Sunday: Hili dialogue

November 15, 2020 • 6:30 am

It’s the Sabbath for all goyische kats: Sunday, November 15, 2020: National Raisin Bran Day.  It’s also National Spicy Hermit Cookie Day, National Bundt Day, and National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day.  Finally, it’s the Day of the German-speaking Community of Belgium.  If you’re wondering what hermit cookies are, they are spicy molasses/brown sugar cookies with ginger, nutmeg, and raisins; the cookie equivalent of Indian pudding. They’re terrific, and you can find a recipe here.

News of the day:

In the main news, Franco is still dead and Trump is refusing to concede. As CNN reports, this is causing an awkward situation, as a transition is required by law to be planned for. One important issue is the pandemic: Biden’s team needs to know what plans the Trump administration has made for distributed a forthcoming vaccine so the distribution can go smoothly. But sorry, Jake, this is the Unhinged Baby Authoritarian in charge, and his people won’t call Biden’s people.

Yesterday thousands of Trump supporters descended on Washington, D.C. to hold a pro-Trump rally.  The demonstration was not entirely peaceful: some people brought illegal guns, there were clashes with police, and one person was stabbed. Trump did a drive-by to put oil in the flames.  The NYT:

On Twitter, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, offered an exaggerated assessment of the event, called the Million MAGA March, claiming that a million supporters had turned out.

Accounts on the ground suggested that her estimate was wildly inflated.

“It’s not like the Fourth of July or anything,” said a police officer who was stationed near Freedom Plaza at 13th and G Streets. He declined to give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “But yeah,” he added, “there’s a crowd down there.”

A rare victory for freedom of expression. After what was apparently a single complaint on twitter, the chain store Target removed both Abigail Shrier’s and Debra Soh’s books about the dangers of uncritical catering to “gender dysphoria” in young people. Now, after pushback from others, including a media inquiry, the store restored both books to their inventory. It is possible to reverse creeping Wokeness!

Amidst the wokery of the New York Times, which is really getting to me, this blind pig finds an occasional acorn. One is this story about the pets “owned” by American Presidents.  Teddy Roosevelt had a badger and a one-legged rooster, Calvin Coolidge had a raccoon, Herbert Hoover had a possum, and the Kennedys had three ponies. Here’s Rebecca, the Coolidge’s “White House raccoon”:

Library of Congress

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 245,460, a big increase of about 1,200 from yesterday’s figure. The world death toll is 1,319,175, an increase of about 8,000 over yesterday’s report.

Stuff that happened on November 15 includes:

  • 1532 – Commanded by Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conquistadors under Hernando de Soto meet Inca Empire leader Atahualpa for the first time outside Cajamarca, arranging a meeting on the city plaza the following day.
  • 1533 – Francisco Pizarro arrives in Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire.
  • 1806 – Pike Expedition: Lieutenant Zebulon Pike sees a distant mountain peak while near the Colorado foothills of the Rocky Mountains. (It is later named Pikes Peak.)

Pike didn’t climb the mountain, which stands out prominently from parts of Colorado; it’s 4302 m (14,115) tall.

An account of his death (he played for the Canton Professionals):

However, tragedy struck near the end of the 1914 season when Turner was severely injured during a game against Parratt and the Akron Indians. While making a tackle on Akron’s Joe Collins, Turner’s back was fractured and his spinal cord was completely severed. According to Canton manager Jack Cusack, who was at Turner’s bedside when he died, his last words were “I know I must go,” he said, “but I’m satisfied, for we beat Peggy Parratt.” Canton won the game 6–0.

  • 1920 – First assembly of the League of Nations is held in Geneva, Switzerland.
  • 1939 – In Washington, D.C., US President Franklin D. Roosevelt lays the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial.
  • 1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal ends in a decisive Allied victory.
  • 1943 – The Holocaust: German SS leader Heinrich Himmler orders that Gypsies are to be put “on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps”.
  • 1949 – Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte are executed for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi.

Here’s a photo of those accused in Gandhi’s assassination:

Standing (L to R): Shankar Kistaiya, Gopal Godse, Madan Lal Pahwa, Digambar Ramchandra Badge. Seated (L to R): Narayan Apte, Vinayak D. Savarkar, Nathuram Godse, Vishnu Karkare.

