Month: May 2021

Monday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

May 24, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Monday, May 24, 2021: National Escargot Day. It is a Three Bun Day, which means that I saw three cottontail rabbits on my way to work. This augurs a good day: 12 rabbits’ feet!

It’s also Asparagus Day, Brother’s Day (only one brother being celebrated?), and, in Canada, Victoria Day and its related holiday in Quebec, National Patriots’ Day (Journée nationale des patriotes). And Bob Dylan turns 80 today! (See below.)

News of the Day:

“Defund the police” was always a dubious slogan, unless qualified with strict specifications on where the money would go to compensate for reduced policing or to add extra social value. And, sure enough, this headline has appeared in The New Woke Times (click on screenshot):

The cause, of course, is a rise in violent crime. A quote:

. . . more cops is what Los Angeles is getting.

A year after streets echoed with calls to “defund” law enforcement and city leaders embraced the message by agreeing to take $150 million away from the Los Angeles Police Department, or about 8 percent of the department’s budget, the city last week agreed to increase the police budget to allow the department to hire about 250 officers. The increase essentially restores the cuts that followed the protests.

The BBC reports that John Kelly, an ultamarathoner, just set a record in the grueling Pennine Way race, a 260-mile route that “runs down the spine of Britain from the Scottish Borders’ Kirk Yetholm to Edale in Derbyshire’s Peak District.”They add that a fit hiker would take over two weeks to hike the route, but Kelly did it in just 58 hours and four minutes. And he had only two 10-minute naps along the way!

Speaking of ultramarathons, the NYT reports a mass death: 21 runners in a Chinese ultramarathon, including one of their best athletes, died when cold weather and freezing rain inundated a 62-mile mountain race. Many of the runners were clad only in short and tee-shirts.

The Associated Press has collected some depressing and hair-raising stories about how the pandemic has affected the lives of Indians, while the medical system breaks down. Here’s just one of several stories:

The Amrohi Family, Gurgaon

At the Amrohi apartment, the former ambassador’s family was calling his medical school classmates for help. One eventually arranged a bed at a nearby hospital.

It was April 26. The brutal north Indian summer was coming on. Temperatures that day reached nearly 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).

His wife, Yamini, and their adult son Anupam put him into the family’s compact SUV.

They arrived about 7:30 p.m. and parked in front of the main doors, thinking Ashok would be rushed inside. They were wrong. Admission paperwork had to be completed first, and the staff was swamped.

So they waited.

Anupam stood in line while Yamini stayed in the car with Ashok, who was breathing bottled oxygen. She blasted the air-conditioning, trying to keep him cool.

An hour passed. Two hours. Someone came to swab Ashok for a coronavirus test. It came back positive. His breathing had grown difficult.

“I went thrice to the hospital reception for help. I begged, pleaded and shouted at the officials,” she said. “But nobody budged.”

At one point, their daughter called from London, where she lives with her family. With everyone on a video call, their four-year-old grandson asked to talk to Ashok.

“I love you, Poppy,” he said.

Ashok pulled off his oxygen mask: “Hello. Poppy loves you too.”

Three hours.

Four hours.

Anupam returned regularly to the car to check on his father.

“It’s almost done,” he would tell him each time. “Everything is going to be alright. Please stay with us!”

Five hours.

A little after midnight, Ashok grew agitated, pulling off the oxygen mask and gasping. His chest heaved. Then he went still.

“In a second he was no more,” Yamini said. “He was dead in my arms.”

Yamini went to the reception desk: “You are murderers,” she told them.

The story continues later in the article.

And a BBC report describes a deadly “black fungus” disease that strikes some people in India who have recovered from Covid, mostly males with underlying conditions like diabetes. It is a fulminating infection caused by a common soil fungus and must be treated with long-term doses of antifungal agents.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 589,517, an increase of 563 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,478,596, an increase of about 9,000 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 24 includes:

  • 1487 – The ten-year-old Lambert Simnel is crowned in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland, with the name of Edward VI in a bid to threaten King Henry VII’s reign.
  • 1607 – One hundred English settlers disembark in Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America.
  • 1626 – Peter Minuit buys Manhattan.

Yes, the island was a bargain: it went for 60 guilders, a trifling amount now worth about $1,143. The sellers were Lenape Native Americans.

