Friday: Hili dialogue

February 18, 2022 • 7:30 am

Good morning on a TGI Friday, February 18, 2022: National Drink Wine Day. To echo Molly Bloom, “and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Tonight I’ll be having more Roderer Brut champagne (I bought two bottles).

It’s also Cow Milked While Flying in an Airplane Day, and that needs some ‘splaining:

Today we celebrate the day the first cow flew in an airplane, as well as the first day a cow was milked while flying in an airplane. On February 18, 1930, a Guernsey cow named Nellie Jay, who also was known as Elm Farm Ollie, flew from Bismarck, Missouri, on a Ford Trimotor plane, to the International Aviation Exhibition in St. Louis. Nellie Jay was chosen because she was a high milk producing cow, and because she had a calm nature. The trip was taken to show the ability of the aircraft, and to take scientific data about the cow’s behavior. Claude M. Sterling piloted the aircraft, while Elsworth W. Bunce of Wisconsin accompanied the cow, and was the first man to milk a cow in flight.

During the 72 mile flight, the milk that Nellie Jay gave was packaged in paper cartons. It was then parachuted to spectators who were watching the flight. Nellie Jay reportedly produced 24 quarts of milk during the flight, and it is even believed that Charles Lindbergh received one of the quarts at the Exhibition. Nellie Jay became known as the Sky Queen after the flight.

Here’s Nellie. I wonder if this feat has ever been repeated. See also Wikipedia’s article on “Elm Farm Ollie” (her other name was “Nellie Jay”).

And it’s also Crab-Stuffed Flounder Day, National Caregivers Day, Pluto Day, celebrating the discovery of this planet on this day in 1930, Wife’s Day in Iceland, and Thumb Appreciation Day, which of course forces me to post this advertisement for milk (it’s the second best cat-relate ad ever made, after “Cat Herders“).

 

News of the Day:

*Despite Russia’s cat-and-mouse game with NATO, in which Putin denies being poised to invade and says he’s pulling troops back at the same time he’s beefing them up, I’m now prepared to predict with fair confidence that Russia will invade Ukraine within ten days. Russian troops massed around Ukraine have been estimated to number between 150,000 and 170,000, up about 50% in the last two weeks. Russia has expelled the second-ranking U.S. diplomat from Moscow, there have been exchanges of artillery between Russian separatists in Ukraine and Ukrainian troops, and that suggests that these Russian separatists will give Russia the “false flag” excuse to invade.

In Ukraine, Russian-backed rebels and Kyiv’s forces traded accusations that each had fired across the ceasefire line in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow accuses Kyiv of “exterminating” civilians.

Ukrainian government forces denied accusations of having targeted separatist positions in the breakaway region of Donbass, which borders Russia.

Details could not be established independently, but reports from both sides suggested an incident more serious than the routine ceasefire violations that are often reported in the area.

Putin is a horrible human being, but we can’t get inside his head to figure out his plan, so I’ll just go by his actions. Many people will die because he wants Lebensraum (or комната для проживания) to the west. And, as always, I hope I’m wrong.

*This is sad, but I can’t see the result “child abuse,” as one reporter put it.  The story: 15-year-old Russian skating phenom Kamila Valieva screwed up her long program at the Olympics and finished fourth. But the Washington Post makes it into a three-hankie weepie, blaming skating itself for meting out the punishment after the IOC had actually given her a second chance:

 Kamila Valieva sat crying, sandwiched between two consoling coaches. She would not rise. She bent over, head approaching her knees. She tilted over, falling into the lap of choreographer Daniil Gleikhengauz.

The Russian figure skater, just 15 and lost in doping purgatory, glued herself to the anguish for 2½ minutes. It hurt like 2½ hours. On Thursday night, the sport did what the Court of Arbitration for Sport declined to do after her positive drug test shook these Beijing Games. It took action and handed down the cruelest punishment possible.

