Friday: Special Hili dialogue

Welcome to the last Friday of the year and the last day of Coynezaa! (It wasn’t a terrific Coynezaa this year as I was supposed to be in Poland.) Kvetching aside, it’s Friday, December 30, 2022, and my birthday. As for food days, it’s National Baking Soda Day. What kind of crappy food birthday is that??

From Marie:

Jacques Hauser sent me a nice shrew-themed birthday card (he works on shrews):

It’s also Bacon Day, No Interruptions Day, the fifth day of Kwanzaa and the sixth of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 30 Wikipedia page. But here are a few people born on my birthday:  Roman emperor Titus, Rudyard Kipling, Al Smith, Bo Diddley, Skeeter Davis, Sandy Koufax, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith (two Monkees!), Patti Smith, Tracey Ullman, Heidi Fleiss, Tiger Woods, and LeBron James. 

Matthew says:

Google Chicxulub crater, and see. . . .

Do it!

Da Nooz:

*Russia has just launched a new barrage of missiles and drones on Ukraine, mostly aimed at destroying Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

Explosions rocked towns and cities around Ukraine on Thursday morning and electricity went out in several regions as Russia launched what appeared to be one of its biggest strikes to date on the country’s energy grid.

The attack combined a swarm of drones and a volley of cruise missiles, the Ukrainian Air Force said on Facebook. Iranian-made exploding drones, which Russia began acquiring last summer, were launched in a first wave, apparently to bog down air defenses before the cruise missile strikes, it said, adding that its defense forces had shot down 54 of 69 missiles and knocked out drones.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said in a statement on Twitter that Russia had been “saving one of the most massive missile attacks since the beginning of the full-scale invasion for the last days of the year.” Authorities were still assessing the damage, though an official in the Kharkiv region said two people had died there.

For three months, Russia has launched waves of cruise missiles at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in what military analysts say is a strategy to plunge the country into cold and darkness and to demoralize the population. The volleys have come about every week or two.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said last week that another barrage was expected during the holidays. “With the approaching holiday season, Russian terrorists may become active again,” he said in a nightly address to Ukrainians.

This is a war crime, and someday I hope Putin suffers for it, if only by being deposed from power. I still wonder what would have happened if Ukraine had been a member of NATO. Would Putin still have attacked it, and, if so, would the other NATO members defend it, as they would be sworn to do?

*From the Guardian via Gravelinspector comes a pretty horrifying piece, “What is it like to survive an execution by lethal injection?” It details two condemned men who survived the attempt to kill them because the technicians couldn’t find a vein to inject the cocktail of three lethal chemicals. The executions were called off, but it was a grim scenario:

“With each jab, Mr [Kenneth] Smith could feel the needle going in and out and moving around under his skin, causing him great pain,” the lawyers recorded.

When no workable veins could be found, Blue Scrubs [names for the technicians] instructed the prison guards to flip the gurney backward so that the prisoner’s feet pointed towards the ceiling while his head bowed to the ground. Smith now found himself, curiously for a man of religion, in an inverse crucifixion.

Then the IV team left the chamber, leaving him in that position for several minutes. On their return, they righted the gurney.

Red Scrubs, swathed now in face mask and shield to protect himself from splattering blood, produced a large-gauge needle. He began piercing it under Smith’s collarbone in search of a central line straight into his subclavian artery.

After five or six jabs, still with no success, a deputy warden moved Smith’s head to the side to provide a clearer run for the needle.

By now the condemned prisoner was in excruciating pain, according to his lawyers. When Smith protested, the deputy warden clasping his head reportedly told him: “Kenny, this is for your own good.”

. . .In Smith’s case, the IV team’s labours failed. He was still in the chamber when the US supreme court gave its go-ahead for the execution, but shortly before midnight when the death warrant would expire the procedure was called off.

The prisoner, still alive but riddled with holes and profoundly traumatized, was returned to his cell. He had been strapped to the gurney for four hours.

*Here’s a bit of holiday cheer from the BBC via Jez: “Doncaster surgery sends cancer text instead of festive message“:

Sarah Hargreaves, who was waiting for medical test results, said she “broke down” when she received the text, only to be later told it was sent in error.

The group which runs the surgery said nobody was available for comment. The centre has almost 8,000 patients.

The first text told recipients they had “aggressive lung cancer with metastases”, a type of secondary malignant growth.

It directed patients to fill out a DS1500 form, which allows people with terminal diseases to claim certain benefits.

However, about an hour later people received a second text telling them it was an error and it was meant to wish them a merry Christmas instead.

Ms Hargreaves said after she received the original text while she was out shopping, she “felt sick to my teeth and broke down”.

*Did penguins pass the mirror test? It’s a test of self-recognition involving an animal with its head marked who then looks in a mirror. If it touches the mark on its own head after seeing a reflection, it passes. As Wikipedia notes:

Very few species have passed the MSR test. Species that have include the great apes, a single Asiatic elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, the Eurasian magpie, and the cleaner wrasse. A wide range of species has been reported to fail the test, including several species of monkeys, giant pandas, and sea lions.

I don’t buy this test completely, but it is indicative of something. At any rate, a report in Hakai magazine has the provocative title, “Penguins may have passed the mirror test.” The thing is, there’s no good evidence that the subject, Adélie penguins, did indeed pass the test—there was no real sign of self-awareness when the penguins looked at stickers on the mirror at head level (they’d be expected to touch their own heads) or had to wear bibs. Despite that, the scientists are trying to add penguins to the group of species that “passed”. They’ll have to do a lot better than that!