  • 1683 – The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, opens as the world’s first university museum.
  • 1813 – South American independence leader Simón Bolívar enters Mérida, leading the invasion of Venezuela, and is proclaimed El Libertador (“The Liberator”).
  • 1844 – Samuel Morse sends the message “What hath God wrought” (a biblical quotation, Numbers 23:23) from a committee room in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland, to inaugurate a commercial telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C.

Morse in 1840; the man knew his Bible:

  • 1883 – The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City is opened to traffic after 14 years of construction.
  • 1930 – Amy Johnson lands in Darwin, Northern Territory, becoming the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia (she left on May 5 for the 11,000 mile flight).

Here’s Johnson  in her Gypsy Moth plane in 1930. The flight took her six days. Sadly, she died after running out of fuel over the Thames Estuary in 1941 and, parachuting safely into the water, died of extreme cold.

  • 1935 – The first night game in Major League Baseball history is played in Cincinnati, Ohio, with the Cincinnati Reds beating the Philadelphia Phillies 2–1 at Crosley Field.
  • 1940 – Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.

Here’s Sikorsky in his first helicopter:

A second attempt succeeded in August of that same year. If you’re in Mexico City, do visit Trotsky’s house, or rather fortress, which he built to stave off attacks. He knew Stalin was going to go after him. In 2012 I visited it (Frida Kahlo’s house is just a few blocks away); here’s the desk where Trotsky was sitting when an assassin put an ice axe into his head. It’s said to be just as he left it.

  • 1956 – The first Eurovision Song Contest is held in Lugano, Switzerland.
  • 1976 – The Judgment of Paris takes place in France, launching California as a worldwide force in the production of quality wine.
  • 1991 – Israel conducts Operation Solomon, evacuating Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
  • 1999 – The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands indicts Slobodan Milošević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo.
  • 2019 – Under pressure over her handling of Brexit, British Prime Minister Theresa May announces her resignation as Leader of the Conservative Party, effective as of June 7.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1819 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (d. 1901)
  • 1938 – Tommy Chong, Canadian-American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
  • 1941 – Bob Dylan, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, artist, writer, and producer; Nobel Prize laureate

Dylan is 80 today! How could time have passed so quickly? Here’s a photo I have in my office of Dylan with a certain young lady (his significant other at the time) who went on to achieve her own renown:

 

  • 1960 – Kristin Scott Thomas, English actress

Those who lost their lives on May 24 include:

  • 1543 – Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish mathematician and astronomer (b. 1473)
  • 1879 – William Lloyd Garrison, American journalist and activist (b. 1805)
  • 1974 – Duke Ellington, American pianist and composer (b. 1899)

I’ve almost finished reading my biography of Duke. Here’s one of my favorites from the Blanton-Webster version of his band (1939-1940): “Cotton Tail.” I put it up in honor of the three bunnies I saw this morning. And yes, this one swings! The sax solo made Ben Webster famous. (And this will wake you up, so keep the sound down if folks are sleeping!).

  • 1996 – Joseph Mitchell, American journalist and author (b. 1908)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Paulina have a chat.

Hili: How does the writing of your masters theses go?
Paulina: It’s going well but sometimes I need a break.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Jak ci idzie pisanie pracy magisterskiej?
Paulina: Dobrze, ale czasem muszę odpocząć.

And Mietek has a moment of rapture:

Mietek: The wind in my hair.

In Polish: Wiatr we włosach

From Science Humor:

From Bruce:

From Meriliee. I do this, too, sticking one foot out from under the covers at night:

I made a tweet!

From reader Ken, who comments, “This man was at one time the National Security Advisor of the United States of America.”

 

Tweets from Matthew:

I think this cat’s just harassed:

This is a gynandromorph (half male, half female) ant of the ant species Pheidole noda, with sexual traits split straight down the middle. I suspect that the side with the wing is male, because only males or females who are destined to be queens have wings. Look at the difference between the male and female morphology!

Fun history and art fact (lovely paintings, too):

Everybody says this photo is wrong, but they can’t quite say why. Are the measurements wrong? Are they using different scales? You tell me! The guy certainly looks more than a foot and eight inches taller than the woman.

Another duck hiatus

May 23, 2021 • 1:10 pm

Duck farming has becoming almost insupportably difficult these days, making it hard for me to think about, much less write about, les affaires du monde. I am exhausted, distraught, and foodless, though the ducks are all alive and healthy. No lunch for two weeks: no time!

Bear with me as the situation develops. We may even have another new brooding entering the pond before too long, in which case I take a header into the mud.

