Good morning on the Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, May 22, 2022: National Vanilla Pudding Day. I can’t think of either that or chocolate pudding without remembering Bill Cosby’s ads for them, so we’ll pass along. It’s also Harvey Milk Day (California), International Day for Biological Diversity, United States National Maritime Day, and World Goth Day.
Here are some Irish goths. Does this subculture even exist any more?
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the life and victories of Ghulam Mohammad Baksh Butt (1878-1960),known as “The Great Gama”. The Doodle and then a photo are below, and Wikipedia says this:
[Gama] was a pehlwani wrestler in British India and a strongman. In the early 20th century, he was an undefeated wrestling champion of the world
Born in village Jabbowal, Amritsar District in the Punjab Province of British India in 1878, Baksh was awarded a version of the World Heavyweight Championship on 15 October 1910. Undefeated in a career spanning more than 52 years, he is considered one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. After the partition of British India, into the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan in August 1947, Gama opted for Pakistan, where he died in Lahore on May 23, 1960.
Undefeated! He did 5,000 pushups and 3,000 squats per day, often wearing 100 kilos of weights.
And here’s the Asian sport of pehlwani wrestling, in which Butt was undefeated:
Stuff that happened on May 22 include:
- 1455 – Start of the Wars of the Roses: At the First Battle of St Albans, Richard, Duke of York, defeats and captures King Henry VI of England.
- 1804 – The Lewis and Clark Expedition officially begins as the Corps of Discovery departs from St. Charles, Missouri.v
- 1826 – HMS Beagle departs on its first voyage.
- 1849 – Future U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is issued a patent for an invention to lift boats, making him the only U.S. president to ever hold a patent.
As far as I now, the “buoyancy device” was never put into use.
- 1906 – The Wright brothers are granted U.S. patent number 821,393 for their “Flying-Machine“.
Here’s one diagram from the ten-page patent, which you can see in its entirety here.
- 1964 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson launches the Great Society.
- 2002 – Civil rights movement: A jury in Birmingham, Alabama, convicts former Ku Klux Klan member Bobby Frank Cherry of the 1963 murder of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
- 2015 – The Republic of Ireland becomes the first nation in the world to legalize gay marriage in a public referendum.
Who was the first couple to marry legally in the world. Wikipedia says this:
While Glenn Cunningham and Adriano Vilar are often cited as the first same-sex couple to have their civil partnership formally recognised in Ireland, in fact several hundred couples were recognised together at the exactly the same time. The couple formed a civil partnership at a ceremony in Northern Ireland in 2010.
But here are Cunningham and Vilar:
DA NOOZ:
*Monkeypox! It’s now in 14 countries. It’s not as deadly as smallpox, but smallpox vaccine seems to prevent it about 85% of the time. But why is there monkeypox in places with no monkeys?
*The Washington Post has made a list of “The top 10 GOP presidential candidates for 2024, ranked.” The ranking is done this way: “As usual, this list takes into account both how likely they are to run in the first place and how likely they are to win.”
And the list in order (#1 most likely to run and win; reasons are given):
- Donald Trump (shoot me now!)
- Ron DeSantis
- Mike Pence
- Nikki Haley
- Tim Scott
- Ted Cruz
- Donald Trump, Jr.
- Glenn Youngkin
- Chris Sununu
- Asa Hutchinson
Any of these excite you? I didn’t think so.
*In response to American sanctions, Russia has just permanently banned 963 Americans from entering Russia, presumably forever (or until Russia changes its mind). Those banned include President Biden, Vice-President Harris, and “a wide-ranging collection of Biden administration members, Republicans, tech executives, journalists, lawmakers who have died, regular U.S. citizens and even actor Morgan Freeman.”
Ex-President Trump is not on the banned list.
*Here’s an almost self-contained news item penned by reader Ken:
Here’s a piece from The Miami Herald about how the “Don’t Say Gay” bill pushed through the Florida legislature by the dumpy demagogue in the Tallahassee governor’s mansion who has his eye on the US presidency — the law that offers rewards to vigilante parents who rat out gay teachers — is working out so far, even though the law doesn’t officially take effect until July 1st.
