Friday: Hili dialogue

November 27, 2020 • 6:30 am

Are you all sated from Thanksgiving feasting? Are you going to live on turkey sandwiches for the next week? I won’t, but many will: it’s the day after Thanksgiving, i.e., November 27, 2020, appropriately, National Leftovers Day.  It’s also National Bavarian Cream Pie Day, National Craft Jerky Day, Maize Day (what you call “corn”), Turtle Adoption Day, and Fur Free Friday. In the UK, it’s Lancashire Day, commemorating “the day in 1295 when Lancashire first sent representatives to Parliament, to attend the Model Parliament of King Edward I. Finally, it’s the infamous Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when Christmas shopping begins in earnest and there are supposedly great bargains to be had.

News of the Day: At last: in a real Q&A session with the press, President-eject Trump said that if the Electoral College makes Biden the winner—as it will—he, Trump, will step down, though he added he may never conced the election. He’s still arguing that he won!

Maureen Dowd, a diehard Democratic columnist at the New York Times, has turned her column over to her Trump-loving brother (seriously), who writes a loving elegy for Trump’s presidency in the column, “Oh, brother! Tears for Trump.” If you want to see what many on the Dark Side think, read it. (h/t Enrico)

Also at the NYT, where the pundits and analysts are out in force, columnist Bill Wilkinson has a lock on why Trump did so well:

However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.

. . . [Democrats] allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.

Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them.

From the Guardian: The Austrian village with the name shown in the picture below has had it, and has finally changed its old name, which dates to the 11th century, to Fugging, which takes effect January 1. I’m sure the 100 inhabitants will be much relieved, and tourism will plummet. (h/t Jez).

A good exercise in journalistic Wokeism is a NYT interactive article called The Myth of North America, in One Painting (The painting is “The Death of General Wolfe“, painted by Benjamin West in 1770).  The article bloviates on and on and on to show how the painting fictionalizes history, shoehorning history into a classical Procrustean bed which is okay, but the real point of the article is for the author to preen by calling out colonialism at the end.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 263,336, an increase of about 1,200 from yesterday’s figure.  The world death toll is 1,439,587, a big increase of about 11,000 over yesterday’s report. 

Stuff that happened on November 27 includes:

  • 602 – Emperor Maurice is forced to watch his five sons be executed before being beheaded himself.
  • 1809 – The Berners Street hoax was perpetrated by Theodore Hook in the City of Westminster, London.

This one you have to look up!

Here’s the will, and you can find the English translation on the Nobel Prize site:

  • 1896 – Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss is first performed.
  • 1924 – In New York City, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is held.
  • 1978 – In San Francisco, city mayor George Moscone and openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk are assassinated by former supervisor Dan White.
  • 1999 – The centre-left Labour Party takes control of the New Zealand government with leader Helen Clark becoming the first elected female Prime Minister in New Zealand’s history.
  • 2006 – The House of Commons of Canada approves a motion introduced by Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognizing the Québécois as a nation within Canada.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1701 – Anders Celsius, Swedish astronomer, physicist, and mathematician (d. 1744)
  • 1874 – Chaim Weizmann, Belarusian-Israeli chemist and politician, 1st President of Israel (d. 1952)
  • 1903 – Lars Onsager, Norwegian-American chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1976)

Onsager, who shared a bathroom with me when I was a grad student at Rockefeller University (he was visiting), got me booted out of the dorms because he complained that I had a woman in my room. Well, I could complain that he had false teeth, which he left in a glass in the bathroom. (UGH!)

  • 1909 – James Agee, American novelist, screenwriter, and critic (d. 1955)
  • 1917 – Buffalo Bob Smith, American actor and television host (d. 1998)
  • 1940 – Bruce Lee, American-Chinese actor, martial artist, and screenwriter (d. 1973)
  • 1942 – Jimi Hendrix, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 1970)

Here’s The Jimi Hendrix experience performing “Foxy Lady” in Maui in 1970, the year he died:

Here’s Caroline with her dad; the caption is from Wikipedia:

Caroline with her father aboard the yacht Honey Fitz off the coast of Hyannis, Massachusetts at age five, August 25, 1963.

Those who decamped from life on November 27 include:

  • 1852 – Ada Lovelace, English mathematician and computer scientist (b. 1815)

Here’s a daguerrotype of Lovelace in 1843. Often seen as the first computer programmer, she died at only 36 of uterine cancer:

  • 1934 – Baby Face Nelson, American criminal (b. 1908)
  • 1975 – Ross McWhirter, English author and activist, co-founded the Guinness Book of Records (b. 1925)
  • 1978 – Harvey Milk, American lieutenant and politician (b. 1930)
  • 1978 – George Moscone, American lawyer and politician, 37th Mayor of San Francisco (b. 1929)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are discussing the latter’s new book, What Israeli Soldiers are Doing to Palestinian Children (in Polish):

Hili: I’m curious who will buy your new book?
A: I’m curious as well, very much so.
In Polish:
Hili: Ciekawa jestem kto będzie kupował twoją nową książkę?
Ja: Też jestem ciekaw, nawet bardzo.
And here’s Hili with Andrzej’s earlier (2019) book, Atheist, which explains why he’s a nonbeliever:

Caption: “Hili is still recommending this.”

In Polish: Hili nadal poleca:

And here’s Kitten Kulka, who may well be related to Hili (photo by Paula R.):

From Facebook:

From The Fabulous Weird Trotters. Look at the expression on that cat’s face!

From Atheist Views:

Rocky the saw-whet owl, a stowaway in the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, was rehabbed for a short while, fed and hydrated, and then successfully released, as shown below:

From Barry: a humiliating cat fail:

Also from Barry—an even more humiliating squirrel fail:

Tweets from Matthew. I don’t know where he dug this first one up, but it’s a corker. The song is dreadful and I’m not that keen on the video (the full one is on Facebook), but the story is great.