Honey is terrified, her babies largely abandoned, and Dorothy has turned psychotic, expelling one of her own brood “the Pepper”, who forages and lives alone and whose welfare, along with that of Honey’s oft-abandoned four ducklings, is our utmost concern.

So, if you want to discuss anything EXCEPT DUCKS, you can do it in the comments below.

Thanks!

—Mgmt.

The Economist on the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire

May 23, 2021 • 9:30 am

Reader Diana MacPherson sent a link to an Economist article with this note:

I subscribe to The Economist so I can read these articles which are often behind a paywall, which is a shame because I find The Economist to be one of the last true bastions of balanced journalism. Their Israel and Hamas coverage I find quite good. Here is their take on the ceasefire which I have put in a mediocre PDF since it’s behind a paywall. Note that they don’t pander to Hamas and talk about them as the ones who have ruined peace in the past.

Fortunately, the entire article is online; you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below. And Diana’s right in saying they don’t pander to Hamas and do indict them for ruining the peace. Still, I want to make a few tangential comments.

Excerpts from the article are indented. As you can see from the sub-headline and from the article’s last paragraph (below), they are not optimistic about the prospects for peace, nor am I. I predict six months as a maximum for the ceasefire.

Yet there were new elements to this round of violence. A wave of clashes between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel itself unnerved Mr Netanyahu. There are new types of pressure from abroad, too. Whereas President Joe Biden emphasised “Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself”, some fellow Democrats called for putting conditions on American aid to Israel.

But for now, none of that is likely to stop the cycle of violence. Israel and Hamas will come out of this battle much as they went in. Nothing has been gained; nothing has been resolved. And yet they are likely to do it again.

(Try this link if the screenshot below doesn’t work.)

Now my comments. First, on the casualty data:

THE FIGHTING lasted less than two weeks, but there was no shortage of explosions. By the end Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, had fired some 4,000 rockets at Israel. Most were intercepted by Israel’s missile defences. Israel responded with hundreds of air strikes on Gaza, a cramped enclave ruled by Hamas, which had no shield. More than 200 people were killed, all but 12 of them Palestinian.

This is pretty accurate: Hamas fired 4,360 rockets at Israel. Of these, 680 fell into Gaza, killing an unknown number of Palestinians who are surely included in the casualty totals. The Palestinian Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, announced that a total of 243 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children (people under 18) and 39 women. The Health Ministry implies that the dead are all civilians, but that is dubious given the imbalance of sexes. Of the 177 adults killed, 138 were men (78%) and 39 (22%) were women. If these are truly civilian deaths, then there must be a severe sex-ratio imbalance in the Gaza population! More likely is that the male toll includes Hamas fighters. A separate fighting group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) did announce that 19 of its fighters were killed by Israelis.

Thirteen Israelis were killed by Hamas, none of them members of the IDF (Israel does separate out military deaths from civilian deaths). While this disproportionality is used as a reason to indict Israel, that is somewhat misguided given the way “disproportionality is used in wartime, but I’ve discussed this before and won’t get into it here. I’ll only add what I said before: Palestine, like Israel, does have an Iron Dome to protect its civilians: the dome is the mantra “Don’t fire rockets at Israel.”

More:

Since the Islamist group [Hamas] grabbed control of Gaza in 2007, the two sides have fought four wars and several smaller battles, costing thousands of lives (again, mostly Palestinian).

This refers not to a battle with Israel, but to the Fatah-Hamas battle for Gaza.  Remember that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 as a voluntary good-will gesture in connection with the Oslo Accords. PM Sharon also evicted 7,000 Jews from Gaza at that time, leaving it “Judenrein” (“Jew free”). The Jews didn’t want to leave, and many had to be physically carried out of their homes by Israeli soldiers, homes that were destroyed by the soldiers as well.  However, the agricultural and industrial infrastructure of Gaza, previously owned by Jews, was donated by Israel to Gaza and the Palestinians, who promptly destroyed this infrastructure simply because it was Jewish. Have people forgotten this?

As I said, the article doesn’t gloss over the actions of Hamas, including storing weapons at schools and hospitals and their use of human shields. I have just one more comment on one of its statements:

Both sides are content to leave Gaza a festering pit of misery that periodically erupts. Hamas’s control in some ways suits Mr Netanyahu, inasmuch as it weakens the Palestinian leadership and dims the prospect of a Palestinian state. Israel will still try to keep the group down, though. It and Egypt have kept Gaza under blockade since 2007, making it harder for Hamas to arm itself—and making life grim for ordinary Gazans. Restrictions on travel mean they cannot leave. The isolated, impoverished territory draws comparisons to an open-air prison.

