Thursday: Hili dialogue

Greetings on the first day of September, 2022: a harbinger of autumn. It’s National Gyro Day, a day of cultural appropriation but also of appreciating a wonderful sandwich. And September is also these food months:

National Chicken Month
National Honey Month (not the duck)
National Mushroom Month
National Papaya Month
National Potato Month
National Rice Month

It’s also National Cherry Popover Day, National Burnt Ends Day (especially toothsome when they’re from ribs), National Tofu Day (in the UK), Ginger Cat Appreciation Day, World Letter Writing Day (when’s the last time you wrote a real letter?), American Chess Day, and Emma M. Nutt Day, the world’s first telephone operator, who started her job on this day in 1878.

Here’s a photo of Nutt (see “1878” below) and then a photo re-creation from a movie; caption from Wikipedia:

Some history from Wikiwand:

In January 1878, the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company had started hiring boys as telephone operators, starting with George Willard Croy. Boys (reportedly including Nutt’s husband) had been very successful as telegraphy operators, but their attitude (lack of patience) and behavior (pranks and cursing) were unacceptable for live phone contact, so the company began hiring women operators instead. Thus, on September 1, 1878, Nutt was hired, starting a career that lasted between 33 and 37 years, ending with her retirement sometime between 1911 and 1915. A few hours after Nutt started working, her sister Stella became the world’s second female telephone operator, also making the pair the first two sister telephone operators in history. Unlike her sister, Stella only remained on the job for a few years.

The customer response to her soothing, cultured voice and patience was overwhelmingly positive, so boys were soon replaced by women. In 1879 these included Bessie Snow Balance, Emma Landon, Carrie Boldt, and Minnie Schumann, the first female operators in Michigan.

Nutt was hired by Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone; apparently she changed jobs from a local telegraph office. She was paid a salary of $10 per month for a 54-hour week. Reportedly, she could remember every number in the telephone directory of the New England Telephone Company.

Here I am feeding Honey by hand yesterday. The Princess of Botany Pond finally deigned to take pellets from me, after being wary of humans whole season (she showed up here about 6 weeks ago to molt; I have no idea where she was or whether she had offspring):

Stuff that happened on September 1 includes:

• 1532 – Lady Anne Boleyn is made Marquess of Pembroke by her fiancé, King Henry VIII of England.
• 1715 – At the age of five, Louis XV becomes king of France in succession to his great-grandfather, King Louis XIV.
• 1836 – Narcissa Whitman, one of the first English-speaking white women to settle west of the Rocky Mountains, arrives at Walla Walla, Washington.
• 1878 – Emma Nutt becomes the world’s first female telephone operator when she is recruited by Alexander Graham Bell to the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company.

See above.

• 1897 – The Tremont Street Subway in Boston opens, becoming the first underground rapid transit system in North America.
• 1914 – St. Petersburg, Russia, changes its name to Petrograd.

In 1924 it became Leningrad, and then went back to St. Petersburg in 1991.

• 1914 – The last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, dies in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo.

Here’s Martha (my dear) when she was still alive in 1912. After her death she was dissected and then stuffed and mounted. You can still see her at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

• 1934 – The first Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animated cartoon, The Discontented Canary, is released to movie theatres.

Here’s the whole cartoon, showing a canary who escapes his cage, only to find that the outside world is scary. (I still don’t think healthy birds should be caged.)

• 1939 – World War II: Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning the European phase of World War II.
• 1939 – Adolf Hitler signs an order to begin the systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and disabled people.

Below is Hitler’s letter, and Wikipedia’s translation is this:

“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are entrusted with the responsibility of extending the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, so that patients who, after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen], are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death [Gnadentod]. — A. Hitler”

• 1941 – The Holocaust: The Nazis execute 2,500 Jews by shooting in Ostroh, Ukraine.
• 1952 – The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ernest Hemingway, is first published.

A first edition, with one of Hemingway’s calling cards containing a message to Sara Murphy, will run you $18,500.  (Sara and her husband Gerald, rich Americans who spent time on the Riveria of France, are known as being the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s underrated novel Tender is the Night. 

