Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 10, 2020 • 6:45 am

I’m trying to get up to speed here, what with a banged-up knee from falling in the pond (it’s almost healed), a messed-up ear, no food, and no sleep. Let’s see what we can do on this Sunday, May 10, 2020: National Liver and Onions Day. My father loved that malodorous dish, and I couldn’t even stand to look at it, much less the smell it. He ate it with (metaphorical) relish. Well, de gustibus non est disputandum. It’s also National Shrimp Day and Clean Up Your Room Day (or you get no shrimp!). If you do get shrimp, remember that it’s also National Lipid Day.

But don’t forget that it’s Mother’s Day! (But which mother? The name implies that we’re honoring only one mom.) But if you have a mom, show her some naches.

Today’s Google Doodle honors Mother’s Day, and when you click on it you go to a site where you can “craft” your own appreciation card to send to your Mom. (As a Duck Mom, I want one!).

News of the Day: Bad but not horrible. Anthony Fauci, as well as the heads of the CDC and FDA, went into a two-week, self-imposed quarantine after they came into contact with someone testing positive for the coronavirus, perhaps Trump’s valet in the White House. Also, according to the New York Times:

. . . Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago and its closest suburbs, added more cases of the virus than any other county in the United States on some recent days. On Friday, Cook County added more new cases than the five boroughs of New York City combined.

Our governor has now decreed that restaurants won’t open in Illinois until late June at the earliest. Oy! I will survive, of course, but I can kvetch. I’ve done a few takeouts.

And finally, and the saddest of all, deaths from coronavirus in the U.S. now stand at 79,696, and in the world, about 279,000.

Stuff that happened on May 10 includes:

  • 1497 – Amerigo Vespucci allegedly leaves Cádiz for his first voyage to the New World.
  • 1503 – Christopher Columbus visits the Cayman Islands and names them Las Tortugas after the numerous turtles there.
  • 1534 – Jacques Cartier visits Newfoundland.
  • 1773 – The Parliament of Great Britain passes the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by reducing taxes on its tea and granting it the right to sell tea directly to North America. The legislation leads to the Boston Tea Party.
  • 1869 – The First Transcontinental Railroad, linking the eastern and western United States, is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah with the golden spike.

Here’s the ceremony, with the Wikipedia caption “The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869; completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. At center left, Samuel S. Montague, Central Pacific Railroad, shakes hands with Grenville M. Dodge, Union Pacific Railroad (center right).”

And here’s the spike: 17.6 karats, driven in by Leland Stanford and on display at the Cantor Arts Museum at Stanford University. One would think it would bend! There’s a whole Wikipedia page on this spike, and here’s some interesting info:

To drive the final spike, Stanford lifted a silver spike maul and drove the spike into the tie, completing the line. Stanford and Hewes missed the spike, but the single word “done” was nevertheless flashed by telegraph around the country. In the United States, the event has come to be considered one of the first nationwide media events. The locomotives were moved forward until their “cowcatchers” met, and photographs were taken. Immediately afterwards, the golden spike and the laurel tie were removed, lest they be stolen, and replaced with a regular iron spike and normal tie. At exactly 12:47 pm, the last iron spike was driven, finally completing the line.

Photo by Wjenning, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
  • 1872 – Victoria Woodhull becomes the first woman nominated for President of the United States.

Here’s Woodhull, nominated for President by the Equal Rights Party; her VP candidate was Frederick Douglass. Now that’s a ticket that would sell today! She was a stockbroker, a spiritualist, and a magnetic healer, as well as an advocate of free love.

  • 1908 – Mother’s Day is observed for the first time in the United States, in Grafton, West Virginia.
  • 1916 – Sailing in the lifeboat James Caird, Ernest Shackleton arrives at South Georgia after a journey of 800 nautical miles from Elephant Island.

Now THAT was a journey! Shackleton, a very brave man, died at only 47 of a heart attack on south Georgia Island, where he’s buried.  Here’s the launching of that flimsy ship on April 24:

  • 1924 – J. Edgar Hoover is appointed first Director of the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and remains so until his death in 1972.

That’s 48 years the old s.o.b. held that job!

  • 1940 – World War II: Winston Churchill is appointed Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain. On the same day, Germany invades France, Belgium and Luxembourg. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom occupies Iceland.
  • 1954 – Bill Haley & His Comets release “Rock Around the Clock”, the first rock and roll record to reach number one on the Billboard charts.
  • 1960 – The nuclear submarine USS Triton completes Operation Sandblast, the first underwater circumnavigation of the earth.
  • 1962 – Marvel Comics publishes the first issue of The Incredible Hulk.
  • 1970 – Bobby Orr scores “The Goal” to win the 1970 Stanley Cup Finals, for the Boston Bruins‘ fourth NHL championship in their history.

Here’s the goal, which is a bit hard to see in this video:

  • 1981 – François Mitterrand wins the presidential election and becomes the first Socialist President of France in the French Fifth Republic.
  • 1994 – Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president.
  • 1996 – A blizzard strikes Mount Everest, killing eight climbers by the next day

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1838 – John Wilkes Booth, American actor, assassin of Abraham Lincoln (d. 1865)
  • 1899 – Fred Astaire, American actor, singer, and dancer (d. 1987)
  • 1946 – Donovan, Scottish singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor
  • 1957 – Sid Vicious, English singer and bass player (d. 1979)
  • 1960 – Bono, Irish singer-songwriter, musician, humanitarian, venture capitalist, businessman, philanthropist and activist

Those who kicked it on May 10 include:

  • 1863 – Stonewall Jackson, American general (b. 1824)
  • 1977 – Joan Crawford, American actress (year of birth disputed)
  • 1990 – Walker Percy, American novelist and essayist (b. 1916)
  • 1994 – John Wayne Gacy, American serial killer (b. 1942)
  • 2012 – Carroll Shelby, American race car driver and designer (b. 1923)

Be sure to see the movie Ford v. Ferrari, which gets a 92% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a good pandemic movie, absorbing and yet not pabulum for the mind. Here’s the trailer. The movie stars Matt Damon and Christian Bale:

And here’s a scene where Shelby takes Henry Ford for a spin in the new racecar:

Finally, Little Richard died yesterday at 87.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pondering. When I asked Malgorzata which options he was pondering, she replied, “I have no idea what options were Hili enteraining and why she didn’t like any of them. Who knows? Maybe she was thinking about the coming elections both in Poland and in US? But I suspect that it was rather an option of dry  or wet cat food while she would prefer beef.”

Hili: I’m considering different options.
A: And?
Hili: I don’t like any of them.
In Polish:
Hili: Rozważam różne opcje.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Żadna mi nie odpowiada.
And here’s a photo of Hili’s almost-friend, the lovely Szaron:

A baby after my own heart, from Jesus of the Day:

Also from Jesus of the Day. I love the Cheshire Cat!

Reader Simon has a 19 year old cat named Pachaca. His caption of her photo: “When the day gets too much we can all take a lesson from a cat – sound asleep, face down 😂.”

From Titania: Is this game for real? Read the differences:

From Simon: Sarah Cooper doing a great lip-synch to Trump again. Listen to this! Trump says Covid testing is useless because you can test negative and then afterwords test positive. Sarah lip synchs it.

And Cooper on Trump on “how to grief”

Two tweets from Heather Haste. What a sweet kitty!

Via Ann German: Another lip-synch effort and also a great coronavirus parody of “One Day More” from Les Mis:

Two tweets from Matthew. The first is a menage à trois espèces, to which Matthew says “awww!”

And the expression of a urinating cat (if you have a cat, you’ll know it):

23 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

    2. In the new movie Capital in the Twenty-First Century, psychologist Paul Piff talks about an experiment using the standard Monopoly game. Researchers has strangers, paired by two’s playing the game. A coin flip decided who would be The Rich Player and who would be the Poor Player.

