Saturday: Hili dialogue

BE SURE TO SET YOUR CLOCKS BACK TONIGHT, AS AT 2 A.M. AMERICA GOES OFF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME. YOU GET AN EXTRA HOUR OF SLEEP!

It’s the weekend: Saturday, October 31, 2020, and it’s Halloween! It’ll be a distanced one this year, and I fear that kids won’t get their usual allotment of candy. One of my friends with two kids is having a “candy” hunt, in which she hides candy around her house, but that’s not nearly as much fun.

In honor of the holiday, it’s National Caramel Apple Day. Carve a Pumpkin Day, National Magic Day, and the related Halloween holidays:

• Allantide (Cornwall)
• Hop-tu-Naa (Isle of Man)
• Samhain

Only three days remain until they filet me like a flounder. And remember: tomorrow evening you set your clocks back, and will get an extra hour of sleep on Sunday night.

News of the Day:

Here’s the latest good news from FiveThirtyEight:

Aunt Becky goes to jail!

Actor Lori Loughlin reported to a low-security federal prison in California Friday, where she will serve a two-month sentence for her role in the college admissions scandal.

Loughlin and her husband admitted to paying $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into college. pic.twitter.com/fPIkxzhUXk

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) October 30, 2020

She got off easy.

There’s a new biography of Sylvia Plath (click on screenshot below) that got a terrific review in the New York Times. (It also got starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus.) As the author notes, “I hope to free Plath from the cultural baggage of the past 50 years and reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.” Click to go to the Amazon link:

New Zealand is a progressive and enlightened country, and just showed it by passing a binding referendum legalizing euthanasia. The vote was lopsided, with 65% in favor of the measure. Curiously, though, the Kiwis weren’t as enlightened about legalizing marijuana, with 53% of voters opposing the measure and only 46% in favor. Would a Kiwi care to explain this?

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 229,672, a big increase of about 1,000 from yesterday’s figure. The world death toll is 1,194,68,, a big increase of about 7,400 over yesterday’s report. 

Stuff that happened on October 31 includes:

• 683 – During the Siege of Mecca, the Kaaba catches fire and is burned down.
• 1517 – Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther posts his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
• 1913 – Dedication of the Lincoln Highway, the first automobile highway across United States.

Here’s the ol’ Lincoln Highway, 5,454 km (3,389 miles) long. Can you think of a popular song that mentions this road?

• 1922 – Benito Mussolini is made Prime Minister of Italy

I’ve noted a few times that the imperious, head-up posture of Trump resembles that of Mussolini:

• 1940 – World War II: The Battle of Britain ends: The United Kingdom prevents a possible German invasion.

I tweeted this anniversary:

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Britain, at least according to historians (July 10-Oct. 31, 1940). "Never was so much owed by so many to so few." pic.twitter.com/ucdc6Ta7YH

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 31, 2020

• 1941 – After 14 years of work, Mount Rushmore is completed.

All four figures on the monument have been canceled:

 

• 1956 – Hungarian Revolution of 1956: A Revolutionary Headquarters is established in Hungary. Following Imre Nagy’s announcement of October 30, banned non-Communist political parties are reformed, and the MDP is replaced by the MSZMP. József Mindszenty is released from prison. The Soviet Politburo makes the decision to crush the Revolution.
• 1961 – In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin‘s body is removed from the Lenin’s Mausoleum, also known as the Lenin Tomb.

Stalin is visible no more, but was buried by the Kremlin wall. Sadly, I never saw him, and didn’t see Lenin, but I did see the embalmed Mao (if it’s real) when I visited Beijing. Here’s what Stalin used to look like:

• 1984 – Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated by two Sikh security guards. Riots break out in New Delhi and other cities and around 3,000 Sikhs are killed.
• 1999 – Yachtsman Jesse Martin returns to Melbourne after 11 months of circumnavigating the world, solo, non-stop and unassisted.
• 2011 – The global population of humans reaches seven billion. This day is now recognized by the United Nations as the Day of Seven Billion.

