It’s Tuesday, the cruelest day, July 28, 2020: National Milk Chocolate Day. It used to be that this was the only form of chocolate I ate, but the older I get the more I like dark chocolate—up to and above 90% cocoa. I have even tried this, which I liked, especially because even a small bit is filling:
It’s also National Hamburger Day, World Hepatitis Day, and World Nature Conservation Day.
News of the Day: The nightly protests, which are not nonviolent, continue in Seattle and Portland. Yes, the feds are a provocation, but I long for the days when provocation was not an excuse for violence by protestors (viz., John Lewis), and civil disobedience brought sympathy from the public.
The Guardian has totaled up who was responsible for politically-motivated killings in the U.S., and the chart, showing only one death attributed to “antifascists” (and the person killed was the antifascist) is below.
As I predicted to a friend (no money involved), the 2020 Major League Baseball season is in deep trouble—only a few days after it started late. Yesterday two games were postponed after a big-time infection of the Miami Marlins by coronavirus. It would have been better just to postpone the season entirely rather than have a truncated 60-game season with no fans in the stands. I predict again that the season will be canceled. And soon football and basketball are set to begin.
Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 148,448, an increase of about 1700 deaths over yesterday’s report. The world death toll now stands at 653,940, an increase of about 5500 deaths from yesterday.
My hair is now completely out of control: here’s a picture taken early this morning, about to tuck into my latte with four shots of espresso.
Stuff that happened on July 28 include:
- 1540 – Thomas Cromwell is executed at the order of Henry VIII of England on charges of treason. Henry marries his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, on the same day.
- 1794 – French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just are executed by guillotine in Paris, France.
- 1821 – José de San Martín declares the independence of Peru from Spain.
- 1868 – The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is certified, establishing African American citizenship and guaranteeing due process of law.
- 1917 – The Silent Parade took place in New York City, in protest to murders, lynchings, and other violence directed towards African Americans.
Below is a very short clip of very rare video footage of the Silent Parade, preserved by complete accident. Here are the Vimeo notes (note that all the marchers are dressed in their Sunday best):
On July 28, 1917 W. E. B. Du Bois organized a parade of African Americans that ran down Fifth Avenue from 59th Street to 23rd Street. Dressed in white, and silent except for a muffled beat of drums, thousands marched in protest of the recent mob violence and lynchings in Waco, Memphis and East St. Louis.
NOTE: This clip originally appeared as part of Universal Animated Weekly, Vol. 5, Issue 83, released on August 1, 1917. In 1929 it was buried, along with 532 other film reels, in a defunct swimming pool in Dawson City, Yukon Territory Canada. It was unearthed in 1978 during a construction project, after being inadvertently preserved for 49 years in the Yukon permafrost.
- 1939 – The Sutton Hoo helmet is discovered.
The helmet dates back to about 625 AD and is thought to have been worn by King Rædwald of East Anglia. It was found in a ship burial. Below is the helmet with reconstructions, and below that a full reconstruction of what it might have looked like. Captions from Wikipedia:
- 1973 – Summer Jam at Watkins Glen: Nearly 600,000 people attend a rock festival at the Watkins Glen International Raceway.
Professor Ceiling Cat was there! It wasn’t Woodstock, to be sure, but it was the largest pop festival ever, featuring the Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Band.
- 1996 – The remains of a prehistoric man are discovered near Kennewick, Washington. Such remains will be known as the Kennewick Man.
After a protract fight over the remains, they were given to local Native Americans, who reburied them, precluding all further scientific study.
- 2005 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army calls an end to its thirty-year-long armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
Notables born on this day include:
- 1635 – Robert Hooke, English physicist and chemist (d. 1703)
- 1844 – Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poet (d. 1889)
I quite like Hopkins’s poetry though others regard him as mannered or puerile. He died at age 44 of typhoid. Here’s a photo:
- 1887 – Marcel Duchamp, French-American painter and sculptor (d. 1968)
- 1902 – Sir Karl Popper, Austrian-English philosopher and academic (d. 1994)
- 1909 – Malcolm Lowry, English novelist and poet (d. 1957)
- 1943 – Mike Bloomfield, American guitarist and songwriter (d. 1981)
- 1964 – Lori Loughlin, American actress, future jailbird
Those who rested in peace on July 28 include:
- 1655 – Cyrano de Bergerac, French poet and playwright (b. 1619)
- 1750 – Johann Sebastian Bach, German organist and composer (b. 1685)
- 1996 – Roger Tory Peterson, American ornithologist and academic (b. 1908)
- 2004 – Francis Crick, English biologist and biophysicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1916)
You’ve surely seen this famous photo; I believe it’s of morning coffee at the Cavendish Cambridge after the structure of DNA had been worked out:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili inspected the trees and declared that the cherry harvest should begin (it starts tomorrow):
Hili: It’s time to start the harvest.Andrzej: So it seems.
Hili: Czas zacząć zbiory.Ja: Na to wygląda.
