Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 27, 2020 • 6:30 am

As one of my grad-school friends used to say, “Grease the new day!” It’s Wednesday, May 27, 2020: National Italian Beef Day and National Grape Popsicle Day. If you like the second better than the first (the Italian Beef sandwich is a Chicago speciality), you’re nuts. It’s also Nothing to Fear Day (what about the virus?),Sunscreen Protection Day, the beginning of National Reconciliation Week in Australia, and Cellophane Tape Day, where there are instructions for observance:

The day should be celebrated by using cellophane tape. Besides using it on paper, there are many other ways you could use it:

Indeed! I for one am celebrating (ignore the pandemic hair):

News of the day: Today’s reported Covid-19 death toll has finally reached “100K” in the U.S. and stands at 350,000 in the world.

The New York Times has an interactive map of where the coronavirus “hot spots” are, and of course one is around Chicago. Click on the screenshot to go to the map:

Twitter has started fact-checking Donald Trump’s tweets—well, two of them about mail-in balloting. Here’s a screenshot and the NYT explanation of how Twitter has added a note to them (the blue addendum doesn’t embed with the original tweet, but you see it on the Twitter site):

Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time on Tuesday, after years of pressure over its inaction on his false and threatening posts.

. . . . The links — which were in blue lettering at the bottom of the posts and punctuated by an exclamation mark — urged people to “get the facts” about voting by mail. Clicking on the links led to a CNN story that said Mr. Trump’s claims were unsubstantiated and to a list of bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies.

Stuff that happened on May 27 include:

  • 1703 – Tsar Peter the Great founds the city of Saint Petersburg.
  • 1927 – The Ford Motor Company ceases manufacture of the Ford Model T and begins to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.
  • 1933 – The Walt Disney Company releases the cartoon Three Little Pigs, with its hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?“

Here it is, and the song starts at 2:17.  Wikipedia adds, “Additionally, [the song] was the inspiration for the title of Edward Albee’s 1963 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  • 1937 – In California, the Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County, California.
  • 1941 – World War II: The German battleship Bismarck is sunk in the North Atlantic killing almost 2,100 men.

Only 114 German sailor survived that brutal battle; here’s HMS Dorsetshire picking up some of them. (If you’re an oldster, you’ll remember Johnny Horton’s song, “Sink the Bismarck“.)

  • 1967 – Australians vote in favor of a constitutional referendum granting the Australian government the power to make laws to benefit Indigenous Australians and to count them in the national census.
  • 2016 – Barack Obama is the first president of United States to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and meet Hibakusha.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1794 – Cornelius Vanderbilt, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1877)
  • 1819 – Julia Ward Howe, American poet and songwriter (d. 1910)
  • 1837 – Wild Bill Hickok, American police officer (d. 1876)

Hickok, a legend of the Wild West, was shot at age 39 while playing poker. He was reportedly holding what is now known as “the dead man’s hand”: a pair of aces and a pair of eights.

Those who popped their clogs on May 27 include:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron continue their wary path toward friendship:

Szaron: Why are you lying here?
Hili: So you will have something to ask about.
In Polish:
Szaron: Czemu tu leżysz?
Hili: Żebyś miał o co pytać.

 

From Literary Jokes and Puns:

A meme from Bruce Thiel. If this is what it takes to get a haircut, count me in!

From Jesus of the Day:

I tweeted about Sam the Duckling to Dr. Antonovich, who also did a duckling rescue, and got a swell reply from her:

They hid my picture of Sam the Duckling (you can see it by clicking on the tweet). That’s sensitive content???

A tweet from reader Barry; the moth is the rosy maple moth (Dryocampa rubicunda), found in North America and, yes, its preferred host is the maple tree.

Tweets from Matthew. First a lesser whistling duck with babies. (They’re from SE Asia.)

Now this is the most ridiculous lockdown project ever, but I find it hilarious. And be sure to turn the sound up!

Of course we need to know this. What could be—dare I say—cooler?

https://twitter.com/DannyDutch/status/1265178439654539267

But a correction this morning: the pelicans are yawning, not cooling off. Still, they’re weird-ass birds!

Matthew calls this a “fabulous thread of flower/fly ecology.” It is, too, involving a strange mutualism between flower and fly, with the fly spending almost its entire life in one flower and the larvae consuming the seeds (and each other!):

Translation: “I’m suffering from cat harassment.” But there is no such thing!

And of this one Matthew comments, “Who knew?” Indeed. Why are adults black and cygnets light gray?

Crikey, I wouldn’t want to have to break up this fight.

17 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Here in South Australia, hairdressers have not been required to shut down. At the beginning there was a rule that 1.5m distance had to be maintained and appointments limited to 30 minutes. Then it was pointed out that that was rather silly! So those rules were rescinded and most hair dressers have carried on — often with reduced numbers of customers to maintain distance from each other. I’ve had my hair cut twice during the shutdown, and there no community related infections have been identified due to hair cuts!

    Reply

  2. Here in South Australia, hairdressers have not been required to shut down. At the beginning there was a rule that 1.5m distance had to be maintained and appointments limited to 30 minutes. Then it was pointed out that that was rather silly! So those rules were rescinded and most hair dressers have carried on — often with reduced numbers of customers to maintain distance from each other. I’ve had my hair cut twice during the shutdown, and there no community related infections have been identified due to hair cuts!

    Reply

  3. I often find it difficult to fathom the scale of death that has occurred in war. For example, for EACH of the men in the photo being rescued from the sunken Bismark there are 17 dead on the seafloor. That’s just one ship from one battle. Sigh…

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  4. “Additionally, [the song] was the inspiration for the title of Edward Albee’s 1963 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

    In the closing scene of the film adaptation of the play by Mike Nichols (Nichols’s big-screen directorial debut), Richard Burton’s “George” recites a few lines alluding to the song to Elizabeth Taylor’s “Martha”:

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  6. I don’t know about swans and cygnets but the orange babies born to momma Langurs are thought to be that way because it makes them easier to keep track of. It seems weird for baby animals to be easier to see, though.

    https [die_embed_die]://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/animals/rare-bright-orange-monkey-born-at-taronga-zoo.aspx

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  7. Trump is preparing us for the day in November when he loses the election and declares it null and void due to mail in voting fraud.

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  8. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I wonder if the two cats have actually had a violent encounter. Seems to me one of them is going to have to make a move toward friendship. A lick behind the ear perhaps. This standoff is unsustainably tense.

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    1. There was no violence between them. Szaron is trying to forge some kind of frienship but Hili mostly ignores him.

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  9. Certain segments of the “hurry up and read this before they delete it” population are impervious to fact checking, and indeed being tagged by the fake news media is a badge of honor.

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  11. One of those pelicans is in fact a Shoe-billed Stork (Balaeniceps rex), one of the world’s weirdest birds.

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  12. Today is also the 80th anniversary of the first day of the Dunkirk evacuation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation

    One fact that is not often mentioned is that, of the 338,000 military personnel picked up and taken to the UK, 140,000 were French or Belgian. Something to remember the next time a Frenchman accuses us of leaving France in the lurch.

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  14. To me, the weirdest thing about the sinking of the Bismarck is that is was “sunk” by an aerial launched torpedo that almost missed. It hit far astern, but damaged the rudder so that the Bismarck could only steam in circles. Thus the Bismarck became easy prey for the British surface ships. The irony is, that if the torpedo had hit amidships, the Bismarck would have almost certainly survived, and made it back to occupied France for repairs.

    Reply

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