Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

December 15, 2020 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a chilly Tuesday, December 15, 2020: National Lemon Cupcake Day as well as National Gingerbread Latte Day, a drink that, like anchovy pizza, has degraded the human palate. It’s also National Cupcake Day, International Tea Day, Zamenhof Day for the (International Esperanto Community), and Bill of Rights Day, celebrating the day in 1791 when Virginia ratified the first ten amendments to the Constitution, meeting the quorum that made them law. But it’s also Cat Herders’ Day, giving me the chance to show once again the very best commercial ever made (this was shown during a Superbowl):

It’s the ninth anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens, too (see below).

Wine of the day:  Yesterday I cooked myself a small strip steak (very rare, of course) and had it with rice,  fresh tomatoes and green peppers, washing it all down with this Coteaux du Languedoc. a little-known red wine that, like this bottle, can be excellent and not too expensive.  At ten years old, this one showed very well and, I expect, could improve for another few years.

News of the day:

Letter of the day: I awoke this morning to find this email from “Chaos G”, as well as several other emails of this ilk. You can’t win with science and religion, for this chowderhead tells me that everyone knew all along they were incompatible:

Hey Dumb Ass,

Just saw your article regarding war between science and Religion.  Of course, there is a war between the 2, there always has been.  Where has your dumb ass been?  You need to find something better to do…

Kvetch of the week: As the New Woke Times converges to Huffington Post, we see its editorial pages increasingly filled with personal “feels” like this ridiculous animation, floating the idea that the writer, longing mightily for the pre-covid times, nevertheless suggests that maybe our pandemic lockdown is the more desirable state. Oy! (click on screenshot). And get the bit in the title, “Also, I think I’m losing my mind.” That is ripped right from the pages of HuffPost.

Yesterday the Electoral College officially made Joe Biden the next President of the U.S., and Kamala Harris the next Vice-President. The electoral vote for Biden was, as I predicted before anyone else, 306, well over the 270 needed to win. Where is my kudos?

Will Trump now concede? In late November he said he’d leave office if Biden won the Electoral College vote, as did a lot of his advisors, but some Trump administration officials are now backing off. The Washington Post writes about one of them:

By Monday morning, [yesterday] White House senior adviser Stephen Miller suggested the challenges could continue until President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

“The only date in the Constitution is Jan. 20,” Miller told Fox News. “So we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election.”

Right the wrong my furry tuchas! Trump is toast. But he keeps beating the drum, as he did yesterday:

The coronavirus vaccine has made its way across the country, and shots are already being administered. New York got the first one yesterday, and Illinois will see the jabs begin tomorrow. What’s sad is to think about all those people in the ICU, dying at a rate of one a minute, who can’t be helped as, elsewhere in the same hospitals, people are being immunized. Still, I tweeted this:

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 301,006, an increase of about 1,700 from yesterday’s figure. America passed 300,000 total dead yesterday, and the deaths occurred at a rate of 1.2 per minute. The world death toll is 1,630,029, an increase of about 9,800 over yesterday’s report—about 6.8 people dying per minute.

Stuff that happened on December 15 includes:

This may be Sitting Bull, but there’s some controversy about the identity of the subject:

Here’s a video of the jubilation at the time:

Here’s the list of the highest-grossing films adjusted to 2019 dollars (from Wikipedia):

  • 1941 – The Holocaust in Ukraine: German troops murder over 15,000 Jews at Drobytsky Yar, a ravine southeast of the city of Kharkiv.
  • 1944 – World War II: a single-engine UC-64A Norseman aeroplane carrying United States Army Air Forces Major Glenn Miller is lost in a flight over the English Channel.
  • 1961 – Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death after being found guilty by an Israeli court of 15 criminal charges, including charges of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership of an outlawed organization.

Here’s the phony passport that Eichmann, under the name “Ricardo Klement”, entered Argentina in 1950. The Mossad, in a daring operation, nabbed him ten years later and brought him to Israel:

  • 1965 – Project Gemini: Gemini 6A, crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford, is launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Four orbits later, it achieves the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7.
  • 1973 – The American Psychiatric Association votes 13–0 to remove homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders, the DSM-II.
  • 1978 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter announces that the United States will recognize the People’s Republic of China and sever diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
  • 1981 – A suicide car bombing targeting the Iraqi embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, levels the embassy and kills 61 people, including Iraq’s ambassador to Lebanon. The attack is considered the first modern suicide bombing.
  • 2001 – The Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens after 11 years and $27,000,000 spent to stabilize it, without fixing its famous lean.