Let’s be clear here: Israel is not depriving Gaza of food, medicine, or other amenities and necessities of life. The blockade, which is enforced by Israel and Egypt (Egypt is stricter!) is meant only to prohibit the importation into Gaza of weapons or of material that can be made into weapons. The EU, the UN, and many GMOs pour millions and millions of dollars into Gaza (more is coming soon), and if there is a reason for a grim life for ordinary Gazans, let us rememeber that much of that is due not to the blockade of weapons, but to the appropriation of donated money to build rockets, tunnels, and to line the pockets of corrupt Hamas officials. Those who continually indict Israel for turning Gaza into an “open-air prison” often seem to forget that this is largely due to the leadership of Gaza by Hamas.

Finally, my friend Malgorzata had a comment on the first sentence above: “Both sides are content to leave Gaza a festering pit of misery that periodically erupts.” Here’s what she wrote me:

This is simply stupid. Israel doesn’t want these eruptions. Israel would be happy if Gaza was a prosperous place with contented, productive people. That was the idea in 2005: a dream that Gaza would develop into “Singapore of the Middle East”. Israel still is helping Gazans not only with medical treatment of Gazans who need more specialized help, but also by training its doctors, and farmers, thinking up new crops they could export, and so on. It’s Hamas and PIJ, and Iran in the first place, who are happy with the misery in Gaza.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 23, 2021 • 8:00 am

It’s Sunday, and that means our weekly dollop of themed bird pictures from John Avise. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

State Birds, Part 1

If you live in the United States, do you know your official State Bird?  In 1927, some State Legislatures began designating particular avian species as their “State Bird.”  Several states ended up choosing the
same species, so there are many fewer than 50 different state species.  Also, for a few states I don’t have any photos of the State Bird.  What follows is part 1 of my available photos of various State Birds (with the State(s) or territory listed in parentheses).

Northern Mockingbird, Mimus polyglottis (Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas):

American Robin, Turdus migratorius (Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin):

Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia):

Western Meadowlark, Sturnella neglecta (Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Wyoming):

Northern Flicker, Colaptes auratus (Alabama):

Cactus Wren, Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus (Arizona):

California quail, Callipepla californica (California):

Brown Thrasher, Toxostoma rufum (Georgia):

Hawaiian Goose or Nene, Branta sandwichensis (Hawaii):

Mountain Bluebird, Sialia currucoides (Idaho, Nevada):

American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis (Iowa, New Jersey, Washington):

Brown Pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis (Louisiana):

Readers’ turtles

May 23, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s World Turtle Day, and so, in addition to our usual wildlife posts, I’m putting up some readers’ photos of their turtles, including photos of how they can be damaged through human carelessness. Readers’ captions are indented, and clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

First, from Divy Figueroa:

Here are a couple of turtle pics from our collection. This little guy was one of our first hatchlings of this species.

Mekong Snail-Eating Turtle (Malayemys subtrijuga):

These are a couple of baby Forsten’s Tortoises (Indotestudo forstenii). We have a nice group of adults and sub-adults. They come from the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, and sadly, they are endangered.

From reader Christopher McLaughlin:

Since Sunday, May 23 in World Turtle Day, I thought I would share some photos of local turtles (tortoises for you persnickety types). Three of them demonstrate how hard life is for the modern turtle and why we all ought to be more thoughtful and kind to turtles. Of course they suffer from all sort of issues; habitat destruction, poaching, pet trade, road crossings, invasive species, climate change, but also lawnmowers, wildfires, and being harmed by our pets.

The first turtle of the year, found in my yard on April 7, still covered in mud and just after a breakfast of dandelion flowers. The ornate box turtle, Terrepene ornata ornata. (Female, I think. I forgot to check)

Carapace damage from a brush hog-type mower favored by rural men to unnecessarily mow large swaths of grassland like the cow pasture behind my property. Terrapene carolina triunguis. (Male)

Prairie fire damage. These little dudes are able to withstand some serious damage from the fires that have always played a part in their ecosystems, and I could not be for certain that this wasn’t completely natural but it was on a nearby prairie “managed” by the conservation department and frankly they are not the most scientifically minded people, but are more concerned with “managing” lands for hunting and fishing. And yes, she is a survivor, a little melted and disfigured but with head, all four limbs, and tail intact.  Terrepene ornata ornata (female)

Another one from my yard with the usual brush hog damage, with the white bone showing through the carapace scutes, but also missing chunks of marginal scutes and carapace bone just in front of my thumb and another chunk on his backside. Terrapene ornata ornata. (Male)

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 23, 2021 • 5:30 am

It’s formally the beginning of the week, but Sunday, (e.g., today: May 23, 2021) is actually perceived as the tail end of the week. It’s National Taffy Day (I don’t like the stuff), as well as World Turtle Day, Lucky Penny Day, and World Crohn’s and Colitis Day. More on some readers’ turtles soon.