The result broke the child. After a disastrous long program, Valieva tumbled from first to fourth place in the women’s individual competition, a supposed sure thing left to watch gold, silver and bronze evade her. There was no need for asterisks, provisional medals or any other winging-it International Olympic Committee gestures to manage a cumbersome situation. The girl lost. She wasn’t crowned, pending the outcome of her peculiar and unsettled case. In the end, she wasn’t recognized at all.

Valieva wasn’t recognizable, either. She fell to the ice twice. She stumbled again and again, resembling a woozy boxer. Almost nothing in her repertoire worked for her: the quadruple jumps, the triples, simple gliding. The more she fought, the worse she looked. Her fundamentals collapsed. Her body stopped working with her, knees not bending, shoulders not straightening.

As she came off the ice, the television cameras caught her perplexed coach, Eteri Tutberidze, saying in Russian: “Explain it to me.”

“The result broke the child?” Child? She is young, but she chose to compete as a woman, and it was as a woman she lost, and as a child she cried. And the saddest thing is that she may never recover the nerve that made her the world’s best woman skater. And she’ll be forever marked as “the one who messed up”

But what puzzles me is how a favorable decision by the IOC to let her compete and maybe even get a medal “broke the child” and ruined her skating. Sure, she was discombobulated as the unwanted center of attention, but athletes can’t blame the sport itself for their failure, especially an athlete who was publicly known to have been taking banned drugs. What if she had been denied the chance to compete? Of course the Russians, who drug their athletes, are largely responsible, and should be sanctioned even more, but was Valieva forced to take the drug? We’ll never know.  She’s the only person exculpated by the media for her bad performance. (I haven’t even seen it, as it’s been wiped from the Internet.)

*Here’s a NYT piece with a terse title, “What was Stonehenge for?”  This derives from a new exhibit at the British Museum, “The World of Stonehenge.”.  The answer, after extensive analysis, seems to be that no, it wasn’t a calendar or astronomical indicator, nor was it built by alients. Rather, it was a kind of spot for social cohesion, or so the experts say:

Stonehenge was built at a time of drastic population decline and dispersal, said Mike Parker Pearson, a professor at University College London who has made major Stonehenge-related discoveries, including the Durrington Walls settlement. There were few, if any, villages, and society was “trying to create a sense of unity and collaboration among its members,” he explained.

Built on the site of an ancient cemetery, Stonehenge was a “monument of remembrance,” he said, and an “expression of unity” that pulled people together in the pursuit of a common endeavor.

Yet, he said, “People don’t want it to be that simple as an explanation.”

Of course this answer is only provisional.  Below: a lovely photo of the place, where I’ve never been:

(From NYT) Incomplete knowledge about the purpose of Stonehenge, which was constructed on a plain in southern England, has become part of the monument’s identity.Credit…English Heritage

*And this is plain weird. According to the Associated Press, the leading dictionary of standard usage has altered  the definition of the word “Jew”, changing it into a pejorative against the advice of ACTUAL Jews.

The Duden dictionary had recently added an explanation to its online edition saying that “occasionally, the term Jew is perceived as discriminatory because of the memory of the National Socialist use of language. In these cases, formulations such as Jewish people, Jewish fellow citizens or people of the Jewish faith are usually chosen.”

This explanation led to an outcry from leading Jewish groups and individuals who stressed that identifying themselves or being called Jews is not discriminatory, in contrast to what Duden’s definition implied.

. . .The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Joseph Schuster, said last week that for him the word “Jew” is neither a swear word nor discriminatory.

“Even if ‘Jew’ is used pejoratively in schoolyards or only hesitantly by some people, and the Duden editors are certainly well-meaning in pointing out this context, everything should be done to avoid solidifying the term as discriminatory,” Schuster said.

The executive director of the Central Council of Jews, Daniel Botmann, wrote on Twitter “Is it okay to say Jew? Yes! Please don’t say ‘Jewish fellow citizens’ or ‘people of the Jewish faith’. Just JEWS. Thank you!”