A meme from Nicole:
From Jesus of the Day:
A trick to impress (or rather sicken) your friends. . . .
A tweet from Gethyn. I think the owl won this one. . .
An accidental encounter sends both cat and owl into intimidation mode.pic.twitter.com/gjmfgvAt9o
— Daily Owls (@Daily__Owls) July 27, 2020
A tweet from Simon. This is pathetic with the cardboard cutouts standing in for live humans. What’s worse is that I’m told that Fox somehow inserts computer-generated crowds into its televised baseball games.
Whose mans is this? pic.twitter.com/6y6WTwX5FE
— Philadelphia Phillies (@Phillies) July 26, 2020
From cesar. Did you know that snakes yawned? I don’t think I’ve seen my ducks do it.
A snake yawning. As far as we know, all vertebrates yawn. There are lots of theories about why – which implies that we don't actually know why. Could be different reasons for different critters. https://t.co/aEmafqRMc5 pic.twitter.com/g4jK2kyqvb
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) July 27, 2020
Tweets from Matthew. This Trump tweet alone would indicate serious cognitive issues:
So the Washington Post is running the Reagan Foundation, and RINO Paul Ryan is on the Board of Fox, which has been terrible. We will win anyway, even with the phony @FoxNews suppression polls (which have been seriously wrong for 5 years)! https://t.co/fOi3AROxuz
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020
Check out this Medium article in which Voshart created realistic portaits of Roman Emperors from statues and other artwork:
What did I do during quarantine? 54 Machine-learning assisted portraits of the Roman Empire.
For this project, I transformed or restored (cracks, noses, ears etc.) over 800 images.https://t.co/yQWWIgfvjJ
— Dan Voshart ☁️⛅☀️ (@dvoshart) July 24, 2020
A lovely bat. But why the orange in a noctunral animal?
The Painted Bat. It looks like Halloween and are just, super cute pic.twitter.com/mB331treX6
— Caitlin Hobbs (they/them) (@caitlinthehob) July 24, 2020
How did Jon Voigt become such a loon? (Sound up.)
Faith and Trust pic.twitter.com/o7EcAmMeS9
— Jon Voight (@jonvoight) July 22, 2020
NOTHING IS MOVING IN THE VIDEO BELOW:
I think this might be the best motion illusion I've ever seen. https://t.co/8KiuSqvNIM
— Tom Hartley (@tom_hartley) July 26, 2020
In a sense I think something could be said to be moving in that illusion. The color changes in a regular sweeping pattern at a regular interval.
That’s a complaint I have with most of these illusions: the motion is not illusory but real. Rather than our visual apparatus being fooled, it is actually able to see motion in more than just the individual dots, stripes, etc. that make up these images. Still, some are definitely more interesting than others.
Agreed. If nothing was moving, it could be a still image instead of a video.
“1540 – Thomas Cromwell is executed” – yesterday, Hilary Mantel was announced to be on the longlist for the Booker Prize for the final volume of her trilogy about Cromwell. The first two books both won the Booker, making her the first woman to be a double winner, and the first author to win for a sequel. If she wins again, it will be unprecedented.
The cardboard cut-outs at the baseball game are lame, but it could be worse: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-52702075
I wonder if John Lewis could have made a difference in Portland and Seattle? If he had gone there and given a speech about Gandhi and MLK.
I suspect one wouldhave to know who Ghandi and MLK were for Angel listen.
Angel =any.
I live in Portland and have attended some of the recent protests.
Thousands of people out for the right reasons.
My sister wimped out of demonstrating in Portland but was out protesting in Hillsboro.
Re: Voshart Quarantine project/Roman Emperors
Way to make all us slackers feel guilty about quarantine. The poster is available to buy where you follow the links.
Yes, amazing work. His explanation for how he chose the source material and then incorporated any written descriptions of the emperors was interesting – especially his choice of the ugliest statues.
While there is a temptation to regard the protesters here in Portland as a single entity, It appears there are two groups.
There is the larger group that begins to gather in the early evening a block or so from the federal building to listen to speakers and to chant.
Then something happens between 10:30 and 11:00 when a small group of people dressed mostly in black gather at the fence in front of the federal building and start yelling at the troops behind the fence and throwing things over the fence. That’s when the tear gas comes. This group seems to get a lot of press coverage.
It’s almost like there are two events happening.
Between 10:30 and 11:00 huh? I wonder when the evening newscasts begin?
KITTEN UPDATE: KITTEN STEALS COUCH SPOT WITH PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING CUTENESS
K slept on my bed for the fifth time in six nights last night. This is not a problem because OC never sleeps on my bed. I do have two other problems that are causing serious disruptions in OC’s daily ritual.
First, I have two couches in the family room. I sit on the couch directly across from the TV every night, and OC comes to sit with me and get affection for about 1/2 hour somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00 PM. unfortunately, K has been lounging on the other couch, and OC has not been willing to come sit with me while K is in the room, so OC has not been getting his daily dose of pets and scratches from me. There is no other time when I can give OC this affection, as he doesn’t like being touched at any other time.