*As expected, soccer legend Pelé died yesterday at a hospital in São Paulo. He was 82, and had terminal cancer.

*Remember the fracas at Hamline University, which fired a professor for simply showing old paintings of Muhammad (depicting his face or body) in class? Well, now FIRE has got into the act:  (h/t cesar)

As PEN America said last week, this is “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.”

Hamline reportedly justified dismissing the instructor based on concerns about “Islamophobia,” as many Muslims believe Muhammad should not be depicted in any way. However, blanket bans on displaying pedagogically relevant material are not acceptable at a university that commits to academic freedom.

FIRE wrote Hamline urging it to reinstate the instructor.

You can see their letter here. Here’s a excerpt:

Hamline’s nonrenewal of the instructor for showing an image of Muhammad violates the instructor’s pedagogical autonomy—protected by basic tenets of academic freedom—to determine whether and how to introduce or approach material that may be challenging, upsetting, or even deeply offensive to some. An instructor’s right to navigate difficult material—like whether to display a historical painting of Muhammad when many Muslims believe Muhammad “should not be pictured in any way”—is well within Hamline’s commitment to protect academic speech that may “potentially be unpopular and unsettling.” Hamline’s policy also reflects nation’s broader commitment to academic freedom. In warning against “laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom,” the Supreme Court called academic freedom “a special concern to the First Amendment” and a principle “of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.”

. . . Lecturers, librarians, researchers, and other contingent faculty members’ expressive rights therefore depend on their institutions’ commitments to refrain from using contract renewals  as a vehicle to respond to criticism or unpopular speech. While an institution may generally decline to renew a contract for a good reason, a poor reason, or no reason at all, it cannot do so
for a retaliatory reason, including retaliation for the expression of protected speech. The breathing room afforded classroom discussion depends increasingly on institutions’ in-practice commitment to uphold their promises of academic freedom, and to zealously guard against signaling that particular discussions, language, or materials may risk nonrenewal.

If Hamline doesn’t back down, I smell a lawsuit.

*Quick news: a NYT op-ed called “Poetry died 100 years ago this month.” Why? Because that’s when Eliot published “The Waste Land,” which, according to author Matthew Walther, made further poetic progress impossible.

The problem is not that Eliot put poetry on the wrong track. It’s that he went as far down that track as anyone could, exhausting its possibilities and leaving little or no work for those who came after him. It is precisely this mystique of belatedness that is the source of Eliot’s considerable power. What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.

I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.

Walther’s pretty much right, though Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney are nothing to sniff at. As for the stuff that passes for “poetry” these days, I can’t get excited. Like rock music, it’s had its day and will wither away.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there’s a special Hili for me, and even a title: “Birthday Hili”!:

A: Hili, get out of this wardrobe at once.

Hili: I don’t want to. Jerry was supposed to be here but everything went wrong and now I have to give him birthday wishes from a distance.

Happy Birthday, Jerry.

Ja: Hili, wyjdź wreszcie z szafy.

Hili: Nie chcę, Jerry miał tu być, ale wszystko się pokręciło i muszę mu składać życzenia na odległość.

Happy Birthday, Jerry.

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

From the FB Page Religion Poisons Everything:

From Anna, a Dave Blazek cartoon:

From Facebook. I bet this is the place in St. Ives, Cornwall, where a seagull nicked my pasty:

Two tweets/toots from God on Mastodon:

From Masih: More protests in Iran:

Today, thousands of people in #Semirom gathered to pay their respect to protester #AliAbbasi, killed by the regime 40 days ago. Iranians took control of their city from the regime and chanted slogans. Ali had just finished his military service #MahsaAminipic.twitter.com/YG48eguXWg

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 29, 2022

From the Divine Sarah (note Baddiel’s “Schrödinger’s Whites” theory of Judaism):

(All y’all really have to do is ask a Jew) pic.twitter.com/wV7TBpchQZ

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) December 26, 2022

From the Auschwitz Memorial, two things to remember on this day:

Other prisoners hanged during the execution on 30 December 1944 were: a Pole Piotr Piąty and Austrians: Ernst Burger, Rudolf Friemel (in the picture), and Ludwig Vesely. They tried to escape from the camp on 27 October 1944. 2/3 pic.twitter.com/KAoZ7NoaPf

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 30, 2022

Tweets from Professor Cobb. What a beautiful baby bird this is! I’d give anything to weigh it!

A struggle to weigh a 97-day-old baby emperor penguin. pic.twitter.com/2Bq1wicybb

— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) December 28, 2022

Another penguin tweet, and I think I posted this a while back. It’s a cliffhanger, but ends up well:

Broken ice and a lone penguin make for a thrilling adventure.pic.twitter.com/ehx1FqN9pE

— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) December 28, 2022

A bizarre story of deceit and Photoshopping; follow the thread:

Okay, so #Receptiogate is trending in multiple countries. If you missed the beginning of this (still unfolding) drama over plagiarized research, fake research institutes, and medieval manuscripts, here's a compilation to get you started with your bowl of popcorn. ⬇️🍿 pic.twitter.com/BkRO34Ejju

— Dr. Paula R. Curtis (@paularcurtis) December 28, 2022

Look at the one in Wales!

#Map shows weirdest place names in #UK. My favorites are #Plwmp #Crackpot
and #GreatSnoring. Source: https://t.co/4HES44q2mC pic.twitter.com/7BT4KPQSV0

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) December 28, 2022