The demagogue is Republican governor Gov. Ron DeSantis, the law takes effect July 1, and is ambiguous. From the Herald:
The new law was both broad and vague, outlawing “classroom instruction … on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through grade 3” and stipulating these lessons must be “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” for all older students. But it was specific when it came to punishment: Parents could sue school districts for violating the law. It would inspire a wave of copycat legislation — Alabama’s governor signed a near-identical measure into law in April, and similar bills are pending in at least 19 other states.
The paper tells of Nicolette Solomon, a fourth-grade Florida teacher who by all accounts was beloved by her students. But they figured out she was married to another woman, and that, though ok by the students, wasn’t okay with parents or her fellow teachers. After suffering harassment for being gay, she quit teaching and says she’ll never teach again in Florida.
*The National Health Service has removed the word “woman” from three pages about ovarian, womb and cervix cancers, cancers that occur only in biological women. From The Daily Fail, which reproduces both the original and changed pages:
The original version of the ovarian NHS cancer page featured the line: ‘Ovarian cancer, or cancer of the ovaries, is one of the most common types of cancer in women.’
It also highlights the women who may be particularly at risk, saying: ‘Ovarian cancer mainly affects women who have been through the menopause (usually over the age of 50), but it can sometimes affect younger women.’
However, in an update sneaked out in January — which campaigners only uncovered this week — both lines were removed.
Instead, another line was added: ‘Anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer, but it mostly affects those over 50.’
. . .The same has happened to the NHS cervical cancer page with the previous version stating: ‘Cervical cancer develops in a woman’s cervix (the entrance to the womb from the vagina). It mainly affects sexually active women aged between 30 and 45.’
While the new version does feature a diagram of vagina, womb and cervix, no mention of women or woman is made.
. . . But the NHS has defended the update, stating it seeks to make the pages ‘as helpful as possible to everyone who needs them’.
Other quoted maintain that this obfuscation of language could actually harm women’s health by not directing vital information to the relevant audience (h/t: Ginger K.)
*I discovered that Harper’s has a “Harper’s Index” of interesting and fun facts. Here’s from the latest (sources given at the site):
Portion of female students asked to sit alone for fifteen minutes who will self-administer an electric shock out of curiosity: 1/4
Of male students : 2/3
That one mystifies me. Are males more masochistic, or more curious?
*As reported by the Algemeiner, the law faculty of the City University of New York has endorsed the pro-BDS resolution passed last December by the Law School’s student government.
At the time, the original measure was denounced by Jewish groups and rejected by CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodríguez, who said its call for an academic boycott was “contrary to a university’s core mission to expose students personally and academically to a world that can be vastly different to their own, particularly through international exchange programs.”
The CUNY Law spokesperson said the faculty endorsement took place on May 12, and did not disclose further details of the vote.
The cowards won’t even reveal the vote tally much less, who voted for or against this resolution. BDS is of course anti-Semitic, since its aim is the elimination of the state of Israel, and so now we seem to have have an official university statement to that effect. As we at the University of Chicago have realized, it chills speech for official units within a University to make official statements on politics, ideology, or morality. I wonder what the Jewish law faculty think of this resolution. (h/t Malgorzata). What with these statements proliferating, is it in the future of American Jews to have to seek refuge in Israel, just as European refugees did a generation ago?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron take their walkies down to the river
Hili: We have to see how long it takes to get to the river.Szaron: But we’ve been there so many times.Hili: Yes, but sometimes we go fast and sometimes slow.
Hili: Trzeba sprawdzić ile czasu zabiera droga nad rzekę.Szaron: Przecież byliśmy tam tyle razy.Hili: Tak, ale czasem idziemy szybciej, a czasem wolniej.
