Tuesday: Hili dialogue

July 19, 2022 • 6:30 am

Good morning to you on the cruelest day, and, in Britain, the hottest day. I hope UK readers can stay cool on this Tuesday, July 19, 2022. Appropriately, it’s National Daiquiri Day, one of Hemingway’s favorite drinks. Made properly, with good rum, a bit of syrup, and lime juice, it’s a fine drink. And only 131 calories!

It’s also National Raspberry Cake Day, National Flitch Day (that’s a bacon measurement amounting to one side of a pig), and Flight Attendant Safety Professionals’ Day.

Stuff that happened on July 19 include:

  • AD 64 – The Great Fire of Rome causes widespread devastation and rages on for six days, destroying half of the city.
  • 1545 – The Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982 the wreck is salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.

Here they are taking it out of the water in 1971: 426 years after it sank; it was remarkably well preserved, and the article on the ship is long and engrossing, with photos of all kinds of stuff they found in the wreckage.

Here’s the preserved ship, caption by Wikipedia as “The remains of the Mary Rose‘s hull. All deck levels can be made out clearly, including the minor remnants of the sterncastle deck.”

What it (sort of) looked like back then. Caption from Wikipedia: 

The Mary Rose as depicted in the Anthony Roll. The distinct carrack profile with high “castles” fore and aft can clearly be seen. Although the number of guns and gun ports is not entirely accurate, the picture is overall an accurate illustration of the ship.

She was beheaded after trial for treason, and was only 16 or 17. Here’s “The Streatham Portrait,” believed to be based on a contemporaneous one of Lady Jane:

And a letter in which she signs herself “Jane the Quene”

And “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, by the French painter Paul Delaroche, 1833. National Gallery, London.” Blindfolded, she couldn’t find the chopping block. But as the first link above notes, there are quite a few historical inaccuracies in this painting. 

It held that position for nine years, and the ship is preserved in dry dock in Bristol. Here it is:

We’ve all heard of this; it was the first big step in organized feminism in America. As Wikipedia says,

The convention’s Declaration of Sentiments became “the single most important factor in spreading news of the women’s rights movement around the country in 1848 and into the future”, according to Judith Wellman, a historian of the convention. By the time of the National Women’s Rights Convention of 1851, the issue of women’s right to vote had become a central tenet of the United States women’s rights movement. These conventions became annual events until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.

You can read the Declaration of Sentiments here. It was modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Here’s the beginning:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

If you know the Metro, that first line connected Porte Maillot and Porte de Vincennes.

Garin was the originally declared winner, but later the first four finishers were disqualified for undeclared reasons (some participants were accused of taking trains!), and the official winner was Henri Cornet.

Garin:

Cornet:

 

  • 1963 – Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 meters (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention.

Here’s a news video of that record-breaking flight:

“A week after the incident, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury.” He received a two-month suspended sentence and Kopechne’s family received $141,000 from Kennedy and his insurance company. His license to drive was also suspended for 16 months.

This is the Dike Bridge off which Kennedy’s car skidded, plunging into the water. He didn’t report the incident until the next day, which of course was deeply suspicious, and at the very least killed his chances of ever being elected President.

Kopechne, a Kennedy staffer, was just 28 when she died. Here she is talking to Robert Kennedy:

  • 1977 – The world’s first Global Positioning System (GPS) signal was transmitted from Navigation Technology Satellite 2 (NTS-2) and received at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at 12:41 a.m. Eastern time (ET)

There are 31 GPS satellites involved in the system at present; here are their orbits, but I haven’t counted the dots:

Da Nooz:

*Britain is melting, with a record heat wave inundating the country, and causing some havoc in a place that doesn’t have much air conditioning. Matthew reports nearly 100 degrees F (38°C) in Manchester, and here’s what else is going on in Blighty:

Much of Britain took an involuntary siesta on Monday as merciless heat scorched the country, driving temperatures close to triple digits Fahrenheit by midafternoon and threatening to smash records.

By midafternoon, Wales had provisionally recorded the hottest day in its history, with the thermometer in Hawarden hitting 98.8 degrees Fahrenheit (37.1 Celsius). The current record for England of 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit (38.7 Celsius) was set in 2019, according to the Met Office, Britain’s national weather service. At 3 p.m., the mercury in Kew Gardens in London hovered just under 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

For Americans in states that regularly sizzle, those numbers might seem underwhelming, but this is happening in a country unprepared for such extremes. In a nation known for its scudding clouds, frequent showers and temperate weather, the blazing heat was enough to hobble much of the country.

Some train services were canceled, while others were running at reduced speeds out of fear that the heat could cause tracks to buckle. Few homes have air conditioning. Britain’s Air Force said it had halted flights into and out of its largest base as a “preventative measure,” indicating that some of the tar on the runway may have melted, and flights into and out of London’s Luton Airport were disrupted after the temperatures caused a “surface defect” on the runway.

*The heat isn’t limited to England, either. The Washington Post adds this:

Heat records toppled in several places Monday, as Wales reported a new all-time high and Ireland registered its highest air temperature in more than a century. More records could fall as the heat continues into Tuesday, with Britain expecting temperatures of up to 106 degrees (41 Celsius) — far above the record of 101.7 degrees (38.7 Celsius) set in 2019. Temperatures hovered just below 104 degrees (40 Celsius) in many areas of France on Monday, but are expected to exceed that threshold in Paris and elsewhere Tuesday.

British authorities declared a national emergency and for the first time issued a “red extreme” heat warning for large parts of England, while France’s meteorological service placed a stretch of its Atlantic coast under the highest-possible alert level. Much of Italy’s north, which is facing one of its worst droughts in decades, remained under a state of emergency.

They also report that hundreds of people in Spain and Portugal have died from heat-related causes.

*More from another Post article, with a map:

This plot [below] from CoolWX.com ingests real time observations from weather stations and compares it to historical data; it is from 2 p.m. Monday local time. Anything in red marks a city breaking a daily record high; magenta represents a station that’s tying or breaking a monthly record temperature, and black circles with an “x” inside denote the matching or exceeding of an all-time maximum temperature.

A number of black circles can be seen in southeastern parts of the U.K., in particular around England, underscoring the unprecedented nature of the event.

Do you think Europeans will get serious about global warming now? Naaah, why should they? Nobody else is, much less the U.S.

*Steve Bannon’s trial for misdemeanor (but criminal) contempt of Congress began today with jury selection. Given that the judge (a Trump appointee) has rejected a number of defenses that Bannon’s team proposed (like calling members of Congress as witnesses), the trial should begin tomorrow and should be short: did he defy a subpoena or not?

The combined effect of the rulings prompted Bannon’s defense lawyer David Schoen to ask a question in open court Monday: “What’s the point of going to trial here if there are no defenses?”

Bannon’s trial prospects appear grim indeed, legal experts told Insider.

Any chances of skirting conviction likely rested in legal arguments that could have muddied the case for jurors. But, in response to the Justice Department’s objections, [Judge] Nichols has taken those defenses off the table.

“What we used to call this in my day was a slow-motion guilty plea,” said Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former US attorney in Detroit. “We all know how this is going to end, which is a conviction.”

Bannon pledged to make his prosecution the “misdemeanor from hell” for the Biden administration, but his continued desire to stand trial has potential benefits aside from the ability to hold himself out as a MAGA martyr.

“Based on everything we know about Steve Bannon, it will be a circus, because that’s how Steve Bannon rolls,” McQuade said.

Yep, and his hypertrophied tuchas is going to roll right into jail, though probably for only a few months at most. Some say he’s proceeding with the trial, rather than pleading guilty, to preserve his right to appeal a guilty verdict–which he clearly expects. But an appeal won’t work.

*I’m avoiding all air travel until fall based on reports both in the news and from my friends—reports of cancellations, delayed flights, endless lines, and so on. The Wall Street Journal analyzes the issue in an article called “Air travel is broken. Here’s why.” (I can’t stand another “here’s why” or “here’s what you need to know” article, whose titles are truly patronizing.) But here’s why: it’s a perfect storm when one thing leads to more problems all the way down to the bottom turtle:

It’s not just one thing going wrong. The system is under strain or breaking down at every link in the chain, and each of the problems at the airlines and airports exacerbates others.

A dearth of baggage handlers and security agents keeps passengers from checking in, leading to flight delays. When immigrations and customs at hub airports are short-staffed, passengers have sometimes had to wait on planes, an issue that affected 2,700 flights arriving in Toronto in May. All this means that pilots and flight attendants work longer days and that there is less time for overnight maintenance. Over time, crew and equipment shortages build.

. . .This year, carriers starved of revenue planned big capacity increases for the spring and summer. But some of the steps they took to shrink in 2020 have proved to be hard to reverse. They found they couldn’t staff back up quickly enough, in an industry that requires both background checks and training for new workers, sometimes involving time spent on flight simulators.

. . .Usually, there’s enough redundancy built into the system to limit the disruption from anything that goes wrong. The difficulty in hiring airport and airline staffers has meant that redundancy isn’t there now.

“The question on everybody’s lips is, ‘Where have they all gone?’” said Tim Clark, president of Emirates Airline, at an event last month. “There are hundreds of millions of people that have disappeared from the labor market.”

The news emphasizes a dearth of pilots; this article concentrates on the baggage system, as lost bags are at an all-time high.  I’ll wait until September to fly, thank you.

*Artist Claes Oldenburg died in New York yesterday; he was 93.  The NYT article in the link gives some photos of his public installations and sculptures, and Wikipedia has several more. Here are two of my favorites with the Wikipedia captions:

Shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA

 

May 1974, Clothespin is a weathering steel sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, located at Centre Square, 1500 Market Street, Philadelphia.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s watching birds grow up (I am, too), but her motives are different from mine:

Hili: There was a nest in the hedge.
A: It’s still there but the nestlings flew away already.
Hili: It’s sad that nestlings grow up so quickly.
In Polish:
Hili: W tym żywopłocie było gniazdo.
Ja: Nadal jest, ale pisklęta już wyleciały.
Hili: To smutne, pisklęta tak szybko rosną.

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

From Linda Calhoun, who says this makes you “laugh and cry at the same time”. Indeed it does. Mike Lukovich sure knows how to make a political cartoon!

From Paul: A cartoon by Dave Coverly.

From Doc Bill, a modernized Van Gogh:

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

The Tweet of God. Just what I want to hear today!

From Luana. Two points for this tweet. First, the more infectious the fungus (the longer the female is dead), the more it lures the male by emitting male-attracting pheromones. Then the male gets infected. It’s a way of getting transmitted when you’re at the peak of transmissibility. Second. we could derive a naturalistic fallacy: if penguins and clownfish show us that LGBTA+ behaviors in humans are “natural”, then so is necrophilia.

From Barry. This tweeter describes himself as an “atheist street preacher”:

From Tom. I don’t think the “bone” image serves any purpose except to get water all over the place. It’s not going to get your dog hydrated!

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. Get a load of those gorgeous feathers!

Why would anyone not let a quokka in???

I think it got up to about 38°C (about 100°F) in Manchester today: a new record high. And here’s one of Matthew’s cats out in the sun. It wasn’t long before he sought out shade.

See the Nooz above for this:

10 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. The Mary Rose wasn’t raised until October 1982 – I remember it well because I had just moved from working in further education to higher education. I was working that day in the education building where they trained teachers for PGCE and the TV was on, so I watched it live (and gasped when there was a loud bang and the cradle dropped suddenly).

    The education building was great to work in, they had loads of space and a fleet of BigTrak’s to play with… I mean, examine for their potential in teaching programming skills to young children.

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  3. Here they are taking it out of the water in 1971

    It was discovered in 1971. The picture is from 1982 when they raised it.

    The Mary Rose exhibition is currently one of the highlights of the Royal Navy Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth which every tourist in the vicinity should visit, although probably not today – my recollection of the air conditioning is “not very effective”.

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  4. The UK’s temperature has exceeded 40°C for the first time, with a (provisional) reading of 40.2°C recorded at Heathrow airport and 42°C likely to be reached before the day is over: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62217282

    My daughter Ana says that TikTok is awash with memes recommending that people leave out bowls of water for Goths – with their pale and pasty skin and dressed all in black, they just aren’t built for this weather…

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    1. D’oh – I forgot to refresh the page before posting and I see that Coel has already mentioned the new UK temperature record.

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  6. … and at the very least killed his [Teddy Kennedy’s] chances of ever being elected President.

    James Earl Carter sure wishes someone would’ve clued Teddy into that fact before the primaries began in 1980. And even at the DNC that summer, Teddy was still stealing Jimmy’s thunder by declaiming “the dream shall never die.”

    I was in New York that queer, sultry summer — not for the DNC, but to see the huge Picasso retrospective at MoMA. Pulled into Penn Station on a train from Rhode Island, right below where the convention was taking place in Madison Square Garden. I’d forgotten all about the DNC until I hit 7th Ave., which was curb-to-curb brass bands and straw boaters. Plus, there wasn’t a goddam room to rent anywhere in Midtown. Got lucky, though, and the Hotel Chelsea (which had fallen on tough times in those days) found me and the two women I was travelling with a room.

    Fun times, those days.

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  7. The combined effect of the rulings prompted Bannon’s defense lawyer David Schoen to ask a question in open court Monday: “What’s the point of going to trial here if there are no defenses?”

    That type of question is ordinarily a prelude to a defendant’s taking his lumps, pleading guilty, getting a two or three level reduction in his federal sentencing guidelines’ score, and seeking the lowest possible sentence (a minimum 30 days in jail in Bannon’s case, as to both contempt counts). The chances are nil, I think, that the judge let’s Bannon stay out of the hoosegow while he pursues a frivolous appeal.

    Buh-bye, Stevie.

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  8. I dunno, if this sort of temperature anomaly keeps occurring, sooner or later someone is going to start claiming that global climate change is happening. Then what we will do?

    Reply

    1. Turning off your air conditioning would be a good start.
      Nuking China’s coal-fired generation plants would be next. They might not like it though.

      Reply

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