All save Savarkar were found guilty, but only Godse and Apte were executed (by hanging):

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1708 – William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, English soldier and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1778)
  • 1738 – William Herschel, German-English astronomer and composer (d. 1822)
  • 1874 – August Krogh, Danish zoologist and physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1949)
  • 1882 – Felix Frankfurter, Austrian-American lawyer and jurist (d. 1965)
  • 1887 – Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter and educator (d. 1986)

Here’s O’Keeffe with her Siamese kitten. Some day someone must explain to me why Siamese cats are so popular among artists:

  • 1932 – Petula Clark, English singer-songwriter and actress.

Clark is 88 today, and still with us. Here’s a medley of her hits that she performed at the BBC in 1971:

  • 1932 – Alvin Plantinga, American philosopher, author, and academic. [JAC: The fact that Plantinga is honored as both a theologian and philosopher, is gainfully employed, and has won prizes, shows that life is unfair; indeed that there is no God, for the race has gone to the muddled.]

Those who became deceased people on November 15 include:

  • 1594 – Martin Frobisher, English seaman and explorer
  • 1917 – Émile Durkheim, French sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher (b. 1858)
  • 1949 – Nathuram Godse, Indian assassin of Mahatma Gandhi (b. 1910)

The right-wing, ruling party of India, the BJP, has in recent years tried to celebrate Godse. What a bunch of morons!

  • 1954 – Lionel Barrymore, American actor, singer, director, and screenwriter (b. 1878)
  • 1958 – Tyrone Power, American actor, singer, and producer (b. 1914)
  • 1978 – Margaret Mead, American anthropologist and author (b. 1901)
  • 1998 – Stokely Carmichael, Trinidadian-American activist (b. 1941)
  • 2007 – Joe Nuxhall, American baseball player and sportscaster (b. 1928)

Nuxhall was the youngest player ever to appear in a Major League Baseball game, pitching 2/3 of an inning in 1944, when he was slightly less than 16 years old. As he said about his rapid transition from high school to the Big Leagues, Nuxhall said, “I was pitching against seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders, kids 13 and 14 years old. . . All of a sudden, I look up and there’s Stan Musial and the likes. It was a very scary situation.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgrzata explains Hili’s latest utterance: “Hili has no illusions about life in general so she wants to have it nicer in particular, i.e., to get more milk.”

Hili: I have no illusions.
A: Neither do I.
Hili: Then pour me some more milk.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie mam złudzeń.
Ja: Ja też nie.
Hili: To nalej jeszcze trochę mleka.

Little Kulka is sleeping on the windowsill:

From Stash Krod:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Su:

A tweet from newsman Dan Rather:

From Barry. You can read more about the trilobite beetle and its bizarre sexual dimorphism here.

From reader Simon, who says, “If there’s prejudice in chameleons, it’s not based on skin color.” Look at the speed of that color change and how it matches each segment of the climb! (n.b., when I put this on twitter, somebody commented that the video was fake and that these reptiles don’t change color that fast. Buyer beware!)

From reader Ken, who says, “Can it get any more petty than this?” The “WH” is, of course, the White House.

Tweets from Matthew.  First, a squirrel hits the jackpot!

What your plants do when you’re not watching:

This curious creature is an Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus). I’ve seen many videos of them approaching humans. Sound up.

Nevertheless, she persisted.  Sound up.

 

31 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I’ve got it:

    The sitting President will fire the President-elect. It’s not written down anywhere that it isn’t allowed!

    Reply

    1. Republicans are afraid that DT might run again? (Another trial balloon.) What will they do if he says ’I’m telling my military not to let Biden in?’

      There are no “checks and balances.”

      Reply

  2. One important issue is the pandemic: Biden’s team needs to know what plans the Trump administration has made for distributed a forthcoming vaccine so the distribution can go smoothly.

    They don’t need the president eject’s cooperation to figure that one out. The answer is none.