The Murphys et amis just for fun. Caption from Wikipedia

• 1958 – Iceland expands its fishing zone, putting it into conflict with the United Kingdom, beginning the Cod Wars.
• 1972 – In Reykjavík, Iceland, American Bobby Fischer beats Russian Boris Spassky to become the world chess champion.
• 1983 – Cold War: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace, killing all 269 on board, including Congressman Lawrence McDonald.

Because of pilot error, the plane wasn’t switched to autopilot and thus overflew part of Russian airspace. A Russian fighter pilot, although he knew this was a civilian aircraft, shot it own with a missile.  Here’s the deviation from the flight path of Flight 007 and the place it was shot down:

Da Nooz:

There’s good news this morning! (h/t Matthew):

for a change some terrific news https://t.co/alYuTF0GTL

— Simon Schama (@simon_schama) September 1, 2022

From CNN (note that Palin uses a gun analogy).  There will be another election in November to fill the seat Pelota won, and I suppose Palin could win it.  As the Guardian notes, the election was close: Pelota got 51.5% of the vote, Palin 48.5%.

CNN:

Democrat Mary Peltola won the special election to fill Alaska’s House seat for the remainder of 2022, according to unofficial results released by the Alaska Division of Elections, halting former Gov. Sarah Palin’s bid at a political comeback.

Palin, the Republican Party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, will get another shot at the House race in a few months, as she and Peltola are among those vying to fill the full term in a separate election in November.

Peltola emerged as the victor Wednesday when Alaska’s Division of Elections tabulated ranked-choice ballots in the state’s first use of the system.

With her victory, the former state lawmaker will flip the seat held for nearly half a century by the late GOP Rep. Don Young, and is set to become the first Alaska Native in Congress.

“Though we’re disappointed in this outcome, Alaskans know I’m the last one who’ll ever retreat. Instead, I’m going to reload. With optimism that Alaskans learn from this voting system mistake and correct it in the next election, let’s work even harder to send an America First conservative to Washington in November,” she said.

*Well, get them sleeves rolled up, ’cause the FDA has just authorized covid vaccination #5 for those of us that have already had four. There are two vaccines about to be “in arms” soon: a Pfizer/BioNTech version for humans 12 and older, and a Moderna version for those over 18. Both versions are aimed at the most common variant circulating now: the  BA.5 variant of Omicron.

Now we don’t know whether the vaccine will be safe or effective, as human trials aren’t even completed. They’re basically winging it, but with sound reason: the same strategy is used every year to calculate the makeup of flu shots. We know the mRNA vaccines are safe, and the recipe should work; we just don’t know how well. What’s stunning is the speed with which this vaccination was made: the FDA dictated the formulation (presumably the mRNA sequence) only two months ago, and now tens of millions of them are already in vials, soon to be at a Walgreen’s near you.

To get the new shot, which should be available within days, you have to have completed at least the first two shots two months or more ago.

*According to a report at dankennedy.net supported by an article in the NYT, the Washington Post is tanking, with subscriptions down, as well as ad revenue, losses mounting, and owner Jeff Bezos (you knew he owned it, right) not showing much interest in the paper. The once-venerable paper, which brought down Nixon, may have to let go up to 100 staffers.

From the NYT:

The organization is on track to lose money in 2022, after years of profitability, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances. The Post now has fewer than the three million paying digital subscribers it had hailed internally near the end of 2020, according to several people at the organization. Digital ad revenue generated by The Post fell to roughly $70 million during the first half of the year, about 15 percent lower than in the first half of 2021, according to an internal financial document reviewed by The New York Times.

Dan Kennedy’s diagnosis:

. . . the Post ran afoul of some inherent contradictions. The biggest is this: It hasn’t really differentiated itself from the Times, which has left the Post in the unenviable position of being a less comprehensive competitor. The Times simply has more, especially in international coverage such as the war in Ukraine as well as arts and culture. The Post’s advantages are that it’s cheaper and its digital products offer a better user interface. Contrast that with the Journal, which really is different from the Times in its focus on business news and its hard-right opinion pages.

