Good morning on a tense Tuesday, June 2, 2020: National Rocky Road Day, celebrating a confection made of chocolate, nuts, and marshmallow. It’s also National Rotisserie Chicken Day, and International Sex Workers Day. Since it’s National Candy Month, it’s appropriately I Love My Dentist Day (I do; he’s a nice guy and a great dentist—the official dentist of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, and he’s in attendance at every game to repair smashed choppers. There’s a dental clinic in the hockey stadium.)
My desert rose (Adenium obesum) is blooming; I’ve discovered over the years that the key is to withhold water when flower buds appear (I tend to overwater). The plant is native to Southern Africa and Arabia.
News of the Day: Concern about the pandemic is now compounded by concerns about demonstrations, about violence (in the demonstrations, by both cops and demonstrators), and about our so-called President. Here are the New York Times headlines; the first is especially dire. Click to go to the reports. (Note that the paper has now decided what we “need to know”, a HuffPost-like catering to the benighted.)
Here’s what you need to know:
- The police use tear gas to clear a path for Trump to visit a damaged church.
- Angry protests continue nationwide a week after George Floyd’s death.
- Looters ransack stores in New York City hours ahead of curfew.
- Military police and Army helicopters are deployed in Washington.
- Police officers targeted in attacks nationwide.
- The Times has reporters on the ground. Here’s what they are seeing.
- The protests’ growing toll: five deaths, thousands of arrests, millions of dollars in property damage.
A more extensive take on the first report:
Today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 105,095, an increase of about 600 from yesterday. The world toll now stands at 256, an increase of about 3500 from yesterday.
Stuff that happened on June 2 include:
- 1692 – Bridget Bishop is the first person to be tried for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts; she was found guilty and later hanged.
- 1835 – P. T. Barnum and his circus start their first tour of the United States.
Here’s Barnum. There is no record of him ever saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
- 1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applies for a patent for his wireless telegraph.
- 1924 – U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
- 1953 – The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, who is crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Her Other Realms and Territories & Head of the Commonwealth, the first major international event to be televised. [Notice that she’s the Queen of all those other countries, including Canada and New Zealand!]
Here’s “The Crownening”, note how long it takes to put the damn thing on her head!
- 1962 – During the 1962 FIFA World Cup, police had to intervene multiple times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
Here are some highlights of that game, which inspired the introduction of red and yellow cards, invented by the English ref of that match, Ken Aston:
- 1979 – Pope John Paul II starts his first official visit to his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country.
- 1997 – In Denver, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died. He was executed four years later.
Notables born on this day include:
- 1740 – Marquis de Sade, French philosopher and politician (d. 1814)
- 1857 – Edward Elgar, English composer and educator (d. 1934)
- 1937 – Sally Kellerman, American actress
- 1944 – Marvin Hamlisch, American composer and conductor (d. 2012)
- 1953 – Cornel West, American philosopher, author, and academic
Those who “passed” on June 2 include:
- 1941 – Lou Gehrig, American baseball player (b. 1903)
- 1942 – Bunny Berigan, American singer and trumpet player (b. 1908)
- 1962 – Vita Sackville-West, English author and poet (b. 1892)
- 1988 – Raj Kapoor, Indian actor, director, and producer (b. 1924)
- 2008 – Bo Diddley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1928)
Here’s Berigan’s most famous song (recorded1937), with great trumpet solos by the man: “I Can’t Get Started”. I used to play this song over and over again from my parents’ collection of old records. Berigan drank himself to death, dying at only 33.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili spurns sanitary strictures:
A: Don’t drink this water, I washed my tools in it.Hili: It’s a good, natural dirt.
Ja: Nie pij tej wody, ja w niej myłem narzędzia.
Hili: To jest dobry, naturalny brud.
