Wednesday: Hili dialogue

July 6, 2022 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a Hump Day (or “험프 데이” in Korean) Wednesday, July 6, 2022. It’s National Fried Chicken Day, so perhaps I should make a run to Harold’s Chicken Shack #14 in Hyde Park, part of the great Chicago chain beloved by many. Make mine a half chicken “mixed” (dark and white meat) with mild sauce.

Update: the laws of physics dictated that I go to Harold’s yesterday afternoon after I wrote this. I haven’t been there since the pandemic, and, salivating at the thought of battered pullet, I drove to #14—only to find it closed until July 10. What a bummer! When you want chicken now, you don’t want to wait four days! I had black beans and rice instead, which is healthier but not nearly so toothsome.

Fried chicken is one of America’s premier items of indigenous cuisine, though other countries have invented it as well. Here’s a Harold’s dinner from Eater Chicago.  Like a rib dinner from the South Side, it comes with about 5 grams of cole slaw and two pieces of generic white bread.

It’s also Chocolate Day, National Macaroni Day, National Strawberry Sundae Day, National Dive Bar Day (which I dedicate to Anthony Bourdain),and International Kissing Dayj.

There’s also a Google Doodle today honoring the life and work of Charlie Hill (1951-2013), a Native American stand-up comedian who also wrote for the television series Roseanne. Click on the screenshot to go to a page of references about him.

Stuff that happened on July 6 includes:

  • 1348 – Pope Clement VI issues a papal bull protecting the Jews accused of having caused the Black Death.
  • 1483 – Richard III is crowned King of England.

Richard the Third, whose remains were found underneath a car park in Leicester:

Here’s the execution scene of Thomas More (played by Paul Scofield) in the famous movie “A Man for All Seasons”.

  • 1854 – In Jackson, Michigan, the first convention of the United States Republican Party is held.
  • 1885 – Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies on Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog.

Here’s Meister and Pasteur. The Wikipedia article doesn’t say if they determined that the dog actually had rabies (other sources say it was “made”, and that Meister was bitten 14 times), but at least Meister didn’t die, and later became a caretaker at the Pasteur Institute until he died in 1940, committing suicide as the Germans entered Paris:

The Arab army came from the desert side, and an attack from that direction was not expected. Here’s the capture from the movie, “Lawrence of Arabia” (also see this clip when Lawrence returns to Cairo with his young assistant after taking Aqaba).

The teams and the box score. Look at that lineup!

Frisch, Hubbell, O’Doul, Gehrig, Ruth, Simmons, Gomez, Grove–oy vey! Of course the American League would win!

Lou Gehrig and his fiancée Eleanor Twichell:

The Bambino crosses the plate after having hit the first homer in the first All-Star Game. Babe was not thin!

  • 1939 – Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany closes the last remaining Jewish enterprises.
  • 1942 – Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in the “Secret Annexe” above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse.

Below: Anne and the secret annex, where several people holed up until the Nazis arrested them on August 4, 1944. They’d been in the Annex for 25 months without ever going outside.

I’ve put an arrow pointing to the annex; the rest of the building was Otto Frank’s factory, which he transferred to non-Jews before they went into hiding.

(From Wikipedia): The Secret Annex with its light-coloured walls and orange roof (bottom) and the Anne Frank tree in the garden behind the house (bottom right), seen from the Westerkerk in 2004

Anne Frank in December, 1941, from Wikipedia. She rewrote her diary, intending it to be published after the war when she survived, though of course she didn’t. But her father Otto, with the help of others, published it, and of course it was immensely popular. It was only an accident that the diary was saved, as it was dumped on the floor with a lot of other stuff while the Germans were looking for valuables. It was recovered by Miep Gies, a family friend.

Jackie wasn’t taking any guff; he was a tough guy, which enabled him to survive his entry into the major leagues as its first black player. (He was razzed, harassed, and called ugly names by both fans and players. As for the court martial, after considerable legal finagling, Robinson was acquitted by a jury of nine white officers.

Here’s an AK-47, an assault rifle also known as the Kalashnikov, dating from 1954/1955.

  • 1957 – Althea Gibson wins the Wimbledon championships, becoming the first black athlete to do so

Here’s a short video of Gibson’s career, showing her winning Wimbledon:

Da Nooz:

*The Highland Park mass shooting in a Chicago suburb has claimed another victim. Of the more than thirty people wounded, another died yesterday, making a total of seven. They have a “person of great interest” in custody, but haven’t yet charged him although he appears to have bought the rifle used in the shooting.

UPDATE: Charges are being brought, including seven counts of murder. Robert E. Crimo III, if convicted, will spend the rest of his life in jail: no chance of parole.