We JEWS may be persecuted, but we’re funny! And a couple of days later the dictionary changed the definition again (this is Lexicography via Twitter):

“Because of their antisemitic use in history and in the present, especially during the Nazi era, the words Jew/Jewess have been debated … for decades,” the entry on the dictionary’s website now says. “At the same time, the words are widely used as a matter of course and are not perceived as problematic. The Central Council of Jews in Germany, which has the term itself in its name, is in favor of its use.”

JEWS is fine, thank you!

*Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 930,302, an increase of 2,306 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 5,883,641, an increase of about 12,400 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on February 18 include:

  • 1861 – In Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis is inaugurated as the provisional President of the Confederate States of America.
  • 1885 – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is published in the United States.

A first edition and first printing of this book will cost about $50,000, which seems cheap:

An Indian stamp commemorating the first airmail:

Pluto waas found using this “blink comparator”, in which, I guess, you blinked alternatively with your eyes and could see if one image had shifted:

  • 1930 – Elm Farm Ollie becomes the first cow to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft and also the first cow to be milked in an aircraft.

See above.

  • 1943 – World War II: The Nazis arrest the members of the White Rose movement.

The three main members, Sophie and Hans Scholl (brother and sister) and Christoph Probst, were beheaded on February 2. Here are the Scholl’s mug shots by the Gestapo after they were arrested. Four days from arrest to beheading, with a mock trial thrown in.

Here’s part of that famous speech in which Goebbels declared “Totaler Krieg” (“total war”) and also had a few pungent remarks about the Jews:

Bolton had poisoned his with with arsenic, and was hanged.

Here’s the Chicago Seven at a news conference on February 28, 1970. How many of them can you name?

  • 1972 – The California Supreme Court in the case of People v. Anderson, (6 Cal.3d 628) invalidates the state’s death penalty and commutes the sentences of all death row inmates to life imprisonment.
  • 2001 – NASCAR Champion Dale Earnhardt dies from an accident on the final lap of the Daytona 500.

Before the crash:

  • 2010 – WikiLeaks publishes the first of hundreds of thousands of classified documents disclosed by the soldier now known as Chelsea Manning.
  • 2021 – Perseverance, a Mars rover designed to explore Jezero crater on Mars, as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, lands successfully.

Remember the joy at the landing and touchdown. Here’s the touchdown sequence. I’m still thrilled watching it!

Notables born on this day include:

He made the most beautiful windows. Here’s one; caption from Wikipedia:

The Holy City (1905) – St. John’s vision on the isle of Patmos, one of eleven Tiffany windows at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland. It has 58 panels and is thought to be one of the largest Tiffany Studios windows
  • 1906 – Hans Asperger, Austrian pediatrician and academic (d. 1980)
  • 1909 – Wallace Stegner, American novelist, short story writer, and essayist (d. 1993)
  • 1931 – Toni Morrison, American novelist and editor, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2019).
  • 1933 – Yoko Ono, Japanese-American multimedia artist and musician.

John and Yoko’s “bed in”, 1969. Do you remember where this was?  Yoko is 89 today.

  • 1968 – Molly Ringwald, American actress

Those who became carcasses on February 18 include:

  • 1546 – Martin Luther, German priest and theologian, leader of the Protestant Reformation (b. 1483)
  • 1564 – Michelangelo, Italian sculptor and painter (b. 1475)
  • 1967 – J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist and academic (b. 1904)

Here’s Oppenheimer briefly describing his reaction at the Trinity test explosion of the A bomb. His line from the Bhagavad Gita became famous.

  • 2001 – Dale Earnhardt, American racer and NASCAR seven times champion (b. 1951)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is getting peeved at having to see Kulka sitting on the inside window ledge (Hili lets people know she wants in by jumping onto the outside ledge). Kulka’s in the foreground:

Hili: Again the same.
A: What’s the matter?
Hili: KUlka is again sitting in the window I want to come through.
In Polish:
Hili: Znowu to samo.
Ja: O co chodzi?
Hili: Znowu Kulka siedzi właśnie na tym oknie, przez które chcę wejść do domu.

