Monday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

December 21, 2020 • 6:30 am

Christmas week and Coynezaa week are at hand! It’s Monday, December 21, 2021: four shopping days to either holiday.

The Winter Solstice began at 4:02 a.m. Chicago time, and it’s now the shortest day of the year. Further, tonight is The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, which will be visible in the night sky given that it’s clear. Today’s Google Doodle celebrates this Conjunction (click on screenshot):

As NASA reports,

What makes this year’s spectacle so rare, then? It’s been nearly 400 years since the planets passed this close to each other in the sky, and nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night, as it will for 2020, allowing nearly everyone around the world to witness this “great conjunction.”

The closest alignment will appear just a tenth of a degree apart and last for a few days. On the 21st, they will appear so close that a pinkie finger at arm’s length will easily cover both planets in the sky. The planets will be easy to see with the unaided eye by looking toward the southwest just after sunset.

From our vantage point on Earth the huge gas giants will appear very close together, but they will remain hundreds of millions of miles apart in space. And while the conjunction is happening on the same day as the winter solstice, the timing is merely a coincidence, based on the orbits of the planets and the tilt of the Earth.

The NASA site will tell you where and how to look for this rare event. You should definitely see this if you can, as one thing’s for sure: you won’t be around for the next one. Find an unobstructed view in the southwest (if you’re in the US) an hour after sunset, and you should see this:

It’s also National Fried Shrimp Day (not kosher!). National Hamburger Day, National Kiwi Fruit Day (a friend calls them “gorilla balls”), Anne and Samantha Day (read the link), Crossword Puzzle Day (see below), Yule (the first day of winter) and São Tomé Day

News of the Day:

On January 12, before Biden gets a chance to stay her execution, Lisa Montgomery will be executed in federal prison for a 2004 murder. If you want to see  a bunch of circumstances mitigating against her execution, read this NYT article about how Montgomery was sexually and physically abused, tortured, and traumatized during much of her early life.  At the very least she should not be killed (she also suffers from bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, psychosis, traumatic brain injury and most likely fetal alcohol syndrome). And her lawyers didn’t adequately represent her. Nevertheless, I doubt Trump will lift a finger to stop the lethal injection.

The Senate finally approved a $900 billion stimulus package for coronavirus, including loans for small businesses, checks for individuals (you can get up to $600), money for cultural institutions and for vaccine distribution—you name it. It was bipartisan, but the Democrats didn’t get what they wanted. That will come in a month when Joe Biden is President (thank Ceiling Cat!)

As the Moderna mRNA vaccine wends its way throughout the U.S., travelers are wending their way home for Christmas. Yes, I understand the impulse, but some California ICUs are already operating at nearly 300% of capacity and we don’t need yet another wave of infections. I wish people could just stay home—just this once. And many countries have stopped allowing flights from Britain to land because of the new extra-infectious mutant strain in the UK.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 317,800, an increase of about 1,500 from yesterday’s figure. The world death toll is 1,701,085, an increase of about 7,500 over yesterday’s report.

Stuff that happened on December 21 includes:

  • AD 69 – The Roman Senate declares Vespasian emperor of Rome, the last in the Year of the Four Emperors.
  • 1620 – Plymouth Colony: William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims land on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
  • 1879 – World premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark.
  • 1913 – Arthur Wynne‘s “word-cross”, the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World.

Here’s a re-creation of that puzzle. Can you solve it? Note that there are no “up” and “down” categories but pairs of numbers.

Disillusioned, the firebrand socialist (a hero of Hitchens, I believe), left Russia in 1923 and published a book about her stay there. Here she is on a streetcar in 1917:

Here’s a trailer for the movie. Can you name all the dwarfs? I can, but there used to always be two I forgot:

The heart, from a female donor, actually functioned perfectly, but Washkansky died from pneumonia contracted after getting immunosuppressive drugs.

  • 1968 – Apollo program: Apollo 8 is launched from the Kennedy Space Center, placing its crew on a lunar trajectory for the first visit to another celestial body by humans.
  • 1988 – The first flight of Antonov An-225 Mriya, the largest aircraft in the world.