From Su:
From Not Another Science Cat Page:
From Jesus of the Day:
From Barry: Land mammal greets sea mammal:
Furry mammal meets non-furry mammal pic.twitter.com/j62GEZ8jSF
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 29, 2022
Bill Maher dilates on LGBQ+ issues:
If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them. pic.twitter.com/t3Tx23MOsu
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) May 21, 2022
From Malcolm. You’ll have to be a Brit to get this one, but I’m sure a British reader can explain it for us:
— Gin and Bacon (@GinAndBacon) May 18, 2022
Good old Patrick Stewart! A tweet found by Ginger K:
#Picard scene with his mother was sad. Especially when you know what Patrick Stewart went through as a child. His father had untreated mental illness & Stewart grew up in an abusive household
Now today why he's an advocate for Mental health & helping victims of Domestic Violence pic.twitter.com/uJLXhU0WY4
— el cucuy rojo (@nogoodchuck3) April 14, 2022
From the Auschwitz Memorial:
22 May 1900 | A Czech Jewish woman, Elsa Menzelová, was born in Prague.
She was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt Ghetto on 28 October 1944. She did not survive. pic.twitter.com/LYTqQRJIjZ
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 22, 2022
Tweets from Matthew. Lovely visitors!
Our neighbours popped in for a visit this morning. It was lovely to see them – just a bit hard persuading them to leave afterwards… pic.twitter.com/IeKf5CfXRG
— Cambridge Computer Science (@Cambridge_CL) May 11, 2022
Cats will be cats:
Liquid cat 😂 pic.twitter.com/kKVL0i4kWx
— CCTV_IDIOTS (@cctv_idiots) April 17, 2022
As I was just saying. . . .
Bought the cat a new chair 🙄📦 pic.twitter.com/w5NASayczQ
— 𝗞𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁𝘆 & 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲 (co-authors) (@TwosYourWords) May 19, 2022
Enlarge the separate pix to get a better look at this gorgeous longicorn:
Nocturnal beetling turned up a bunch of these beauties – the longhorn Pyrrhidium sanguineum. They were on a big oak limb that had come down in the winter storms. Tidily hirsute and that red is incandescent. pic.twitter.com/CZAz9o590E
— Ross Piper (@DrRossPiper) May 19, 2022
“But why is there monkeypox in places with no monkeys?” – it’s being spread by men having sex with other men. One theory is that t the spread is easier now that humans have less immunity to smallpox, which is closely related. Some doses of smallpox vaccine are being procured because of this.
Please supply a reference for the claim that monkeypox is currently being spread by “men having sex with other men”.
In any case, ‘monkeypox’ is a misnomer. The first known cases were in laboratory monkeys, but primates are not thought to be an important reservoir for the virus, let alone a zoonotic source of human infection. More likely rodents.
Here you go:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61527835
And another source, which mentions the same pattern of transmission in Spain: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/18/monkeypox-alert-spain-men-show-symptoms
Thank you
“You’ll have to be a Brit to get this one, but I’m sure a British reader can explain it for us” – The woman is Liz Truss and the mystery is how she has become our current Foreign Secretary, one of the four “great offices of state”. She’s widely mocked, not least for her speech at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in 2014: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y2V3PrfN98U
Yes, I’ve got plausible explanations for the other three pics, but I can’t explain bottom left. It works even better with Boris Johnson.
By the same token, why is there chickenpox where there are no chickens?
Or smallpox where there are no smalls?
That last quip in the Maher video about wanting to be a pirate at and being scheduled for eye removal and peg-leg surgery is brilliant. I think it’s time we started breaking out the numbers for just gays and lesbians from those for trans and plus individuals.
In the UK Allison Bailey, a black lesbian, was accused of transphobia simply for co-founding the LGB Alliance. She believes that the Alliance is needed to fight for the rights of gay and bisexual people, which she sees as having been abandoned by Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBTQIAP+ organisation. She is currently suing Stonewall and her barristers chamber for discrimination and the case enters its final week (I think) tomorrow.
She successfully raised more than £500,000 from around 9,000 donors, although the crowd funding platform she initially used was bullied by the usual suspects into taking her appeal down and she ended up having to create her own website to raise the cash. It’s proving to be an eye-opening case. Allison’s background and her version of events is here: https://allisonbailey.co.uk/
I heard about Ms Bailey’s campaign here at WEIT (and nowhere else before or since) and have contributed to it. Jerry, you have more reach than you know.