And here are, in order, Leon, Mietek, and an unnamed cat, one of three that were abandoned by a Polish man who went to jail.  Elzbieta drives an hour to feed them every day. Anybody want that beautiful Polish tabby?

The caption, as characterized by Malgorzata:

This caption, extremely difficult to translate but the idea is: “A normal day, why so much noise about nothing.” I don’t know which of the cats is saying that and I don’t know what noise he means. (In Polish: “Dzień jak co dzień, nie wiadomo, o co tyle hałasu.”)

Leon:

Mietek:

Fostered tabby (isn’t it  beaut?):

A meme from Bruce, which rings so true!

More snow creations from Peter:

From Merilee:

The Tweet of God:

I highly recommend watching all three seasons of Ricky Gervais’s series “After Life”. This is the final scene, and if you haven’t seen the show, but will do so, DO NOT WATCH THIS CLIP.  If you have, you’ll see once again that it’s a bit of genius. And it will make you tear up.  (Sound up.)

From Simon, who says, “Cub needs to assess size of potential prey more carefully”:

From Ginger K.:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, we have two tweets:

The expressions on some of these newly-arrived inmates are sometimes frightening:

Tweets from Matthew. I wonder whether this crow will suffer from beak fatigue:

Matthew says that this is a real e-book that you can buy on Amazon. And, sure enough, it is.  Be sure to click on the tweet to see the whole title.

As Hawks notes, Darwin’s views of human evolution were pretty clear here. At the top you see “man” as a sister group to other apes like gorillas. This means that he saw all human groups as having a single origin, i.e., he was an advocate of monogeny, which comported with the Wedgwood familial view of “am I not a man and a brother?” And his speculation below turned out to be right.

I just found this; it’s the passport photo of my mother, my sister, and me taken for our 2.5 year stay in Greece Oy, did I have big ears! (They’ve flattened with age.)

45 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. And the saddest thing is that she may never recover the nerve that made her the world’s best woman skater. And she’ll be forever marked as “the one who messed up”

    Oh I’m sure she will recover. These athletes go to major competitions probably several times a year, and she’s 15. The girl who beat her to gold was already the world #1, and the three of them will compete against each other again for the 2022 title of World Champion in late March. So as early as the end of next month, Valieva could be crowned world champion and back on cloud 9.

    What really struck me was the Russian coaching response to her skate. Their women had just won gold and silver, and nobody congratulates them; they all rush over to Valieva instead. Those video shots of the gold medal winner sitting alone were really telling.

    I will make a prediction: the investigation into drug use in the program will find that the other two are clean. It seems pretty clear to me that Valieva is their Next Big Thing, their Golden Child, and they care much less about the other two. Based on their observed behavior, I’ll bet that the performance enhancement is focused on her because she’s the only one they care enough about to enhance. They don’t want ‘Russian skating’ to succeed, they want her specifically to succeed.

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  2. Pluto was found using this “blink comparator”, in which, I guess, you blinked alternatively with your eyes …

    You don’t have to blink, the machine does that for you (it flips rapidly, back and forth, between the two images, so that any difference is obvious).

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  3. The cat milk advertisement reminded me of our beautiful white polydactyl kitty, Flora, who could catch a ball with either of her front “hands” and to all intents she had two thumbs and made good use of this mutation.
    BTW I also had huge ears, me and Prince Charles at the time.
    Stonehenge nowadays not a good visit. The information Centre is very helpful but you cannot get near the henge itself as pressure of people and graffiti, souvenir hunters etc has made it only visible at a distance behind a fence. I remember as a boy climbing all over it. I was part of the problem, but in 1954 the population of the UK was a fraction of what it is now and few people owned motor vehicles (we were one of the few who did) so places like Stonehenge you had to yourself.
    I drove past it whilst on a visit to the old country in 2019 and viewed it from the road passing and it is still most impressive even at a distance.