Details from the NYT:

The man in custody after the death of seven people at a Fourth of July parade in suburban Chicago appeared to have spent weeks planning the attack and wore women’s clothing during his getaway from a rooftop after firing more than 70 bullets, officials said on Tuesday.

The gunman “exited the roof, he dropped his rifle, he blended in with the crowd, and he escaped,” said Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, who added that a rapid effort to trace the gun and review video evidence helped investigators identify a person of interest in the case.

Chief Covelli said the man, Robert E. Crimo III, who had not been charged as of midday Tuesday, had legally purchased in the Chicago area the rifle that was used in the attack. He had another rifle, apparently also bought legally, in the car with him when he was taken into custody on Monday evening about 10 miles from the scene of the attack, the chief said.

. . .The shooting came a week and a half after President Biden signed the most significant gun measure to clear Congress in nearly three decades, but it was unclear whether any of the new regulations would have stopped the gunman. He carried out his attack in a state that already has some of the nation’s toughest gun laws, but is bordered by states where firearms are much easier to come by.

The attack, a few minutes into a charming Fourth of July parade, sent the police on a sprawling manhunt that forced residents to shelter in place for much of the day, and prompted neighboring cities to cancel their holiday events. About eight hours later, the police in North Chicago, Ill., spotted the car Mr. Crimo, 21, was driving, attempted to pull him over and then took him into custody after a brief chase. (Officials had originally said he was 22 but corrected that on Tuesday.)

We seem to have forgotten the school shooting in Uvalde already. It seems as if we now have a news cycle in which a mass shooting occurs in the U.S. every few days and dominates the news for a short time until the next one. Two rifles at 21: is there no limit?

*And if that’s not depressing enough, the Washington Post reports that there have been over 200 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2022 so far—and we’re barely halfway through the year. That works out to more than one a day.

The shooting at a Forth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill. that left six people dead and dozens injured was one of fourteen mass shootings over the long weekend. There have been just over 100 since a rampage at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., left 19 children and two teachers dead on May 24.

Mass shootings, where four or more people — not including the shooter — are injured or killed, have averaged more than one per day so far this year. Not a single week in 2022 has passed without at least four mass shootings.

They’re on the rise, too, and we’re on pace with last year’s record through the fourth of July. A graph from the article:

*yahoo! news reports continuing stupidity from gun loon REPRESENTATIVE Lauren Boebert, a specimen of Homo americanus who embarrasses us all . But this is just another “dog bites man” story. 

Her take on the shooting in Denmark that killed three and injured four is below:

But there is social media pushback, and this time it’s on point. First, this is the first mass shooting in Denmark since 2015. One person pointed out that although Colorado (Boebert’s state) and Denmark have roughly equal populations, in 2021 there were 364 murders in Colorado and only 39 in Denmark. It’s the guns, stupid!

And there’s this graph below: 3.96 gun deaths in the U.S. per 100,000 people; the figure in Denmark is 0.141.

*Things are getting really gnarly for the Ukrainians, especially in the eastern part of the country, and there’s nothing we can do about it. At best they’ll lost only a large chunk of their country; at worst, the whole country. The latest news from the AP is that the governor of a large Ukrainian province is urging all its citizens to flee:

The governor of the last remaining eastern province partly under Ukraine’s control urged his more than 350,000 residents to flee as Russia escalated its offensive and air alerts were issued across nearly the entire country.

Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said that getting people out of Donetsk province is necessary to save lives and enable the Ukrainian army better to defend towns from the Russian advance.

“The destiny of the whole country will be decided by the Donetsk region,” Kyrylenko told reporters in Kramatrosk, the province’s administrative center and home to the Ukrainian military’s regional headquarters.

“Once there are less people, we will be able to concentrate more on our enemy and perform our main tasks,” Kyrylenko said.

The governor’s call for residents to leave appeared to represent one of the biggest suggested evacuations of the war, although it’s unclear whether people will be willing and safely able to flee. According to the U.N. refugee agency, more than 7.1 million Ukrainians are estimated to be displaced within Ukraine, and more than 4.8 million refugees left the country since Russia’s invasion started Feb. 24.

Yesterday while walking home, I had a flash or a premonition that President Zelensky, a brave and stalwart man, wound end up dead like many of his fellow Ukrainians. It was a horrible thought.