      Rich Player got twice as much money to start, and got to roll two dice instead of one. (Meaning they got to mover faster to Go and pick up $200, to Poor Player’s one.

      At the end of the game, when Rich Players were asked why they thought they won, not one of them attributed their success to having the advantages from the start. Not one of them.

      Reply

    3. Ironically, Wikipedia notes that “In the feminist themed Monopoly version, Ms. Monopoly, the properties are replaced with inventions by women. Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolists (a book about Magie and her board game) criticized Ms. Monopoly for not including Magie’s Landlord’s Game even though it’s acknowledged as the prototype to Monopoly, meaning that Monopoly itself was invented by a woman. [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-misplaced-feminism-of-ms-monopoly/ ]”

      Reply

  2. Little Richard…one of the primary reasons for rock & Roll back in the beginning. Did not really get proper recognition but I think we know the reason why.

    Reply

  3. Sorry you’re all banged up! I hope you’re on the mend soon (and that if you can’t go shopping, an Instacart shopper can bring you some noms!)

    Reply

  4. 1977 – Joan Crawford, American actress (year of birth disputed)

    “You should never speak ill of the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” — Bette Davis

    Reply

  5. According to Stephen Ambrose (Nothing Like It: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869), the hole for the Golden Spike was pre-drilled, so that they only had to tap it into place.

    Reply

      1. Wasn’t that Lincoln’s purpose for give-away financing a transcontinental rail road?, To pump white Europeans onto mid-continent Indian land and promote European colonization of the Pacific coast, sending the Chinese back to where they came from.
        No black Americans in the photo either. Despite what the movies say, Lincoln (I almost wrote “Trump”) plotted to send freed slaves to the Caribbean, where his favorite biologist/paleontologist Louis Agassiz (of Harvard)said the climate was that for which they had been created. The Lincoln administration financed fat-cat railroad builders all through the Civil War but as the war ran down Lincoln was stymied as to how get a fleet large to haul away all the freed slaves. Despite being made of gold, a spike is still a spike.

        Reply

  6. May 10th reminds me of 1933. On that date the Germans burnt in many of their cities those books that they considered “ungerman”. This was already well understood by Heinrich Heine who wrote in 1821 in his tragedy “Almansor”: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur! Dort wo man Buecher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” [That was only a prelude! Where they burn books, they finally burn people too]. Heine’s books were burned in 1933 as well.

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  7. I watched two racing movies in the last week: Ford v. Ferrari and Rush. I found the former to be a standard “feel-good” movie and rather boring, but the latter was exhilarating while managing to be a character study about ambition, risk, and the human drive for competition. Rush is phenomenal, while FvF is merely OK.

    That’s my opinion, of course. For those of you who have the movie channels on cable, Rush has been showing on one of them (I think it was HBO, but I’m not positive about that).

    Reply

    1. I saw and enjoyed them both, as you say, very different. I recently watched a documentary on the 1976 season (the Hunt vs Lauda competition depicted in Rush) I think on Prime.

      1976:Hunt vs Lauda

      Made in 2014 interviews with a lot of the people around at the time and old footage that I hadn’t seen before.

      Reply

      1. Thanks for telling me about the documentary. It’s a fascinating story, so I can’t wait to watch it. I did some reading after watching the movie and was surprised at how little the movie embellished and how similar Hemsworth and Bruhl looked to their respective real-life characters (especially Bruhl).

        Reply

  8. Yup, Mothers’ Day (in some places). We had our Lockdown Family Reunion this Sunday evening as usual: Kent/London/Paris/Italy. Twelve of us, including six parents and seven children. The three mothers all received virtual bouquets, and actual glasses of wine.

    Then we had a Great Family Quiz Nite, which was still more unbuttoned. Even the three grandchildren (10, 8 and 3) had some quiz questions to ask us. Such fun!

    Reply

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