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  4. Built on the site of an ancient cemetery, Stonehenge was a “monument of remembrance,” he said, and an “expression of unity” that pulled people together in the pursuit of a common endeavor.

    They found people buried in post holes for wooden columns, in a giant circle around the ring. That doesn’t say “ancient cemetary,” it says “human sacrifice when building it.” Or at the very least, “burial coordinated with the building of it.”

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    1. It must have been very hard labour with the associated injuries and mortalities requiring suitable internment and perhaps meeting another spiritual requirement?

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      1. Whenever I see photos of Stonehenge, I remember Bill Bryson’s humorous quote: Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, ‘Right, lads!’ Another twenty like that…and then we can party!

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    2. I was born and grew up near Stonehenge (and went to Prof Pearson’s alma mater for my degree), and I can confirm the whole damn thing was built to celebrate Mātauranga Māori.

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  5. “Kamila Valieva sat crying, sandwiched between two consoling coaches” – there wasn’t much consoling according to International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach:

    When I saw how she was received by her closest entourage with what appeared to be a tremendous coldness, it was chilling to see this, rather than giving her comfort, rather than to try to help her.

    The BBC reports:

    Tutberidze, whose training methods were already under the spotlight, did put her arm around the young Russian while she waited for her score. But moments before that had demanded to know: “Why did you let it go? Explain it to me, why?”

    Bach said he was “very, very disturbed” by what he had seen when watching the competition on television.

    “All of this does not give me much confidence in this closest entourage of Kamila, neither with regard to what happened in the past, nor as far as it concerns the future,” he added.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/winter-olympics/60417450

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    1. The Russian coaches did not console Kamila Valieva. On the contrary, they received her coldly and reproached her harshly.

      Head coach Eteri Tutberidze is also more infamous than famous for her harsh training methods in the skating scene, reminiscent of ill-fated times in the Eastern Bloc.

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        1. Indeed! According to the BBC report I linked to at the start of this thread:

          Tutberidze has overseen something of a production line in successful young Russian skaters in recent years at the Sambo-70 club in Moscow – including new Olympic champion Anna Shcherbakova and silver medallist Alexandra Trusova, who are both 17.

          Before them, there was 2018 champion Alina Zagitova, who was 15 when she won gold and 2018 silver medallist Evgenia Medvedeva, who was 18. Meanwhile, Yulia Lipnitskaya, was 15 when she won team gold at Sochi 2014.

          They have either all retired while still teenagers or gone on a break from the sport with no return imminent.

          And from the way Trusova was speaking on Thursday after her silver medal, she may soon be another name to add to the list of early retirements.

          “I hate this sport, I hate this sport, I hate all of it. I won’t go to the medal ceremony… I don’t want to go,” she was overheard saying angrily before later composing herself at a news conference and adding: “Of course these were only emotions and I’ll think it over and later on I’ll take a decision what I’m going to do in the future.”

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          1. I chalked a lot of that up to the frustration of kicking complete a$$ on the technical part of the free skate program and still not receiving the highest score. It’s a “if this can’t win, what the heck will?” sort of exasperation. The woman did four (or five?) quad jumps! Two of them late when the judges are supposed to award more points for them! And yet ended up second place.

            Hopefully her coaches or mentors will point out to her that she DID outscore everyone on the free skate. Those quads did their job. The reason she got silver is because the other woman outscored her on the short program.

        2. Olympic champion Katarina Witt (1984 and 1988) has commented on the subject with the following words:

          “She’s a 15-year-old child who has been put under political pressure. The whole world was watching and she was a shadow of her usual self.”

          “Someone, her team or her parents, someone with responsibility, should have put her on a plane and taken her away from there. The way she has been treated is so irresponsible. She’s only 15 and she could only ever come out of this as a loser.”

          “She has the talent and the aura and she’s trained so hard. I just hope that she can manage to overcome what’s going on now and return, but I fear that the next 14-year-old will already be waiting in the wings to take her place.”

          https://www.dw.com/en/kamila-valieva-misses-out-on-figure-skating-medal-after-doping-controversy/a-60816293

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  6. I’d like to think of Kamila Valieva as a victim in this.