It’s now supposed to be stable for another 300 years. The angle of lean is only 4 degrees, but it looks bigger, doesn’t it?

Notables born on this day include:

  • AD 37 – Nero, Roman emperor (d. 68)
  • 1859 – L. L. Zamenhof, Polish linguist and ophthalmologist, created Esperanto (d. 1917) [see above]
  • 1860 – Niels Ryberg Finsen, Faroese-Danish physician and educator, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1904
  • 1892 – J. Paul Getty, American-English businessman and art collector, founded Getty Oil (d. 1976)
  • 1916 – Maurice Wilkins, New Zealand-English physicist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
  • 1919 – Max Yasgur, American dairy farmer and host of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair (d. 1973)

Here’s Yasgur with the debris of Woodstock:

Max and Miriam Yasgur on their land after the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. (Photo By Bill Eppridge/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
  • 1923 – Freeman Dyson, English-American physicist and mathematician (d. 2020)
  • 1981 – Michelle Dockery, English actress

Who doesn’t love Lady Mary?

Credit: Carnival Films

Those who entered oblivion on December 15 include:

Vermeer of course drew no cats, but he was one of the greatest painters of all time. Here’s “The Geographer” (1668-69):

  • 1683 – Izaak Walton, English author (b. 1593)
  • 1890 – Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota tribal chief (b. 1831)
  • 1943 – Fats Waller, American singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1904)
  • 1944 – Glenn Miller, American bandleader and composer (b. 1904)
  • 1958 – Wolfgang Pauli, Austrian-Swiss physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1900)
  • 1966 – Walt Disney, American animator, director, producer, and screenwriter, co-founded The Walt Disney Company (b. 1901)
  • 2009 – Oral Roberts, American evangelist, founded the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association (b. 1918)
  • 2011 – Christopher Hitchens, English-American essayist, literary critic, and journalist (b. 1949)

This is my favorite Hitchens video, and you must watch it if you haven’t. It’s his 2006 defense of free speech at the University of Toronto’s Hart House Debating Club. The topic? “Be it resolved: Freedom of speech includes the freedom to hate.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili insults Andrzej:

Hili: People are ignoramuses.
A: That’s true, but why are you saying this?
Hili: Exactly: even you didn’t know this.
In Polish:
Hili: Ludzie są ignorantami.
Ja: To prawda, ale dlaczego to mówisz?
Hili: No właśnie, nawet tego nie wiesz.

And in nearby Wloclawek, teenager Mietek faces the week:

Mietek: A busy Monday.

In Polish: Pracowity poniedziałek

From Bruce. This is a most excellent meme, because I have this problem constantly. I finally put my spatula in a deeper drawer:

From Michael, some really, really bad ancient pictures of cats. When will they ever learn?

And a Christmas cat meme from Barb:

A tweet from Titania. Et tu, Hogarth? Hogarth??

From cesar. Why did the cat swat the horse?

Tweets from Matthew. Sound up for sure on this one, as their disputation is hilarious.

And another tweet from the same source:

I like some of these names!

All right; now I have to go to Switzerland and take this ride:

35 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)”

    1. It is not a Bordeaux but a Coteaux du Languedoc, the region around Montpellier. Different region, different climate, different soil. 😉

      1. In a Bordeaux style bottle, I didn’t look further at the AOC (not one I recognized). And the label is quite faux-Bordeaux. Those are my excuses. 🙂 But I stand behind my comment on Eric Solomon. And it’s no surprise he’s bringing in quality Languedoc wine.