If you’re interested in Darwin, or how the woke are trying to bring him to heel and indict him for, among other things, inciting genocide, read the piece I wrote yesterday about an attempt to smear Darwin.

Wine of the Day: Port is usually reserved for the colder months, but I had this bottle hanging around and stood it up vertically a week ago to allow the sediment to fall. (There was a heavy sediment in this one; I lost about a glass through decanting.) And if you want a vintage-style port without paying $75 and holding it for 15 years, this is the one for you (I think I paid about $25 for this bottle). It was an absolutely spectacular wine, heavy with alcohol (18.5%) and deeply rich with flavor, with tons of ripe cherry fruit and no “heat”. It is a dark garnet color and slides down the throat like velvet. It is, literally, a lip-smacking wine. LBV Port is, of course, sweet, as it should be.

Port is still an underrated wine in the U.S., though the Brits know its worth. There are many types, with vintage at the top (and the best), but there are also many bargains like tawnies and these LBV styles. If you want a nice evening tipple with your book, see if you can get hold of this one. (For genuine vintage ports, Graham’s, also with a sweet profile, is my favorite.)

I expect this bottle, put under vacuum, will last me a week.

News of the Day:

It’s mercifully quiet this weekend so far; the cease-fire in Israel and Gaza is still holding. So, after the first piece, there’s some news without gravitas.

According to the Washington Post, Black Lives Matter has officially allied itself with Palestine:

Black Lives Matter, which has grown into a potent political force amid a national reckoning on race, has responded forcefully to the violence in the Mideast to extend its reach into foreign policy, pressing the Democratic Party to adopt a dramatically different approach to the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whatever the aftermath of the violence in the region, it has starkly changed the Israeli-Palestinian debate in the United States, shifting it for many liberals from a tangled dispute over ancient, often-confusing claims to the far more familiar turf of police brutality and racial conflict.

“We understand that the liberation of Black people in the United States is tied to the liberation of Black people all over the world, and tied to the liberation of oppressed people all over the world,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter. “Being in solidarity with the Palestinian people is something that’s been part of our work as Black Lives Matter for almost as long as we’ve been an organization.”

There were no words about the oppression of women, Jews, gays, apostates and nonbelievers by the Palestinians, as those forms of oppression don’t matter. What a shame that the erstwhile alliance between African-Americans and Jews, important in the Civil Rights marches and activities of the Sixties, is a thing of the past.

Ok, now to the persiflage:

First, a number of candy companies are hopping mad because purveyors of “edibles” containing cannabis are making products resembling commercial candies. Take a look, for instance of real Skittles (above) and the dope-containing Skittles (below):

Or real Starburst Fruit Chews versus the kind that can get you baked:

This being America, lawsuits are underway.

America’s great gymnast Simone Biles landed a “Yurchenko double pike” in training and it’s amazing. If she lands it in competition in the Olympics, it will be a first. Have a look:

Another view:

More COVID news. The Guardian reports that well known Dutch scientist Elizabeth Bik is subject to a lawsuit by another “scientist” who published a shoddy study purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for the virus. She pointed out the paper’s errors online, and now the guy who published the paper, Dr Didier Raoult, has sued her for “harassment”:

The legal complaint alleges harassment over Bik exposing data errors on PubPeer, and extortion because she has a Patreon account where people can donate to her work. She has responded to Raoult’s calls on Twitter to declare who is funding her by sharing links to her Patreon.

This suit unconscionable. The Guardian adds:

The case, filed with the French state prosecutor by controversial infectious diseases physician Dr Didier Raoult, has prompted hundreds of scientists from across the world to publish an open letter calling for science whistleblowers to be protected.