Notables born on this day include:

• 1632 – Johannes Vermeer, Dutch painter (d. 1675)

He was one of the greatest painters of all time, but more on that later today. Here’s a lovely Vermeer avec chat (I know someone is going to tell me it’s manipulated):

• 1638 – Meindert Hobbema, Dutch painter (d. 1709)
• 1795 – John Keats, English poet (d. 1821)
• 1835 – Adolf von Baeyer, German chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1917)
• 1887 – Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese general and politician, 1st President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) (d. 1975)
• 1896 – Ethel Waters, American singer and actress (d. 1977)
• 1920 – Helmut Newton, German-Australian photographer (d. 2004)
• 1931 – Dan Rather, American journalist
• 1950 – John Candy, Canadian actor, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1994)
• 1950 – Jane Pauley, American journalist
• 1961 – Peter Jackson, New Zealand actor, director, producer, and screenwriter

Those who croaked on October 31 include:

• 1517 – Fra Bartolomeo, Italian artist (b. 1472)
• 1918 – Egon Schiele, Austrian painter (b. 1890)

Schiele also has a claim to be one of the greatest painters of all time, though he died of the “Spanish flu” at 28.  I was blown away when I saw his paintings in the pigment in Vienna. Here’s a lovely self portrait

• 1926 – Harry Houdini, American magician and stuntman (b. 1874)

Here’s Houdini’s grave in Queens. His wife’s Catholic family wouldn’t let her be buried next to Harry, as he lies in a Jewish cemetery (his birth name was Erik Weisz). Here’s his grave marker:

• 1984 – Indira Gandhi, Indian politician, 3rd Prime Minister of India (b. 1917)
• 1988 – John Houseman, Romanian-born American actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1902)

Here’s Houseman in the role that Boomers know best: as Professor Kingsfield in the movie “The Paper Chase”:

• 1993 – Federico Fellini, Italian director and screenwriter (b. 1920)
• 1993 – River Phoenix, American actor and singer (b. 1970)
• 1995 – Rosalind Cash, American actress and singer (b. 1938)
• 2008 – Studs Terkel, American historian and author (b. 1912)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is greedy for knowledge:

Hili: I wonder when this pandemic will end.

A: We would all like to know.

Hili: Yes, but I like to know everything first.

Hili: Ciekawa jestem kiedy ta pandemia się skończy?

Ja: Wszyscy chcielibyśmy to wiedzieć.

Hili: Tak, ale ja lubię wiedzieć pierwsza.

And here’s little Kulka, who no longer counts as a kitten:

From Su:

Two Halloween memes from Jesus of the Day:

and. . .

From Titania. I’ve already seen this kind of tut-tutting about the divisiveness of the French government as if to excuse religiously motivated murder:

As @UK_CAGE rightly points out – until we put an end to free speech, Easter worshippers will continue to be subjected to mostly peaceful massacres by austere religious scholars. https://t.co/9gLtCbTU2Q

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) October 29, 2020

Tweets from Matthew. First, a d*g that knows how to treat a cat right:

Dog does the sweetest thing for his cat brother when he gets tired from their hike 💕 pic.twitter.com/D9NqWm1T3C

— The Dodo (@dodo) October 12, 2020

Humans couldn’t do this, ergo tapirs are denser than we are:

Remarkably, tapirs run under the water on the bottom, a bit like hippos do. Seen here in the Prata River, Brazil. pic.twitter.com/AviKXSKngZ

— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) October 30, 2020

A poor Moggy of Size. The drawer should have been opened a bit more:

Was this operation elegant? No.
But was it successful? Also no. pic.twitter.com/YubK11yVbO

— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) October 30, 2020

Why such different paths to wind up in the same place? Matthew thinks it’s the wind, and I don’t know. But the fact that this bird can go a bazillion km and wind up in the same place each time is astounding:

See the track of one of the Godwits that we put a satellite tracker on last year, it has finished its trip around the world for this year, now time to rest up, until it does it all again in March next year pic.twitter.com/utzHAb7Zd4

— miranda trust (@miranda_trust) October 22, 2020

I’d suggest that you watch the short video about this remarkable convergent evolution:

For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it? https://t.co/6yMVv3XlUX pic.twitter.com/h0bn3GlZ2y

— Eons (@EonsShow) October 28, 2020

Matthew tweeted a photo of a man born in 1749!

He was 40 when the French revolution happened. https://t.co/k3w3igUt22

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) October 29, 2020

Another tweet from Matthew. It has not only a poem, but video of lovely flight formations. The species is the pink-footed goose, Anser brachyrhynchus.

“Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.”

The Fall of Rome – W H Auden https://t.co/iHQizJ6uYh

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) October 29, 2020