    The IOC is a completely corrupt organization and they and Russia (not that I think any country is innocent of this) have used this child cruelly and have now discarded her.

    Presumably Kamila Valieva has been grist for the Russian “amateur” sports industry since early childhood and I can’t imagine any child having the resources to handle this.

    The whole rotten edifice of the Olympics should be torn down, it is a disgraceful blot on the reputations of all the young athletes that compete.

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    1. I think, at the very least, the minimum age limit for competing in the Olympics should be 18.

      I also find it somewhat incredible that Russia is not still banned from international sport. They clearly have no respect for their athletes and still have a win at all costs, legal or illegal approach.

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    2. We watched it last night, and when her disastrous performance was over my wife remarked “maybe she did that on purpose?” I don’t know about that, but it was very uncharacteristic, and it does resolve the controversy over what to do about her medal.

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  7. The German language has become strangely PC over the past few years. I heard someone addressing a conference, and she referred to herself as (loosely translated) ‘a person of migratory background’ rather than a ‘migrant’ or ‘immigrant’. For a language where every noun has a gender (m/f/n), it seems backwards that they are now trying to introduce a fourth grammatical and personal gender (‘divers’ = ‘non-binary human’), rather than scrap linguistic gender entirely and use common gender, the way many other Germanic languages do (Dutch: ‘de’ is common, formerly masculine or feminine; ‘het’ is neuter.)

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    1. I should have read the Duden article above before posting. Duden mentioned alternatives like jüdische Menschen, Bürger/-innen, Mitbürger/-innen (Jewish people, Jewish citizens, Jewish co-citizens/countrymen). That surprised me for two reasons: a) it is not people-first language (terms like PLWA: ‘people living with AIDS)’ or ‘people of a migratory background’, and b) it places an unnecessary focus on citizenship (just like not all ‘senior citizens’ are … citizens; so what do we call elderly non-citizens?).

      If I hear the noun ‘Jew’, I sometimes follow up with the question ‘In what sense was he a Jew?’. The complexities of the question Who is a Jew? can be resolved by maintaining multiple terms for the various primary definitions: ‘a person of Jewish faith’, ‘a person of Jewish heritage’, and ‘a person of Jewish culture’ frequently, but not always, overlap. It’s nice to keep the noun ‘Jew’ as an umbrella term; still, it is ambiguous enough that I tend to avoid it. Being able to discuss Atheist Jews and Buddhist Jews (JuBus) is relevant here.

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    2. The Duden has been on a woke path since Germanist Kathrin Kunkel-Razum took over as editor-in-chief in 2016. Among other things, she is driving forward with verve the inclusion of gender-equitable spelling in German orthography, although this approach is rejected by a large majority of the German-speaking population.

      The Council for German Orthography, who “is the main international body regulating Standard High German orthography”, has also not made a regarding recommendation gender-equitable spelling.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_for_German_Orthography

      The Duden and Kathrin Kunkel-Razum are on an ideologically charged mission, and this is how it is perceived by a majority of Germanists and linguists from German -speaking countries.

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      1. I have had hope that the deeply ingrained gendering of nouns in German would be a defense against the awokening of the language.

        But, to the credit of The Duden, they added the adjective woke. (For those who need to know, it is declined like any other German adjective.)

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    3. Strangely enough, non-binairy people in het Netherlands do not wish to use the neuter grammatical gender ‘het’, but ‘hen’ or ‘hun’- grammatically plural and 4th 3rd case. This shows that the idea is Anglosaxon import, a direct translatio of they – not based on local practice.

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  8. Good thing cows can’t fly. Mostly a stunt but at least the plane did not crash. Would have been ground beef.

    I guess that Russia will attack idea did not have a time limit on it. What we are seeing for the first time in years is what really good diplomacy looks like. Especially considering the last president we had it is not something many have seen or recognize. They may still go in but it will all be on Putin as Biden and his Secretary of State have put the screws to the screwee. Yes folks, this is what first class diplomacy looks like.