Only one of these planes was built, designed to carry cargo. Wikipedia notes this: “The airlifter holds the absolute world record for an airlifted single-item payload of 189,980 kg (418,830 lb), and an airlifted total payload of 253,820 kg (559,580 lb). It has also transported a payload of 247,000 kg (545,000 lb) on a commercial flight.  Here’s the behemoth, and look at all those wheels!

 

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1550 – Man Singh I, Mughal noble (d. 1614)[8]
  • 1795 – Jack Russell, English priest, hunter, and dog breeder (d. 1883)
  • 1804 – Benjamin Disraeli, English lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1881)
  • 1866 – Maud Gonne, Irish nationalist and political activist (d. 1953)

Gonne was also an actress and a feminist, and well known for having been the love object of William Butler Yeats, who proposed to her four times (she turned him down every time) and wrote several famous poems inspired by her.


Two great geneticists were born on this day, one year apart (the first two below):

Wright almost made it to 100. I corresponded with him in his last years, and then, after his death, collaborated with two colleagues on two papers (1997, 2000) that dismantled what he saw as his greatest achievement, the “shifting balance theory of evolution”, a theory that was deeply flawed and no longer has much influence. Wright would have been furious, but fortunately he never saw them. He did send me a reprint of his article on evolution in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Muller had a colorful life: he worked with T. H. Morgan in the “Fly Room”, tried to kill himself with sleeping pills in 1932, and then and went to the Soviet Union to do genetics between 1933 and 1936, where he became disillusioned with Lysenkoism and then moved to Edinburgh. He also never had a real academic job until after he won the Nobel Prize, which he got for showing that X-rays caused mutations. Indiana University then hired him. Muller was an absolutely brilliant geneticist but a difficult colleague, the kind who demanded constant credit for his work—perhaps the result of being unrecognized when younger.  Here he is looking at Drosophila—with an eye loupe!

  • 1937 – Jane Fonda, American actress, producer, and activist
  • 1940 – Frank Zappa, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 1993)
  • 1959 – Florence Griffith Joyner, American sprinter and actress (d. 1998)
  • 1969 – Julie Delpy, French model, actress, director, and screenwriter

If you’ve seen the “Before Trilogy“, you’ll know this actress, shown here with her co-star Ethan Hawke.

  • 1977 – Emmanuel Macron, President of France

Those who found their Heavenly Abode on December 21 include:

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at 44 while eating a chocolate bar and reading the Princeton alumni magazine. He’s one of my literary heroes, though he couldn’t spell worth a damn (his editor Max Perkins corrected any errors). Gatsby is the book everyone reads, but I love Tender is the Night. When I read Fitzgerald’s first book—This Side of Paradise—as a teenager, I decided to go to Princeton (that’s where the book is set, and where Fitzgerald went to college), but my parents told me they didn’t have enough money to send me there. I wound up at William & Mary, which was probably better for me.  Here are Fitz and Zelda in 1921:

  • 2009 – Edwin G. Krebs, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1918)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili makes a wise statement, informed by the Polish past:

Hili: How did humans create gods?
A: By looking for the best model of secret police.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak człowiek stworzył bogów?
Ja: Szukając najlepszego modelu tajnej policji.

And in nearby Wloclawek, Leon has a task:

Elzbieta: Find the angel!

In Polish: Znajdź aniołka.

And young Mietek is sleeping, saying this as he dozes off:

Mietek: Just until the holidays. . . .

In Polish: Byle do świąt…

Little Kulka is still wearing her jacket to prevent her licking her wounds after she was spayed.  She hates it! It will be removed on Wednesday.

From Facebook:

From Bruce:

Here’s a festive coffee mug for the holidays from Jesus of the Day:

More of Titania’s predictions come true:

Now Helen Keller is privileged?? What does it take to be unprivileged?

Tweets from Matthew. Yes, ’tis the season of cats and trees:

A lovely photo from 1959:

Don’t forget the Great Conjunction tonight. Here’s why it’s happening:

Such stealth!

Wonderful pictures, wonderfully restored and looking quite au courant:

20 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)”

  1. … the firebrand socialist [Emma Goldman] (a hero of Hitchens, I believe) …

    Hitchens included a piece by Emma Goldman in The Portable Atheist, but when it comes to that generation of socialist woman of Eastern European Jewish derivation who were heroes of The Hitch, the first to come to mind is Rosa Luxemburg, cofounder of The Spartacus League.

    Both Goldman and Luxemburg visited Russia after the Bolsheviks took control and came away unimpressed.

  2. He [Fitzgerald]’s one of my literary heroes, though he couldn’t spell worth a damn (his editor Max Perkins corrected any errors).

    Okay, so once and for all, that “orgastic” in Gatsby‘s penultimate paragraph — an abstruse synonym of Fitzgerald’s choosing, or one of Fitzgerald’s idiosyncratic misspellings that Perkin’s let slide?

  3. I have not been able to follow the conjunction to get any data as it has been cloudy at sunset in southeast virginia for the past week, but at least theoretically, using 10×50 bimoculars with a seven degree field of view should spilt the two images nicely in the same visual field and possibly give the observer a sense of saturns rings and some of the four tiny gallileon moons’ images around jupiter. It depends a lot on how much ambient background light is still in the sky at the time. But please do try it if you have an old pair of binoculers laying around the house. I have an old edmund astroscan rich field telescope and look forward to trying it out at 16x with a three degree field of view…if the damn fog and clouds will just lift.

  4. The dead from the virus are getting close to half those who died during the 1918 influenza. And the total during that pandemic is pretty close to the civil war loss. CNN had a documentary on the 1918 virus that captured how bad it was and similarities to this one. It would kind of go away and then come back much worse than before killing many within 24 hours. In 1918 they did not know what a virus was let alone have nothing to treat it. On a history note, pres. Wilson got the flu while attending the peace talks in Europe. They say his personality and general being changed quite a bit after the flu and believe it may have affected his place in the treaty.

    2. Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron had a difficult relationship with the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow MP, who is quite a short man. After one altercation, Bercow is alleged to have said to Cameron, “I’m not happy”.

      To which Cameron is said to have responded, “Well, which one are you, then?”

  6. While the rules seem arcane, it seems clear that to be white is to be privileged, and to be privileged is to be white.

  8. Hili makes her declaration while standing next to a herm? which sounds more like a pronoun for the non-binary.

    And since I take it that HIli rarely goes upstairs now, I think she ventured up there yesterday and rested on the table just so she could gloat at Kula wearing that protective robe.

  9. I managed to get a brief, but fairly good view of Saturn and Jupiter on Saturday before the clouds rolled in (I’ve been following them since mid Nov.). It would be a wonderful Solstice Day gift to be able to see them, but there’s not much chance in south central PA.

    As to whether cats climbing Christmas trees is really a problem: some of my friends with cats had no problem–the cats just liked to lie under the trees and occasionally bat an ornament. Such has not been my experience, where almost all cats have climbed up the tree the minute it was put up (sometimes two at a time), knocking it over and causing the bucket with water to tip over. The cats thought the trees had been brought in expressly for them, including all ornaments, tinsel, garlands, etc. When I moved away from my parents’ house 40 years ago, I decided never to have a tree again. I’ve never regretted the decision–no more broken ornaments, water-soaked carpeting, vomiting from their having eaten objects they shouldn’t have, etc. It’s much more fun to watch videos of other peoples’ cats in trees on the internet!

  10. Gonne was a ferocious antisemite and Nazi sympathizer. By all accounts a nasty piece of work, but she might have been able to make a go of it with Yeats, who also was very gung-ho on facism, and associated for a time with Eoin O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts, for which he wrote several poems as ‘marching songs’. A lovely bunch of people, the literary modernists…

  12. The colorized pictures reminded me of a YouTube video showing a series of old photographs that have been digitally processed. They say “colorized” but I suspect that a lot more processing was done. Sure, questions arise as to how faithful they are to their subject but they are amazing to see regardless:

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