And this is true. While I don’t like the way the NYT sometimes slants the news, or what it chooses to cover, in general it’s got news that the Post just doesn’t have.  And Kennedy has a solution:

In the long run — and the short run — the Post needs to establish itself as the go-to place for a certain kind of coverage you can’t get anywhere else. Its political reporting is broad and deep, but so is the Times’. With a much smaller staff than the Times has, what opportunities are there? In the final years of Graham family control, the Post emphasized regional coverage. Without abandoning its commitment to national and international news, maybe the way forward for the Post is to reconnect with its local audience.

Well pardon my French, but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They’re going to get out of the hole by “connecting with the local audience.” That apparently doesn’t mean deeper coverage of D.C. politics, but more news from the surrounding area: local news. Not gonna work.

*And an op-ed by Mary Ziegler in the still-prosperous NYT, “The next step in the anti-abortion playbook is becoming clear,” is relevant to my next post, summarizing an article by Laurence Tribe about the problems with the Dobbs decision.  And the way forward is pretty clear: fetuses will be deemed persons, with all the right of non-embryonic persons.

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision came down in late June, a Georgia law has gone into effect defining a “natural person” as “any human being including an unborn child” and giving a $3,000 tax break for pregnancies after about six weeks. An Arizona statute that defines fetal rights from conception is being fought in court. Leading anti-abortion groups are developing plans for a federal abortion ban that could include recognition of fetal personhood, and prominent anti-abortion commentators have said that it is “not a far leap from Dobbs to constitutional personhood.” So-called abortion abolitionists, who favor punishing pregnant patients for abortion, argue that full recognition of personhood requires “the same legal penalty as murdering or being an accomplice to the murder of a born human being.”

Americans United for Life, long viewed as one of the movement’s more pragmatic organizations, is pushing a federal fetal personhood strategy, too.

Of course fetuses, which will eventually develop into what we recognize as a “person”, are not equivalent to children or adults, any more than an acorn is equivalent to a sapling or a mighty oak. Will we now have to prosecute those who use surplus frozen embryos to get stem cells for murder?

The problem with this view is that the only source of a belief that a fetus is equivalent to a “person” is a religious view: that a fertilized egg is somehow supposed to have a “soul” introduced at the moment of conception, and that soul is sacred—and somehow confers rights. But religious beliefs aren’t supposed to be privileged in what’s Constitutional, even though the U.S. Supreme Court is violating that again and again.

Nooz from reader Ken:

“Dinesh D’Souza’s follow-up book to his widely debunked documentary about alleged fraud in the 2020 election — titled (what with brevity being the soul of wit and all) 2,000 Mules: They Thought We’d Never Find Out. They Were Wrong. — was scheduled for release tomorrow, but has been pulped by Regnery Press (the publisher of many rightwing masterpieces). The reason given by Regnery is that it discovered a “significant error” in the manuscript. Regnery says that the new projected release date is October 25th.”

🚨NEW: Publisher of @DineshDSouza's book 2000 MULES has issued a FULL RECALL. I received this image from a book vendor for Walmart. The book's election fraud premise has been widely debunked.

I've asked publisher @Regnery why it issued the full recall. Will report. #Publishing pic.twitter.com/RELOFntJkp

— Nancy Levine 🇺🇦 (@nancylevine) August 29, 2022

We don’t know what the error is, but I wonder, given the book’s contents, whether it was some lie that could get D’Souza or the publisher in legal trouble.

From the Daily Beast:

A: What are you doing?

Hili: I’m looking with nostalgia but without knowing what for.

In Polish:

Ja: Co robisz?

Hili: Patrzę tęsknie, ale bez celu.

. . . and another lovely picture of Kulka taken by Paulina:

From Merilee, a Bob Mankoff cartoon:

From Nicole: