Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a dilemma:
Hili: I do not agree.
A: Who with?
Hili: With myself and it’s very annoying
In Polish:
Hili: Nie zgadzam się.
Ja: Z kim?
Hili: Sama z sobą i to mnie bardzo denerwuje.
Sunday: Hili dialogue
August 13, 2023 • 4:50 am
I confess – I have not read these as carefully before – this one is particularly intense (meaning, of course, very well crafted!).
I’ll bet Hili knows how lucky she is to be in a location where one is safe outside and in. Exceptional
I keep my cats inside because they would not be safe outside. The barn cats can go into the animal area after I shut the gates in the afternoon, and before I open them in the morning. 4000 sq. ft. is plenty of room to roam, plus they can come into the heated area through the cat door whenever they want.
I used to think that the house cats were safe inside. Thursday morning I found a coral snake on the laundry room floor. I managed to catch it and put it outside without getting bit, but it would have killed one of the house cats with a bite.
We have no idea how it got in. They are pretty small, though, so it wouldn’t take a gaping hole anywhere. A couple of years ago we had a newly hatched bull snake in the pantry. It still had an egg casing stuck to its head.
Coral snakes used to be a border species, but I think they are migrating northward because of global warming. One of the firefighters that we are catering told Faye that he saw one up the mountain where they are doing preventative work, so the one in my house was not an anomaly.
Scary.
L
I have strictly indoor cats, no cat door, but somehow a small garter snake once managed to squeeze through the hole where the screen door meets the door frame. Several cats were quite interested and let me know, but they seemed to be too puzzled to get too close.
May I ask where you live? I’m hoping the coral snakes don’t get into south central PA.
I live ten miles north of Mountainair, NM.
I think low desert animals have a ways to go before they get to PA. (I went to Wilson College in Chambersburg.)
But I have read reports of boa constrictors found in GA, SC, and TN. They were an introduced species in FL, released by “pet owners” who found them unmanageable once they reached 30 ft. and 70 lbs. So instead of turning them over to a zoo or having them euthanized, people just let them go, and they became established, feeding on local wildlife and residents’ small dogs and cats. Now they are a big problem in the southern US.
Coral snakes in NM used to just be found in the counties along the Mexican border. That area is lower Sonoran desert. We are upper Sonoran desert, a somewhat distinct ecosystem. There is a rest stop on the freeway near Socorro that has a boardwalk that you can walk out on, and when you look to the north, there is a clear line of demarcation in the vegetation from when you look to the south.
I guess the snakes don’t care about that.
L
On this day:
1779 – American Revolutionary War: The Royal Navy defeats the Penobscot Expedition with the most significant loss of United States naval forces prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
1792 – King Louis XVI of France is formally arrested by the National Tribunal, and declared an enemy of the people.
1889 – William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut is granted United States Patent Number 408,709 for “Coin-controlled apparatus for telephones.”
1898 – Carl Gustav Witt discovers 433 Eros, the first near-Earth asteroid to be found.
1906 – The all black infantrymen of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment are accused of killing a white bartender and wounding a white police officer in Brownsville, Texas, despite exculpatory evidence; all are later dishonorably discharged. (Their records were later restored to reflect honorable discharges but there were no financial settlements.)
1913 – First production in the UK of stainless steel by Harry Brearley.
1918 – Women enlist in the United States Marine Corps for the first time. Opha May Johnson is the first woman to enlist.
1954 – Radio Pakistan broadcasts the “Qaumī Tarāna”, the national anthem of Pakistan for the first time.
1961 – Cold War: East Germany closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants’ attempts to escape to the West, and construction of the Berlin Wall is started. The day is known as Barbed Wire Sunday.
1964 – Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans are hanged for the murder of John Alan West becoming the last people executed in the United Kingdom.
1967 – Two young women became the first fatal victims of grizzly bear attacks in the 57-year history of Montana’s Glacier National Park in separate incidents.
1969 – The Apollo 11 astronauts enjoy a ticker tape parade in New York City. That evening, at a state dinner in Los Angeles, they are awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Richard Nixon.
2020 – Israel–United Arab Emirates relations are formally established.
Births:
1756 – James Gillray, English caricaturist and printmaker (d.1815)
1818 – Lucy Stone, American abolitionist and suffragist (d. 1893).
1820 – George Grove, English musicologist and historian (d. 1900).
1860 – Annie Oakley, American target shooter (d. 1926).
1866 – Giovanni Agnelli, Italian businessman, founded Fiat S.p.A. (d. 1945).
1888 – John Logie Baird, Scottish engineer, invented the television (d. 1946).
1895 – Bert Lahr, American actor (d. 1967).
1899 – Alfred Hitchcock, English-American director and producer (d. 1980).
1902 – Felix Wankel, German engineer (d. 1988).
1914 – Grace Bates, American mathematician and academic (d. 1996).
1918 – Frederick Sanger, English biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013).
1926 – Fidel Castro, Cuban lawyer and politician, 15th President of Cuba (d. 2016).
1945 – Howard Marks, Welsh cannabis smuggler, writer, and legalisation campaigner (d. 2016).
1949 – Philippe Petit, French tightrope walker.
1951 – Dan Fogelberg, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2007).
1953 – Peter Wright, English historian and author.
1955 – Paul Greengrass, English director and screenwriter.
1958 – Feargal Sharkey, Northern Irish singer-songwriter.
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover:
1766 – Margaret Fownes-Luttrell, English painter (b. 1726).
1826 – René Laennec, French physician, invented the stethoscope (b. 1781).
1863 – Eugène Delacroix, French painter and lithographer (b. 1798).
1910 – Florence Nightingale, Italian-English nurse and theologian (b. 1820).
1912 – Jules Massenet, French composer (b. 1842).
1917 – Eduard Buchner, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1860).
1946 – H. G. Wells, English novelist, historian, and critic (b. 1866).
1971 – W. O. Bentley, English race car driver and engineer, founded Bentley Motors Limited (b. 1888).
1995 – Alison Hargreaves, English mountaineer (b. 1963).
2000 – Nazia Hassan, Pakistani singer-songwriter (b. 1965)[35]
[Referred to as the Queen of South Asian pop, she is considered one of the most influential singers in Pakistan. Starting in the 1980s, as part of the duo Nazia and Zoheb, she and her brother Zoheb Hassan, have sold over 65 million records worldwide.]
2004 – Julia Child, American chef, author, and television host (b. 1912).
2021 – Nanci Griffith, American singer-songwriter (b. 1953).
A wonder to behold the performance you Brits elicit from your sailors merely via the incentives of rum, sodomy, and the lash. 🙂
Hili appears to be having a crisis of confidence worthy of Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of M. Sartre’s first novel, Nausea.
I can eat some breakfast now that I’ve got my Sunday morning pretensions out of the way. 🙂
Looks like the U.S. is following New Zealand down the rabbit hole. Sigh.
The Biden-Harris Administration has formally recognized Indigenous Knowledge as one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States and our collective understanding of the natural world.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/news-updates/2022/12/01/white-house-releases-first-of-a-kind-indigenous-knowledge-guidance-for-federal-agencies/#:~:text=The%20Biden%2DHarris%20Administration%20has,understanding%20of%20the%20natural%20world.
At first glance that does not look good. It says nothing about separating this knowledge from actual science and that is also not good.
Well, crap. Thanks for finding this December 1, 2022 OSTP announcement Lysander. Looks like it is into NOAA and I bet nobody of influence has the guts to oppose it openly and risk a knee jerk racist label. Luckily, in this case, K-12 education policy and content is a state level responsibility. Hopefully this pre-enlightenment stuff will not enter the content guidance of the next generation science standards. While I really like uncle joe on so much of his job, I hate woke biden/harris on these issues.
Could just be a statement on output of a workshop last year which will be simply shelved and forgotten or could be beach head for getting some budget to move ahead with something that might actually develop some content recommendation for K-12 science and engineering. In any case, It certainly is worth keeping a watchful eye on it.
NSF has already started incorporating indigenous knowledge into its portfolio.
An effort to ensure sustainability of mountainous regions and peoples around the world, centered around local and Indigenous knowledges and braiding knowledges with western science, is moving forward with a $2 million funding push from a National Science Foundation award to Colorado State University.
https://source.colostate.edu/indigenous-knowledge-western-science-meet-to-advance-mountain-sustainability/
Oh HELL no…
Canada is getting into the act, too.
The University of Hawaii is among the universities and organizations awarded a $17 million grant to develop artificial intelligence using indigenous knowledge.
The six-year grant was awarded by Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund for an international research project called, “Abundant Intelligences: Expanding Artificial Intelligence Through Indigenous Knowledge Systems.” It will be led by Indigenous co-investigators and collaborators from eight universities and 12 Indigenous community-based organizations from Canada, the United States and New Zealand.
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2023/04/30/hawaii-news/university-of-hawaii-gets-grant-to-create-ai-with-indigenous-wisdom/#:~:text=Digital%20Account%20now.-,The%20University%20of%20Hawaii%20is%20among%20the%20universities%20and%20organizations,artificial%20intelligence%20using%20indigenous%20knowledge.
“Abundant Intelligences: Expanding Artificial Intelligence Through Indigenous Knowledge Systems.”
Laughed out loud. There is zany and there is ChatGPT Matauranga edition.
The award is out of the nsf directorate of social, economic, and behavioral sciences which, while not education, unfortunately, is getting close to the hard sciences. So that is a beach head of funding. I repeat….crap!
Note to Historian: today the Houston Chronicle has an obituary of Rice U. historian
Harold M. Hyman. Perhaps you’ve read some of his books.
Today Hili reminds me of the Sorely Unmissed former USA VP Dan Quayle, who once said that “I have opinions – strong opinions – but I do not always agree with them.”