Second, we have a new development this morning: K took OC’s spot on one of the couches in the living room. As in the family room, there are two couches (and two chairs) in the living room, and a very large amount of floor space with a rug. OC usually slowly moves from the floor to one couch and then to the other couch over the course of the day, moving with the sun (the couches are set up as a right angle). He sleeps in this semi-clockwise routine beginning at between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM, and usually gets up at about 6:00 or 7:00 PM. Hopefully, K has not completely broken this routine as well, or OC will really have nothing left of his normal routine.
And that is all for today’s kitten update. Be well and stay safe, friends!
UPDATE: K has left the couch and is currently on my desk. OC may be able to keep his living room daytime sleeping routine. We shall see.
Just letting you know that I, for one, appreciate these updates! And I’m sure I speak for others. So please keep posting them (with PCC(e)’s concurrence, of course).
Thanks for the updates – I hope it all works out!
I’m interested how it goes.
I found a quick and easy solution to “quarantine hair”. Just get some scissors and cut it very very short. This can be done by touch. You don’t even need a good mirror. If it is short enough, it can’ be very uneven because there’s not enough hair length to make big errors.
The great thing about quarantine is nobody will see you anyway. Soon enough your hair will grow out and be relatively even.
It felt so good to get that pile of hair off my head!
Yes, you put your hair between your fingers and use the thickness of your hand to give consistent length to the hairs. Still, I find it tough to manipulate the scissors. Using a mirror actually makes it more difficult in my experience.
Yes, exactly. I did most of it by touch. The only mirror I have is a little stereo microscope mirror and that was useful to catch some spots I missed.
I kind of enjoyed the fact that I didn’t care anymore how it turned out.
“I kind of enjoyed the fact that I didn’t care anymore how it turned out.”
One of the few benefits of getting old, I find.
The quarantine helps. If no one will see you, who cares?
“You don’t even need a good mirror” – back in the day, Keef Richards didn’t need a mirror at all, of course. (Well, not for cutting his own hair…)
Jerry could get a curling iron and create some fun hairstyles.
You mean Jheri curls? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jheri_curl
Here is a short video illustrating why the Painted Bat is striped black and orange. It all has to do where the bat rests and how it folds its wings.
https://www.youtu.be.com/watch?v=UFkIi4MJS9A
🐾🐾
Love the owl. Hard to believe that it’s the cat which is the heavyweight (literally) in that competition. But of course, making it hard to believe is the entire point of the display.
Nice coffee cup, Hairy One!
I had an unpleasant thought. The protests in Portland, Chicago and other cities are a win-win situation for Trump. If they stop, he claims credit. If they continue until November, he claims that the left is filled with violent anarchists.
He needs to win the midwestern working class. If the Chicago riots remain on their TV for months, Democrats will seem weak.
Yes, it’s worrying. On the other hand, I don’t see how this wins Trump more voters. Anyone who is not in his core supporters aren’t going to be convinced that rioters are coming to their towns. Even if they do, it should be balanced by outrage over the trampling of state’s rights and sympathy for BLM. Still, Trump seems to have a sixth sense as to what some people care about.
I strongly disagree. Many older voters prefer safety over idealism. Trump knows this and is making frightening ads aimed at them. The protestors are giving him votes on a silver platter. I’ve rarely seen such stupid and clueless protestors as these violent ones that are attacking the courthouse and burning buildings. The non-violent protestors’ great efforts to highlight police brutality are being completely undone by this violent subset.
I wasn’t siding with the violent protestors. It has definitely gotten out of control. I agree with what you say here but I feel that older voters will not be swayed by Trump’s transparent action to drum up this violence or see the need to re-elect Trump in order to quell it. It does bother me that some of the protestors are such willing tools of the Trump administration. Their actions jeopardize the very thing they are advocating.
They will not be swayed by Trump’s actions, they will be swayed by the inaction of the Democratic politicians. The Democrats have boxed themselves into a position where stopping vandalism is considered pro-Trump. Six months of nightly vandalism is not an attractive thought.
Trump has the uncanny ability to make his enemies do his bidding.
I disagree. Dems, at least those with national prominence, would be playing into Trump’s hands by drawing undue attention to the violence. Instead, I suspect they are encouraging local Dems to convince BLM leaders and others that the violence is playing into Trump’s hands and that it needs to stop. At the same time, they are working legal channels to force Trump to withdraw his army and to draw attention to the real reasons Trump is doing this.
No surprise that right-wing violence is the real threat in America. The media has no trouble calling a jihadist killing an act of terror (which it is). But when a white man mows down a group of people, the word “terrorism” is never uttered. What’s that about?
Love the mug. Love the long hair. You make a great looking old hippie. ✌️
Hooke also wrote (apparently – the histories mention it but I have yet to read it) a pioneering book on microscopy and microbiology – _Micrographia_.