You can sign a petition against the persecution of Bik’s rightful criticisms here.

he case, filed with the French state prosecutor by controversial infectious diseases physician Dr Didier Raoult, has prompted hundreds of scientists from across the world to publish an open letter calling for science whistleblowers to be protected

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 589,328, an increase of 578 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,469.436, an increase of about 10,500 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 23 includes:

  • 1430 – Joan of Arc is captured by the Burgundians while leading an army to raise the Siege of Compiègne.
  • 1533 – The marriage of King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon is declared null and void.
  • 1618 – The Second Defenestration of Prague precipitates the Thirty Years’ War.

Two men were defenestrated, but both survived the 70-foot (21-meter) drop out the window, most likely because they landed on a dung heap. Here’s a woodcut of that famous incident:

  • 1701 – After being convicted of piracy and of murdering William Moore, Captain William Kidd is hanged in London.

The rope broke on the first try, but they gave him no mercy and hanged him again. He was then gibbeted (see below):

  • 1844 – Declaration of the Báb the evening before the 23rd: A merchant of Shiraz announces that he is a Prophet and founds a religious movement that would later be brutally crushed by the Persian government. He is considered to be a forerunner of the Baháʼí Faith; Baháʼís celebrate the day as a holy day.
  • 1992 – Italy’s most prominent anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three body guards are killed by the Corleonesi clan with a half-ton bomb near Capaci, Sicily. His friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino will be assassinated less than two months later, making 1992 a turning point in the history of Italian Mafia prosecutions.

The explosion site: this is what happens when you go after the Mafia. Falcone was a brave man:

  • 1998 – The Good Friday Agreement is accepted in a referendum in Northern Ireland with roughly 75% voting yes.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1707 – Carl Linnaeus, Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist (d. 1778)

Here’s Linnaeus’s country house in Sweden, which I photographed upon visiting Uppsala in 2006:

  • 1891 – Pär Lagerkvist, Swedish novelist, playwright, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1974)
  • 1974 – Jewel, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, actress, and poet

Those who found Eternal Rest on May 23 include:

  • 1701 – William Kidd, Scottish pirate (b. 1645)
  • 1906 – Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian director, playwright, and poet (b. 1828)
  • 1934 – Bonnie Parker, American criminal (b. 1910)
  • 1934 – Clyde Barrow, American criminal (b. 1909)

Bonnie and Clyde, before and after:

  • 1937 – John D. Rockefeller, American businessman and philanthropist, founded the Standard Oil Company and Rockefeller University (b. 1839)
  • 1945 – Heinrich Himmler, German commander and politician, Reich Minister of the Interior (b. 1900)

When captured by the allies, SS head Himmler bit into a cyanide capsule and died within 15 minutes. The aftermath (sorry for so much death today!):

Here’s Nash; he and his wife were killed in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Little Kulka is taunting Hili.

Hili: Do not provoke me.
Kulka: And what would you do to me if I did?
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Nie prowokuj.
Kulka: A co mi zrobisz?
(Zdjęcie: Paulina R.)

From Divy:

Cat linguistics via Brian Leiter:

From somewhere on Facebook:

A tweet from reader Ken, who adds this about the first tweet: “Among the multitude of things this woman doesn’t know diddly-squat about is the difference between gold stars and yellow badges. She appears to be getting her talking points directly from QAnon conspiracists.”

The second tweet is equally insane:

From Barry. You go, rat!

Tweets from Matthew. The first one sends you to the mother lode of optical illusions (143 of them!). Unfortunately, I don’t know what the one in the tweet represents. There is a Darwin Illusion (here), and I’ve put another one below.

Poor mismatched kitty!

Two tweets showing some unknown animal. Matthew first commented, “I have no fricking idea what this weirdo is except that it’s some kind of arthropod. There’s a linked vid in the next tweet which doesn’t help. But then he realized, as I guessed, that it was a soft-shelled turtle. It’s thus appropriate for Turtle Day. Look how fast it is!

I think this is that errant walrus in Wales that the Egg Man is trying to drive away:

 

Guy solves three Rubik’s cubes while juggling them

May 22, 2021 • 2:15 pm

This is unbelievable, but is a Guinness World record, so it must be kosher, no? What a talent to not only juggle, but manipulate the cubes in your hand for the brief time you have them so that their faces eventually align. I wonder if you can make a living out of this.

Here are the YouTube notes:

The fastest time to solve three Rubik’s cubes whilst juggling is 5 mins 2.43 sec, achieved by Que Jianyu (China), on the set of ‘La Notte dei Record’, in Rome, Italy, on 17 November 2018.