    Reply

  3. The plant video is marvelous. These are all members of the family Marantaceae, the “prayer plants”, so-called because they have a joint below each leaf which rotates the leaf to a vertical position during the night and moves it back to a horizontal orientation during the day.

    Reply

  4. The Trumpers said a million person march on Washington but just like all his exaggerations, there were about 10 thousand. I believe there was a concession twitter. Something like – he won and the election was rigged.

    Reply

    1. If there were a million Trump supporters there, I’ll eat their MAGA hats.

      Team Trumpis exaggerating as badly as about this as it did about the size of his inauguration crowd and the size of his superspreader campaign event in Tulsa.

      Reply

        1. Many are calling this a step in Trump’s transition as supposedly it’s the first time he’s actually said that Biden won. I’m afraid it’s the best we’re going to get but it sort of sounds like he may be giving up the fight.

          Reply

  5. Trump is refusing to concede. As CNN reports, this is causing an awkward situation, as a transition is required by law to be planned for.

    It’s one thing for the petulant child residing in the White House to refuse to invite Biden for the traditional post-election visit to the Oval Office (as Obama invited him, and as each of his predecessors invited their successors, however disappointed they may have been in the election result and however bitterly contested the campaign that preceded it). It’s another thing entirely for Trump to deny Biden’s transition team access to the funds and office space earmarked for the transition, and to block Biden personally from receiving the daily presidential intelligence briefing. That is the height of irresponsibility on Trump’s part and a demonstration of his abject lack of patriotism.

    Reply

    1. As someone joked on BBC Radio 4, the fact that Biden isn’t reading the daily intelligence briefings means that he’s receiving the same level of information as Trump…

      Reply

    2. I was just coming to the comments to make this point. I don’t need to hear Trump personally concede but the government needs to move forward.

      It’s Trump appointee Emily Murphy as head of General Services Administration who has the authority to make the call. It would give funds, office space and access to briefings, etc.

      It’s suspected she’s getting marching orders from Trump, of course. But she could break from Trump and sign the order at anytime.

      Eventually this stupid game will come to an end. Trump is trying to hang on to power but he’ll fail to do so. It’s just a matter how much damage he does on the way out the door.

      Reply

  9. On Twitter, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, offered an exaggerated assessment of the event, called the Million MAGA March, claiming that a million supporters had turned out.

    Oh, we had the same situation in August in Berlin when Corona deniers demonstrated. The organizers spoke of 800,000, 1.3 million or even 3 to 5 million participants. In the end it were about 17.000 protestors.

    These people (In Berlin or Washington) live in their own world of denial. They cannot bear the truth.

    Reply

    1. 17,000 was probably the number attending, and the higher figures the estimates of how many people they spread the disease to as a result…

      Reply

  10. Herbert Hoover’s son Allan had a pair of alligators at HH’s house at 2300 S St while he was Secy Commerce (now the Burmese Embassy, and not “South” St as this account states, probably a result of some auto-correct).

    Anyway, there’s an extensive list of other presidential pets at the tab on this linked page incl sheep grazing the WH lawn under Woodrow Wilson. Unlike the current one, very occupant of the WH has had at least one (even WH Harrison!), save two of them, neither of whom most people would be able to name even if given clues.

    From the complete list you also find that JQ Adams also had an alligator, that did live @ the WH. And given the bias here, particular attention should be paid to Martin van Buren’s entry. (Just sayin…).

    Reply

  14. 1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal ends in a decisive Allied victory.

    I am curious about the source of this statement. The Japanese on Guadalcanal were not wiped out, nor did they surrender. In fact the Allies were quite surprised when in February 1943 they discovered that the Japanese had evacuated all their forces.

    At dawn on 8 February, the U.S. Army forces on both coasts resumed their advances, encountering only a few sick and dying Japanese soldiers. Patch now realized that the Tokyo Express runs over the last week were evacuation, not reinforcement missions. At 16:50 on 9 February, the two American forces met on the west coast at the village of Tenaro. Patch sent a message to Halsey stating, “Total and complete defeat of Japanese forces on Guadalcanal effected 16:25 today…the Tokyo Express no longer has a terminus on Guadalcanal.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ke

    Reply

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