A picture from Matthew labeled “Ollie looking daft.” Ollie is the killer moggy who laid my nose open with a deft swipe of his paw when I last visited Matthew in Manchester:
From Bruce Thiel:
This is my own personal beef about the pandemic:
A tweet from our former President with his statement about the death of George Floyd. This is the kind of unifying statement that a real leader makes, and would be unthinkable issuing from the peabrain of our current “President”:
My statement on the death of George Floyd: pic.twitter.com/Hg1k9JHT6R
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 29, 2020
. . . and from the satirical Babylon Bee:
Powerful: Protesters Spell Out 'Love' With Burning Homes And Businesseshttps://t.co/8QRmXZJgwf
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 1, 2020
From reader Ken, who notes this:
Alabama US senator Doug Jones (the guy that whipped Roy Moore’s ass in the 2017 special election), who generally has all the charisma of Mr. Whipple, gave a pretty rousing statement on his way to a rally for justice in Birmingham. (But then, he was the prosecutor who put the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing defendants away. Plus, he knows he probably doesn’t have a prayer in this year’s election and, as Mr. Kristofferson said, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose):
We are all hurting.Headed to a rally for justice in Kelly Ingram Park pic.twitter.com/s1EGTMLe4A
— Doug Jones (@DougJones) May 31, 2020
From Barry: some interspecific love. Grania, who died on June 16 last year, would have loved this, as she sent me many tweets about animal friends of different species.
bear loves his tiger brother pic.twitter.com/vjoUNGBTxa
— ali (@ali33322216) May 31, 2020
A peaceful moment in nature with lovely deer. Bushy Park is actually in London, part of Hampton Court Palace.
A minute with deer in Bushy Park pic.twitter.com/7kcEwVEQGB
— Nikon Photographer (@Astrid_Tontson) May 31, 2020
What’s next: pedicures?
A chimp filing his nails https://t.co/QIti4Be6MX
Credit: Center for Great Apes (@CFGA) ape sanctuary in Florida pic.twitter.com/88dke9r0X7
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 31, 2020
Moar wild boar in the streets, again in Poland. This is delightful!
Meanwhile, in Olsztyn, Poland… pic.twitter.com/UjdQNocInN
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) June 1, 2020
And a retweet by Dr. Cobb himself:
Lest we forget: after the virus has gone, we still have this existential threat to deal with. https://t.co/HKABwEXyge
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) June 1, 2020
For all 20 players and all 16 teeth?
His main job may be reordering broken dentures.
There’s a joke in there, but I ain’t going to make it…
Spit it out!
Peaceful protesters were cleared out of his way with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, before the DC curfew was scheduled to start, so that Trump (a putative Presbyterian) could have a photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church holding as a prop a bible — you know, the book he couldn’t find Second Corinthians in if you spotted him everything but the first three Pauline Epistles.
You couldn’t stage a more clownish photo-op if you had all of Monty Python together to stage it.
Trump can surround himself with all the Christian iconography he wants; in his hands, it’s all pagan idolatry.
For all his reality show experience, he really blew it with that show. He looked utterly ridiculous, in an evil sort of way.
A bit from the Freethinker: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thefreethinker/2020/06/hitler-and-trump-comparisons-being-made-after-bible-stunt/
*Sigh* Our pea brain president. Of course this is an insult to peas. So lima bean president? No one likes those beans.
A big problem in any case is that he is mentally incapable of being the right person at the helm at this time.
I like lima beans, actually. How about “shit for brains”? Though I think even dung beetles might steer away from this one.
Slight spelling mistake
“Crownening”
Also
Australians might be feeling a bit left out by your last sentence.
“Bishop Budde denounced the way the president held up a Bible during his visit, a move she interpreted as a political prop”
It’s disturbing enough to see this guy deliberately destroying what remains of social unity, but it’s especially disgusting to see him use condescending stunts like this. It’s as if he thinks of Americans as small children, impressed by tawdry bits of piety. Since so many seem to appreciate the theatrics, it means we live in a nation of idiots. Which is a sad conclusion, but, I fear, necessary.