  2. Yes the creation of these deliverable vaccines in such a short time is truly amazing. I would like for someone to do a chronology of the basic research and pieces of technology development over the past twenty years or perhaps more that made this event possible. I expect that the first mrna grant proposals did not make the cut in the grant peer review process and would like to know when that was and how that work was funded. Certainly the human genome project and associated developments of the 90’s were the seed of allowing the chinese to so quickly sequence the sars cov2 genome. Then of course there are the delivery systems that get the mrna into the body and cells. This was a huge university/institute/government/industry engineering achievement at the end of the day. It would be nice to see all of the basic science research efforts and the timeline and funding sources for that research that made this achievement possible.

    1. We recently had a presentation on a simple, low-cost ventilator invented by the University of Minnesota and built by the company I work for (Boston Scientific). It went from initial emergency use submission to approval and manufacture in 30 days.

      Coventor:

      https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/fda-authorizes-first-its-kind-low-cost-ventilator-developed-university-minnesota#:~:text=News%20Release-,FDA%20authorizes%20first%2Dof%2Dits%2Dkind%2C%20low%2D,developed%20by%20University%20of%20Minnesota&text=U%20of%20M%20researchers%20developed,with%20few%20to%20no%20ventilators.

    2. Don’t forget the industrial engineers, other engineers, tech writers, etc. that make the product go from an idea to a viable, labeled, distributed product. Especially with drugs and vaccines, this is a monumental task.

  3. The angle of lean is only 4 degrees, but it looks bigger, doesn’t it?

    I was so unconvinced that I put it into Photos and “corrected” the tilt. The link below shows the photo after I added a 5 degree lean the other way. It still doesn’t look straight but, according to the guidelines that Photos puts in, it is about as straight as I can get it. The perspective makes it more tricky as does the fact that the tower seems to have a slight banana shape to it.

    https://sincereflatteryblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/the_leaning_tower_of_pisa_sb.jpeg-1200×1828.jpg.jpeg

    2. If it’s leaning (and they didn’t build a counter-camber into it (extremely doubtful)), then it has to have a curve to it — even if very slight.

  4. I tweeted this:

    It’s less than eleven months from when the first Covid-19 patient was diagnosed in the U.S. until we’re receiving vaccine. A truly remarkable achievement by any standard.

    2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine coming for sure. The question will be which 3 people to give it to. Maybe lead from Pfizer, lead from Moderna, lead from USG’s Operation Warp Speed?

    1. What about Sarah Gilbert of Oxford? For 15 years she has been pioneering the Oxford process of designing vaccines to induce T cell responses to antigens. She was able to adapt her process to Covid-19 virtually overnight.

    2. It’s not impossible that six prizes for this could be awarded, if the Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine Committees work together. There is at least one person who is a member of both committees.

  5. Glenn Miller, the famous band leader was born in the same town I am from. The little house where he was born is still there, kind of a museum piece.

  6. Yeah, I am going to go ahead and say that I doubt the World’s appreciation for Hogarth is in any way due to, or affected by, the actions of the prigs at The Cartoon Museum.

  7. Ok, so to have a top grossing movie, it better be an epic sci fi yarn involving lots of cgi fight scenes, but also the main characters are doomed lovers who are thrust into a war featuring good vs evil.

  9. The cat herding commercial was a good one! There are lots of fairly subtle details. One of my favorites is the one herder who sneezes on horseback, presumably from a cat allergy. He chose the wrong line of work.

  10. Trump won’t concede but McConnell publicly acknowledged Biden as President this morning. Perhaps that’s a sign that he’ll attempt to put a lid on the craziness expected when they officially ratify the count in the Senate on Jan. 6th.

    2. I was as clueless as you until I looked it up, because I didn’t think the reference was to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The woman is Michelle Dockery who plays a character named Lady Mary in Downton Abbey, which I’ve never seen and until I looked that show up, I was spelling it Downtown Abbey.

      1. During the austerity years, when David Cameron was the British (Scots would no doubt say the English) prime minister, Private Eye magazine parodied his government of out-of-touch posh boys as Downturn Abbey: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/covers/full/1275_big.jpg. And then we elected another bl**dy Old Etonian as our leader… Deference and forelock tugging is an inexplicable part of the English psyche, apparently.

  13. “..now I have to go to Switzerland and take this ride..”

    The trip was down, so I’ll join you to enjoy the walk up beforehand!

  16. If only Chaos G had been there to make his point so eloquently to the heinous dudes in charge of the church and set everything straight back in the day…

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