On the right we have “Don’t say gay”, and on the far left we have “Don’t say woman”. A kind of bizarre symmetry continues in the culture wars.
The poor immigrant women who had their first sexual intercourse, often non-consensual, at a young age—the very ones at highest risk of cervix cancer—are often not allowed to learn English well. They may not know they even have a cervix.
The trans lobbyists intimidating the NHS into this language either have no cervixes or are older well-off females who don’t have sex with men. They don’t have to worry about cervix cancer or they already know all about Pap smears themselves, thank you very much.
The thing that saddens me about this (along with “pregnant people“ and “chest feeding”) is its negativity. What wing of the the trans lobby wants to erase women? Do the XY-trans just resent that campaigns to prevent cervix cancer or promote breast feeding aren’t all about them, the way pressuring lesbian women to have sex with them is? Or do XX-trans just hate their sisters so much that they want to undermine these campaigns by making it harder for them to reach women at risk?
> Who was the first [same-sex] couple to marry legally in the world.
… in the modern world – and only due to public referendum. (Same-sex marriage had already existed in parts of modern Europe for 14 years at that point, so the referendum was really just rubber-stamping a fait accompli.) I find the canonical text is “Same-Sex Unions In Pre-Modern Europe” much more fascinating. Polytheist cultures have historically been much more tolerant of same-sex marriage than monotheist cultures have been – of course, there is also the standing question as to whether humanity, human cultures, or human governments need marriage in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-Sex_Unions_in_Pre-Modern_Europe
Not even close. The Netherlands legalised same sex marriage in 2001, and there were many other countries that beat Ireland to it.
I think the “first” refers to “in a public referendum”?
Prosecuted by Doug Jones, the former Alabama US Attorney and US senator who defeated granite-Decalogue-wielding, credibly-accused-kiddie-diddling, SCOTUS-same-sex-marriage-defying, twice-removed-from-office former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore in a 2017 special election.
Nice summation of Moore’s illustrious career. Whatever else they might be, though, even victims of rape, a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old are not “kiddies” and neither are the of-age teenagers he was accused of hitting on non-criminally just creepily.
I’m going to say that I don’t regard as credible accusations of sexual misconduct brought up decades after the fact supposedly occurred against a controversial male public figure who now is in a position of power from which he can perhaps be toppled. Victims of sexual assault never lie. But non-victims may.
Perhaps the credible accusation of kiddie-diddling comes from Sasha Baron Cohen’s comedy act where he (Cohen) claimed to be a foreign secret agent with a machine that could identify pedophiles, and so identified Moore.
Okay, let’s make it a credibly accused minor abuser — all of which occurred when Moore was a thirty-something Alabama district attorney cruising the local mall for jailbait. Here’s a pretty good summary of the information that lent the allegations against Moore credibility.
Of course, none of that stopped another credibly accused sexual abuser, Donald Trump, from holding a rally near the Alabama border in support of Moore’s candidacy even after the allegations came to light (as if Moore’s defiance of the US constitution as to the granite Decalogue and SCOTUS’s same-sex marriage decision while chief justice of the Alabama supreme court hadn’t already rendered him unfit for office).
It’s interesting that both Wright brothers’ signatures seem to be written by the same person. Any handwriting experts concur?
I think the “By” above the attorney’s signature indicates that he is signing for them.
Yes, obviously. Duh. Good eye.
Goths are still a pretty active sub-culture. There is a biannual convention of Goths at Whitby, in Yorkshire, where Bram Stoker’s Dracula came ashore. It is attended by Goths from all over Europe: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/people/whitby-goth-weekend-2022-all-of-the-best-photos-as-the-spring-event-returns-3666297
The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, nowadays a very dull dog indeed, was allegedly a Goth during his schooldays nearly 50 years ago: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/chancellor-philip-hammond-laughs-off-goth-claims-by-richard-madeley-a3295746.html