Another fantastic cake:

This is lovely, and I’m glad the marmoset (how small it is!) didn’t hurt the insect:

As Matthew says of this commuting pigeon, “Hard to work out why it is doing this and how it learned it.”

I hope some of the readers who send in astronomy photos will give us a view of this:

 

44 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “Good people don’t go to heaven. Only Christians.”

    There is such a “neener, neener, neener” quality to Christianity.

    Repulsive.

    L

    Reply

  2. The Austrian village with the name shown in the picture below has had it, and has finally changed its old name, which dates to the 11th century, to Fugging, which takes effect January 1. I’m sure the 100 inhabitants will be much relieved, and tourism will plummet.

    So no longer a honeymoon destination?

    Who are the city fathers who changed the name — the same folks from Reinhardt & Co. publishing who edited Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead?

    Reply

    1. I would have thought they missed the opportunity to cash in on the name. They could open a theme park – Fucking World…

      Reply

        1. Nice map.

          How far is it from Cock Bridge to Tickle Cock Bridge?

          Asking on behalf of an old high school girlfriend.

          Reply

        2. I used to live near a village called Pratts Bottom, which was only a stone’s throw from Badgers Mount. Shame they’re not in the top 50.

          Reply

      2. Somewhere I have a terrific postcard picture from there, from the rail station with an absolutely fiery (hellfire!) sunset sky.

        The sign says ‘Hell – gods expedition’.

        I think the last word is exactly that spelling. I’d like to think that ‘the almighty’ went to sort out Lucifer.

        But maybe it is the sign for the place to get your goods expedited by train.

        Reply

      3. A place in Newfoundland is called ‘Paradise’, and I was intending to suggest pairing with that instead.

        But then I remembered that province to have also towns called ‘Come By Chance’ and ‘Dildo’.

        Reply

        1. When I worked as a bellman in Lancaster County, we had great fun explaining to the city slicker tourists that to get to Paradise, you had to go through Blue Ball and Intercourse.

          Reply

  3. “The painting is “The Death of General Wolfe“, painted by Benjamin West in 1770”

    The link leads to the Guardian article on Fuc… ging 😉

    Reply

    1. There is a life-sized memorial in the south transept of St.Paul’s cathedral to Wolfe with him falling off his horse. I bet Wren would have hated all the interior fixtures & memorials, ruining his design! He made North America anglophone I suppose… 😬

      Berners St hoax supposedly origin of the phrase “hook it” for scarpering. That would make a great film.

      Reply

  5. The cause of Trump fame can be seen every day. It’s the media – print, television, on line, you name it. For days now he has done nothing, just golf and crying in his pepsi. Yet what do you see, just Trump and more Trump. The media is addicted to this idiot and apparently so is everyone else.

    Reply

  6. The answer to Matthew’s question may be answered by what I’ve seen many times on The London Underground. Pigeons feeding on subsurface platforms will hop on trains to look for crumbs dropped by travellers. They usually hop off before the doors close but sometimes they will wait, to everyone’s anxiety and/or amusement, then hop off at the next stop. Whether any work the whole line needs looking into.

    Reply

  7. Italian singer Adriano Celentano released a song in the 70s with nonsense lyrics meant to sound like American English, apparently to prove Italians would like any English song. It was a hit …

    Sounds like Blondie-manqué to me:

    Reply

  8. Will Wilkinson’s NYT op-ed on why almost half of Americans voted for Trump is based on an economic interpretation. He argues that “Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.” I think it is much too early in election analysis to say that the economy was the defining issue for Trump voters. After all, Trump barely mentioned the economy on the campaign trail. His underlying message was cultural. He claimed that he spoke for those who didn’t like the way America is changing. Evangelicals and the religious in general counted on his as a buttress against the growing secularism. Wilkinson himself notes that the growth of entrenched partisanship played a significant role in voting patterns. It is unclear as to the extent that the attitude of the two parties regarding the virus and the economy influenced voting behavior.

    It will takes months or years, if at all, for any consensus to emerge from scholars as to the motivations of the Trump voters. The primary reason people do something can change from moment to moment. It is too simplistic to identify a single reason, such as the economy or race, as to why people voted for a certain candidate. However, we can say this for sure about the Trump voters: the preservation of democracy and the rule of law were not on their list of priorities.

    Reply

    1. Here are a couple of hints for the scholars. Fox news and Fox news. Let them name anytime in past history when one complete television network pushed the propaganda for one candidate all day and every day for years. They still continue with the crimes committed by the democratic fraud election machine. It is relentless and never before have we seen anything like it. Surprised that Trump got so many votes are they? I guess we have to have more complicated reasons.

      Reply

    2. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, religion was unimportant. Trump, who might well be an atheist himself, allied himself with Evangelicals in a marriage of convenience.

      Reply

  9. “Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 263,336, an increase of about 1,200 from yesterday’s figure. ”

    The previous two days had about 2200 and 2300 deaths reported, and 1300 Thurs. on Worldometer.

    Except for the holiday existing, this would have been the first week for months when deaths would have been over 2000 all of Tuesday to Friday.

    Deaths are the important number, population taken into account. But daily its reports jump around, predictably lower on Sat, Sun, Mon.

    Probably the best figure to see the direction and rate is just deaths/week

    (/million, if comparing different places)

    using Wed. to Tues. figure. But that takes digging and arithmetic.

    Reply

  12. Rocky gave the impression of sensing that it was the last time she would be able to be this close to a human, and lingering a bit to save the memory.

    Reply

  14. One of my personal highlights was seeing Jimi Hendrix perform at Mile High Stadium in Denver in the summer of 1969. He left too soon.

    Reply

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