*Lots of people have sent me this link (thanks, all!), and it’s worth the short read to see how toxic and woke anthropology has become, particularly cultural anthropology, has become. It’s a harrowing tale from anthropologist Joseph Manson, who can’t take it any more and is leaving his department via early retirement.  Manson’s article, “Why I’m leaving the university,” refers to UCLA—the subject of yesterday’s post on its Asian American Studies horror—and also finds the school to be anti-Semitic as well as unbearably woke. It’s a litany of horrors as he watches a colleague (a liberal) get ripped to pieces by a militant group of faculty and students in his department:

But I can describe their public torment and humiliation of one of my colleagues, P. Jeffrey Brantingham. Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of (among other counter-revolutionary sins) “entrench[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation. This document contains no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembles a religious proclamation of anathema. As you won’t be surprised to hear, Jeff is not a racist, but a standard-issue liberal Democrat. The “referral” to the Vice-Chancellor never materialized, but the AGSA resolution and its aftermath achieved its real goal, which was to turn Jeff, who had been one of the most selfless citizens of the department, into a pariah.

. . . Not only was Jeff ostracized, he was unpersoned. None of the faculty talked about him, if they could possibly avoid it.

. . . A 2019 article by Liel Leibovitz, titled “Get Out,” argued that the increasingly open hostility of American universities toward Jews is inseparable from the universities’ increasingly brazen rejection of two values that, during the 20th Century, made them into places where Jews specifically, and curious, ambitious, and open-minded people generally, could thrive: meritocracy and free debate. In 2019, I thought that Leibovitz was exaggerating and rather overwrought. Everything that’s happened since has shown that he was right. That’s it: I’m getting out.

*I haven’t cited the HuffPost in a while, and that’s good because I don’t need to read that trashy and über-wokey site. But I came across a report elsewhere that sent me to a HuffP*st site to read about a tweet that’s got Bette Midler in hot water—on social media of course. Here it is:

Actually, that tweet got tons of “likes”, and H*ffp*st is just doing its usual schtick of blowing up Twitter squabbles and presenting them as news. So they report the dissenters, like these two, the first from a physicist:

They present no pro-Midler tweets. Note the implication of the first one that even trans men are not born as women but as trans men!

Here are the results of yesterday’s poll in which readers guessed whether Trump will be indicted. I think the percentage answering “yes” has gone up since the last poll like this, but I can’t be arsed to find out. Anyway, you see the vote, which has 55% thinking he won’t be indicted and 39% saying he will:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being a curmudgeon:

A: Can you smell the fragrance of the roses?
Hili: Yes, but it doesn’t excite me.
In Polish:
Ja: Czujesz jak te róże pachną?
Hili: Tak, ale mnie to nie podnieca.
And a photo of baby Kulka on the front steps:

**************

From Malcolm, who found this cat-shaming cartoon on Facebook:

From Divy:

From The Kiffness, a musical collaboration:

The tweet of God (an earlier one was removed):

A “faux” tweet from Trump, who’s been banned on Twitter.

This comes from Ken, who says, “Judging from his posting below on Truth Social, Donald Trump may wish to cast a vote in the poll you held this morning (Tues.) in the Hili dialogue.”

From Simon. Sound up; this is ADORABLE!

From Andrée, snooping ducks!

From Barry, who says “nice jump”! Indeed, though I wonder if the penguin could have gotten up by going underwater and then doing a fast swim to the surface to leap onto the ice, as in the second tweet below. Note: the content of the first tweet is NOT sensitive. They do that to my tweets sometimes, too. So click “view”.

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew: Some editor didn’t do their fact-checking at the New York Times (to see who Laura Chapin is, go here).

And the article at issue is this one by by Leah Libresco Sargeant (click to read):

Two of Matthew’s family moggies, photographed by daughter Eve. Ollie is the one that laid my nose open with a deft claw when I visited Manchester.

17 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I love Manson’s term, “standard-issue liberal Democrat,” and will happily self-identify as such.
    Like our host, I shake my head at how woke anthropology has become. Forty years ago I was studying to be an ethnomusicologist (path not taken) and was required to take a slew of anthropology courses. I loved every one of them and loved my anthropology professors, too. Back then, anthropology was taught as a science. I particularly and fondly remember my physical anthropology course, which turned me on to the wonders of evolution.

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  2. … until he [Joseph Meister] died in 1940, committing suicide as the Germans entered Paris

    As between the options available in 1940 as the Germans invaded, I’d’ve rather gone with Rick and Sam along the tortuous route set out in the opening scene of the movie, from Paris to Marseille then across the Mediterranean to Oran and on to Casablanca, in the hope of obtaining an exit visa to Lisbon.

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  3. Sounds like Brantingham was the target of an old-fashioned denunciation.

    I’d love a visit to Harold’s on Kimbark. Dark half with extra hot sauce, please. When I started college the Harold’s on 53rd was further East, near, if not across from the old Bibs ‘n Ribs. When they moved, a friend of mine got their old menu sign, covered in ages of grease. They folks who worked their looked at him like he was nuts for wanting it.

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  4. I’m not on Twitter, so I can’t verify this, but I just read that Bette Midler’s tweet had 90k likes and 25k retweets, and is likely to have more since those figures were from about 36 hours ago.