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    1. I think you may be right about that. I’m now thinking Russia probably won’t invade.
      The longer he has to keep his forces deployed on Ukraine’s borders, bored, scared, homesick, and horny, the more disaffected they become and the more prepared the opponents get, on both the military and diplomatic fronts. He’s wasting food and fuel just to keep his soldiers alive while Ukraine is digging into the earth. And even in the modern era, infectious diseases like dysentery and respiratory viruses plague large deployments. Putin has even left himself an out by claiming he isn’t planning to invade in the first place.

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      1. Yes, to beat Putin at his game they have laid out his entire plan in public for all to see. He can easily run over Ukraine but when the Russian solders start dying and the body bags come home Putin knows he has lost in his propaganda plan. His plastic image in Russia is all he cares about.
        The European countries and the U.S. will put the financial hurt on Putin. He is nothing but an oil and gas bag.

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      2. I have thought as much for some time. Putin has been trying to get any real concession for an excuse to withdraw while saving face, but none is coming. So he is between a rock and a hard place now. Although their victory is rather certain, should they invade, they won’t be able to pacify Ukraine and Putin would be weakened politically. He has miscalculated.

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  9. I say the man with coat and tie with kid on his knee is their lawyer, William Kunstler. Abbie Hoffman I believe is to Kunstler’s left. (The judge’s name was Julius Hoffman which caused some confusion in news reports.)

    Best I can do. Over to you, Ken.

    Grrr! Auto-correct + clumsy finger = Morning. Need to finish coffee.

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  12. Here’s the Chicago Seven at a news conference on February 28, 1970. How many of them can you name?

    Used to be that I would always forget Weiner and Froines. But since The Trial of the Chicago 7 came out on Netflix, it’s a lot easier remembering them, along with the five more high profile defendants — Rubin, Hoffman, Hayden, Dellinger, and Davis.

    It happened that when the Aaron Sorkin movie came out on Netflix, I was with my siblings (in our first post-COVID gathering, for the funeral of the family matriarch). They’re a few years younger than I, and they insisted that I watch the movie with them, since (because I made it to a college campus in the Fall of 1971, when the antiwar movement was entering its final throes), I could fill in some background for them. I reminded them I was a 15-year-old heading into sophomore year in high school when the ’68 DNC took place in Chicago, but did the best I could.

    They also have it in mind that I was some kind of hippie. I explained to them that to straights and squares, I may have looked and seemed like a hippie, but to an echt Sixties hippie, I was no hippie. A poseur at best.

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    1. I agree Paul. There seems to be a small delay between posting comments and them appearing in the thread. Your comment appeared just after I posted mine at #14 below.

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      1. My comments appear instantly on the page but the email notifications of other people’s posts are what’s probably delayed. Glad to hear I know my ravens from my crows! 😉

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  14. I think the crow is a raven, Corvus corax. It is very heavy billed and generally thickset and what one can see of the tail is consistent with raven. In Russia the all black carrion crow, Corvus corrone, is replaced by the distinctively grey and black hooded crow, Corvus cornix. It certainly appears to like cookies!

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  15. Robert Oppenheimer’s oft-quoted remark, referencing the Bhagavad-Gita, of his thoughts on the occasion of the first nuclear bomb test:
    “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

    What he actually said at the time according to his brother who was standing next to him:
    “It worked!”

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  17. Re: the roll of tape: Cartoon I saw recently [think it was an old Far Side]: The Devil is handing out employee awards: “And for inventing the tape roll with no starting point…”

    Reply

  18. “But the Washington Post makes it into a three-hankie weepie . . . .”

    The Post’s breathless bloviation is most impressive.

    I have yet read the NY Times’s reporting on her to see if its breathlessness matches that of the Post, but today’s hard copy Times has two full pages consistenting of nothing but a picture of her in a posture of anguish. Wear it out NY Times!

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