Tuesday: Hili dialogue

March 23, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Tuesday, March 23, 2021: National Chips and Dip Day (make mine ruffled potato chips with sour cream-onion dip, or Doritos with guacamole). It’s also National Melba Toast Day, National Chia Day, National Agriculture Day, National Puppy Day, Cuddly Kitten Day, World Meteorological Day, and Day of Hungarian-Polish Friendship.

News of the Day:

Below is a news video of the fracas at Miami Beach the night before last. The City has now set an 8 pm curfew in South Beach and closed off the area to nonresidents (it’s an island accessed by a causeway)—restrictions that will remain in place until April 12. Maybe it’s the pandemic, but there aren’t many masks to be seen. Maybe these kids won’t get very sick if infected, but they could infect others. And now the number of weapons recovered (WEAPONS?) exceed 100.

Oy vey!  The BBC has a new show on the market of religious relics, many of which are sold on eBay. There are apparently several hundred pieces of the True Cross up for sale (go here to see them, some with “certificates of authenticity”). Lord, are people credulous!

The AstraZenica vaccine, briefly put on hold because of fears of blood clots, has now been cleared again and, as they say, “shots are ready to go into arms.” The vaccine has proven 79% effective at preventing symptomatic cases of coronavirus, a figure between the efficacy of the J&J vaccine on the one hand and the Pfizer and Moderna jabs on the other.

As I write this on Monday evening, there are reports of an active shooter who unloaded his ammo into people at a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket. Police were shown on television perp-walking away a shirtless man with a bloody leg, but we weren’t told if he was the suspect, nor how many people were killed or injured. I expect that when I finish this post on Tuesday, we’ll have a death toll. So many shootings, so many guns. . .

And this morning the death toll is reported at 10, one of them a Boulder police officer. There are no details yet on who the suspect is or his motive.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. 542,587, an increase of just 650 deaths over yesterday’s figure.  The reported world death toll stands 2,736,721, an increase of about 8,100 deaths over yesterday’s total. 

Stuff that happened on March 23 includes:

  • 1775 – American Revolutionary War: Patrick Henry delivers his speech – “Give me liberty, or give me death!” – at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, Virginia.
  • 1806 – After traveling through the Louisiana Purchase and reaching the Pacific Ocean, explorers Lewis and Clark and their “Corps of Discovery” begin their arduous journey home.
  • 1857 – Elisha Otis‘s first elevator is installed at 488 Broadway New York City.

Here’s a patent for an Otis elevator four years later:

  • 1868 – The University of California is founded in Oakland, California when the Organic Act is signed into law.
  • 1919 – In Milan, Italy, Benito Mussolini founds his Fascist political movement.
  • 1933 – The Reichstag passes the Enabling Act of 1933, making Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany.
  • 1956 – Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic in the world. This date is now celebrated as Republic Day in Pakistan.
  • 1977 – The first of The Nixon Interviews (12 will be recorded over four weeks) is videotaped with British journalist David Frost interviewing former United States President Richard Nixon about the Watergate scandal and the Nixon tapes.

Here are some highlights of those interviews:

  • 1983 – Strategic Defense Initiative: President Ronald Reagan makes his initial proposal to develop technology to intercept enemy missiles.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1882 – Emmy Noether, Jewish German-American mathematician, physicist and academic (d. 1935)

Noether made many contributions to math and physics, the most notable being Noether’s Theorem, which showed that the symmetry of any physical law is invariably associated with a conservation principle (e.g., the conservation of energy). Here’s Noether and her pathbreaking paper (she had many others):

Bannister is of course the first human to run a mile faster than four minutes. (There must be a lower limit limit based on what’s possible given human physiology and morphology, but what is it? You can’t run a mile in 10 seconds, but you can in four minutes. Somewhere in between is the limit.) It was 1954, and he was 25.  Here he is at the finish line:

Those who “passed” on March 23 include:

Here’s Brick and Maggie the cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, HIli’s helping everyone get ready for Spring:

Hili: It’s time to rake the leaves and take out the lawn mower.
A: If you say so.
In Polish:
Hili: Pora zgrabić te liście i wyciągnąć kosiarkę.
Ja: Jak tak mówisz.

And cute little Kulka gazes out the window:

From Bruce:

From Nicole:

From Merilee:

More tweets from the “Titania educates” series in which her Twitter readers take her seriously.

From Barry: a lovely blue-eyed cat.

From Dom. This woman really loves beeflies, and she should because she’s a fly expert. Beeflies are in the order Bombyliidae (sounds like a Tolkien name), are important pollinators, and often mimic bees and wasps—presumably the result of the evolution of Batesian mimicy that gives mimics an advantage because predators avoid them.

Tweets from Matthew: a lovely marginal sketch of a cat and its toy:

A fluffy lynx strolling down the street. What I wouldn’t give to have seen that. See more photos at the linked Dodo article:

Two videos of the volcano erupting in Iceland. The second shows footage as a drone flies over it.

Google translation: “Here the well-known drone images from above from last night, without the banners that the news media think they have to stick on.”

Who doesn’t love tardigrades? This one looks like an early tetrapod clambering about on land:

19 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

    1. Thank you so much for this link. I am looking forward to listening to it this afternoon. BBC and Royal Institution have so many interesting and informative lectures for the public. I really appreciate jerry and our commenters calling attention to them.

      Reply

        1. I have to say I find Bragg irritating. Also they are responsible for introducing the fake ‘historical present’ tense – I do not recall it being popular before. Grrr….

          Reply

  2. Way I remember Cat, Maggie had on a slip damn near the whole film. (After the movie was released, I believe the sales of slips skyrocketed at department stores across the country.):

    Reply

  3. Jesus, Nixon’s fulla shit in those excerpts of his interview with David Frost. In the first, he’s just rambling, filibustering Frost to eat up time. The other two are merely mendacious, self-aggrandizing anecdotes. He claims it was a “terrible emotional shock” to him, but the sonuvabitch can’t even recall correctly the number of students actually killed at Kent State.

    It was four dead in Ohio, asshole.

    Reply

  4. The UK approved the AstraZeneca vaccine on December 30th. Since that time, almost 200,000 Americans have died from coronavirus. Many of these of lives could have been saved if the FDA had given approval on the same date. And yet, the FDA is going to wait a few more weeks before approving the vaccine.

    The FDA’s sloth in the name of “safety” is absolutely despicable.

    Reply

    1. AZ hasn’t even filed an application for an Emergency Use Authorization yet; and, given the kerfuffle late last night and this morning, it may be a while before they do.
      Their first study was a mess, with some patients given only a half-dose for their first dose, and varying times between first and second doses.
      Their second study, the one on which they are/were expected to file their EUA application, seems to have been properly conducted; but having your Data Safety and Monitoring Board write a letter to NIH, BARDA, NIAID, and Dr. Fauci complaining that AZ’s press release of yesterday may not have been accurate, is not a good sign.
      See, for example, the New York Times and Washington Post (and a lot of other places by now) for stories – and expect something on tonight’s news.

      Reply

    1. Since you’re obviously a very discerning collector, David, could I interest you in a piece of the Turin shroud that I have to sell (for personal reasons beyond my control, of course…)? 😉

      Reply

Leave a Reply to Ken Kukec Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *