town of Lake Wobegon in the first place.

  7. All the cool people call it “parm” these days. No need for long-winded names of cheeses.

    1. And much of it that you buy in the grocery store these days, already ground, contains a large amount of “sawdust” filler.

  8. It took four days to climb the Eiger north face in 1938 and in 2018 Ueli Steck did it in 2 hours 22 minutes and 50 seconds.

  10. Butterfly McQueen “must have been an atheist too.”

    Indeed she was. In 1989 she received the Freethought Heroine Award from the FFRF https://ffrf.org/outreach/awards/freethought-heroine-award/item/11976-butterfly-mcqueen

    I think it’s important to stress this, given that African Americans are stereotypically regarded as ignorant, credulous believers, and incapable of abstract thought. Re McQueen in particular, she was compelled to play characters that embodied the crudest racist stereotypes and she played them so well that, unfortunately, she was seen as personally embodying those stereotypes, when nothing could have been farther from the truth.

  11. That Harlem Globetrotters video deteriorated in the most bewildering way around the one minute mark. What the hell was going on there with the guy pulling a crying kid’s shoes off, and telling women in the crowd to kiss him or else he’ll do the same? That was a bit disturbing.

    I’d put money on that guy being a nutcase off-court too.

  12. I too saw the Harlem Globetrotters once. My father took me to see them. I was surprised by the gesture because he knew nothing of basketball, being an English gent. We went to many more soccer games though.

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