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  5. Strictly speaking, an abdominal pregnancy, which is a kind of ectopic pregnancy in which the fetus implants in, for instance, the mesentery, can survive to “term” if the place the fetus implants has an adequate blood supply. It is EXTREMELY rare, and it carries high risk for both mother and fetus, but such fetuses can be carried to term and be (surgically) delivered. It’s FAR from ideal, obviously, and such pregnancies are apparently associated with high rates of birth defects as well.

    Now, a TUBAL pregnancy, in which the fetus implants within the fallopian tube is uniformly fatal to the fetus and extremely dangerous for the mother–if not surgically removed, it is frequently fatal to the mother.

    Reply

    1. The original tweet doesn’t claim that an ectopic pregnancy can produce a living child (will die in first trimester, doesn’t say anything about possibility of longer term). The point seems to be that the writer considers any fertilized egg as a baby.

      Reply

      1. I was merely responding to Laura Chapin’s claim that “THERE NEVER HAS BEEN AN ECTOPIC PREGNANCY DELIVERED. LITERALLY NEVER.”, which she felt the need to put in all caps, but which is not an accurate statement.

        When people not just confidently but vehemently make statements that are not accurate, and in such a vituperative fashion, I think they hurt their own case, even when I agree with their general sentiments–at least if they’re trying to persuade anyone who is not simply sitting in the stands and cheering for one side or another.

        I didn’t find anything factually objectionable in the text of the tweet to which Chapin was responding, nor frankly much that was personally objectionable. The original tweeter certainly didn’t seem to be advocating not removing a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, they just seemed to think there was an attitude difference between them and some others who would do the same procedure. I don’t know how much such a difference could matter, but what they said wasn’t worthy of such ire, nor did it merit the statement that the piece should never have been published–at least not the portion shared by Chapin.

        Reply

        1. Yes and no Robert. Yes, not never, but -as you point out- the overwhelming majority (99+%) of ectopic pregnancies are in the fallopian tubes. When discovered, the embryo or foetus is dead. They are often discovered quite late, because hCG levels (used in pregnancy tests) are often quite low. And it is a surgical emergency. I find no real fault with Chapin, except she should have said ‘hardly ever’ instead of ‘never’.
          Note that an ectopic pregnancy destroys the Fallopian tube, and that the greatest risk factor for an ectopic is a previous ectopic, which would lave the woman in question sterile, since there are only two tubes (well, sterile at least before IVF and embryo transfer).

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        2. Thanks for the clarification. I was mostly responding to our host’s and Chapin’s dislike of the tweet. Your second paragraph is excellent (meaning, of course, that i agree wholeheartedly).

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  7. That raid on Aqaba cannot possibly have been as shown in the film. It shows the Turks having heavy machine guns and a cavalry attack in a narrow valley.
    Heavy machine guns are exquisitely able to mow those kind of charges down (heavy machine guns were the end of cavalry charges), so either the Turks did not have the machine gun shown, or the charge was over a much wider field.

    Reply

    1. The charge, in reality, was on a small Turkish outpost at Abu Al-Luson, which sits about 80km north of Aqaba, in somewhat hilly terrain. The charge itself was downhill. The British Navy simultaneously shelled Aqaba port, which was not as well defended as the film suggests.
      TEL’s troops vastly outnumbered the Turks, and were firing during the charge, supported by others maintaining continuous fire on the Turks from high ground surrounding the outpost.
      Also, the Browning machine guns shown in the scene had not been manufactured when the scene was to have taken place.

      In the 60s and 70s, it was pretty common for war films made in places like Spain, where the scene in question was filmed, to use the assistance of the military and the equipment they had on hand as stand-ins for whatever military was being portrayed. One can tell where many of the scenes for L of A were filmed by looking at which rifles they are using.

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        1. Certainly. Growing up with both parents being military historians has made it difficult to immerse myself in war films, without noticing all the anachronistic details. I have at least learned to not point them out to everyone around me while watching the film.

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  8. Boebert’s statement is ill informed and idiotic, and Bremmer’s rebuttal is perfect. Nothing much one could possibly add.
    Only stressing the numbers: gun violence death is more than 28 times more likely in the US with lax gun laws compared to Denmark with strict gun laws. So there, Boebert!
    [For US-ians: that is like losing 1000 U$D compared to 28.000 U$D, forgive me tghe snark]

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  9. Regarding Ulvarde, to the politicial Right the media is simply following ‘The Narrative(tm)’, since the shooter in the Colorado event is White their name/race will be shouted from the rooftops. In reality it’s simply the more recent event.

    More insidious conspiracy theories are already circulating online to the effect that the shooter in Colorado was an ‘FBI Drone’ (e.g. Brainwashed.) and that others wait to be activated.

    Reply

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