I had no idea that the introduction of red and yellow cards in football (soccer) was as recent as 1962. I would have guessed that it went much further back than that.
Red and yellow cards are actually more recent than that. I remember they were something new when I was a child. They were introduced during the 1970 World Cup, as a consequence of a player refusing to leave the field after two warnings during the 1966 WC. In 1966, Ken Aston was the chief of FIFA referees and decided something should be done.
Source (in Italian):
https://www.mondiali.it/curiosita-mondiali/cartellini-gialli-rossi-storia-risale-al-mondiale-1970/
I was also a child in 1970 but here in Canada football/soccer didn’t have much of a mainstream presence at that time (it was mostly ice hockey, with also baseball and American football). I might have heard of Pele at that time, but maybe not. My English cousins came to visit in 1974, which is when I became a bit more aware of “the beautiful game”.
I tried to learn some Italian before visiting the country in 2000. I can still remember the incredibly patient staff at one hotel we stayed at, putting up with my laborious attempts to speak. I haven’t gone back to studying the language since then but my knowledge of French and Spanish helps me get the gist. Thanks for the article.
And novelist — Justine and Juliette and 120 of Sodom come to mind, though there may be others.
The 120 Days of Sodom.
I’ve read all of de Sade’s novels that have been translated into English. They would be horrifying if they weren’t so boring.
Ollie looks like he’s ready to take you on again!
President Obama has a longer statement presented yesterday (link below). I don’t think it can be stated any more eloquently or succinctly that he does here.
https://medium.com/@BarackObama/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-point-for-real-change-9fa209806067
Interesting facts about the Salem Witch Trials that go against common misconceptions about it:
(1) All the executed were hanged or, in one case (Giles Corey), “pressed” to death with stones. None were burned.
(2) Only 30 people were found guilty of witchcraft, and nineteen were executed.
(3) Of the nineteen executed, nearly one third were men (fifteen women and four men).
(4) And my favorite fact: according to multiple witnesses, Giles Corey was “pressed” for two whole days before dying (pressing involves the slow piling of stoned onto the chest over time to suffocate and break the bones of the victim). Every time the sheriff stacked more rocks upon his chest and demanded a confession, Corey simply replied, “more weight.” By previous court accounts, he was a nasty SOB (he beat one of his indentured servants to death, for example), but going out this way was pretty bad-ass.
I wasn’t a STEM major, BJ, merely a lowly humanities fella, but I’m pretty sure 4 out of 19 is closer to 1/5th than 1/3rd. 🙂
Only for small values of 4.
Well, I was never very good at math myself 🙂 I was thinking of the 15 women and somehow bungled that up in my head as the entire count, so was thinking four out of fifteen.
But I do freely admit on a regular basis that I am an idiot.
re Trump church photo op:
The obvious choice would be to walk to the MLK memorial but then I’m not a fake Christian pandering to my base.
Beautiful flower!
Beautiful flower!
Worse threat than ever, perhaps:
“A common message in use to convey the seriousness of climate change to the public is: “Carbon dioxide levels are higher today than they have been for the past one million years!” This new study by Brian Schubert (University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and coauthors Ying Cui and A. Hope Jahren used a novel method to conclude that today’s carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are actually higher than they have been for the past 23 million years.
The team used the fossilized remains of ancient plant tissues to produce a new record of atmospheric CO2 that spans 23 million years of uninterrupted Earth history. They have shown elsewhere that as plants grow, the relative amount of the two stable isotopes of carbon, carbon-12 and carbon-13 changes in response to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This research, published this week in Geology, is a next-level study measuring the relative amount of these carbon isotopes in fossil plant materials and calculating the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere under which the ancient plants grew.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200601194144.htm
But on the US situation, I thought Trump was akin to a pea because they both lack brains!?
Which unfortunately now has happened here too. I’m sad to report that a demonstration of less than 50 against the US racism eventually grew to 8000, for the first time breaking the pandemic rules.