From Jerry: a parsing of duck language for chickens; cartoon from Gary Larson’s The Far Side:
Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are not synchronised.
Szaron: I’m thinking.
Hili: Leave me alone. I’m asleep.
In Polish:
Szaron: Myślę.
Hili: Daj mi spokój, śpię.
On this day:
1040 – King Duncan I is killed in battle against his first cousin and rival Macbeth. The latter succeeds him as King of Scotland.
1880 – Construction of Cologne Cathedral, the most famous landmark in Cologne, Germany, is completed.
1885 – Japan’s first patent is issued to the inventor of a rust-proof paint.
1893 – France becomes the first country to introduce motor vehicle registration.
1901 – The first claimed powered flight, by Gustave Whitehead in his Number 21.
1920 – The 1920 Summer Olympics, having started four months earlier, officially open in Antwerp, Belgium, with the newly-adopted Olympic flag and the Olympic oath being raised and taken at the Opening Ceremony for the first time in Olympic history.
1935 – Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, creating a government pension system for the retired.
1936 – Rainey Bethea is hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in the last known public execution in the United States.
1947 – Pakistan gains independence from the British Empire.
1967 – UK Marine Broadcasting Offences Act declares participation in offshore pirate radio illegal. [Dad was briefly a pirate DJ, though before it was illegal.]
1969 – The Troubles: British troops are deployed in Northern Ireland as political and sectarian violence breaks out, marking the start of the 37-year Operation Banner.
1980 – Lech Wałęsa leads strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland shipyards.
1994 – Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as “Carlos the Jackal”, is captured.
2013 – Egypt declares a state of emergency as security forces kill hundreds of demonstrators supporting former president Mohamed Morsi.
2015 – The US Embassy in Havana, Cuba re-opens after 54 years of being closed when Cuba–United States relations were broken off.
Births:
1802 – Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist (d. 1838).
1814 – Charlotte Fowler Wells, American phrenologist and publisher (d. 1901).
1848 – Margaret Lindsay Huggins, Anglo-Irish astronomer and author (d. 1915).
1851 – Doc Holliday, American dentist and gambler (d. 1887).
1867 – John Galsworthy, English novelist and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1933).
1881 – Francis Ford, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1953).
1912 – Frank Oppenheimer, American physicist and academic (d. 1985).
1941 – David Crosby, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2023).
1945 – Steve Martin, American actor, comedian, musician, producer, and screenwriter.
1945 – Wim Wenders, German director, producer, and screenwriter.
1947 – Maddy Prior, English folk singer.
1950 – Gary Larson, American cartoonist.
1953 – James Horner, American composer and conductor (d. 2015).
1966 – Halle Berry, American model, actress, and producer.
1969 – Tracy Caldwell Dyson, American chemist and astronaut. [She has completed three spacewalks, logging more than 22 hrs of extravehicular activity and is scheduled to return to space in March 2024 for a third time.]
Dive through the clouds
With a scream really loud
Hold you head proud
And wind up in a shroud
1922 – Rebecca Cole, American physician and social reformer (b. 1846).
1951 – William Randolph Hearst, American publisher and politician, founded the Hearst Corporation (b. 1863).
1956 – Bertolt Brecht, German poet, playwright, and director (b. 1898).
1958 – Frédéric Joliot-Curie, French physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1900).
1984 – J. B. Priestley, English novelist and playwright (b. 1894).
1988 – Robert Calvert, South African-English singer-songwriter and playwright (b. 1945). [Best known for his work with Hawkwind, but his solo album Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (1974) is excellent.]
1988 – Enzo Ferrari, Italian race car driver and businessman, founded Ferrari (b. 1898).
2020 – Julian Bream, English classical guitarist and lutenist (b. 1933).
Thank you for the note on Gustave Whitehead and his number 21. I read several historical books centered on accounts of the Wright brothers during the 2003 centennial celebration of their first flight, I do not remember mentions of Whitehead. There were discussions of Langley’s efforts, but I do not recall Whitehead….though he may have been discussed and I just do not recall it now, twenty years later. Regardless of who achieved the first phenomenon, it does seem clear that the Wrights persevered to engineer the first practical heavier than air controlled-flight machine…the prototype of modern airplanes.
The Wright brothers’ plane achieved sustained powered flight with a human on board, no assistance on take off and with complete control in three dimensions. They solved all the problems of powered flight and so they deserve the accolade in my opinion. Also, the witness statements are less sketchy.
And here is a video making the case for the Wright Brothers.
Gustav Whitehead vs. The Wrights
Another person born on August 14 was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Russell Baker. Here is a quote from him:
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. -Russell Baker, columnist and author (14 Aug 1925-2019)
When I began reading the NYT on a daily basis as a college student in the 1970s, Baker’s “Observer” column was a staple of our nation’s newspaper of record’s op-ed pages. He was nothing if not a graceful prose stylist.
I recall taking an English Comp course in which a fair amount of class time was devoted to parsing Baker’s pieces.
Cats like to jam their head into something when they sleep, like Hili is doing here. That is the really hard sleep.
This change in the Hili Dialogue is happening while I experience a certain unsettlement of mind…
Correlation is not causation
Correlation is not causation
Correlation is not causation
[ breathe]
Beginning duck reminds me of having to help my daughter diagram sentences, which is something I’d never learned to do in school.
When I attended parochial grade school in the 1960s, the nuns were sticklers for learning to diagram sentences. I thought that, these days, it had become something of a lost art.
“When I attended parochial grade school in the 1960s, the nuns were sticklers for learning to diagram sentences.”
Ditto for the ’50s, and I loved it–all those words interacting with one another like children on a jungle gym set, some swinging on swings, some sliding down slides, some playing on the monkey bars, all happy, all contributing to the scene—that is, the sentence. More than any other exercise, diagramming sentences impressed upon me the importance of each word having its proper place and doing its proper job, sort of like Ricky Gervais’s dogs: “You like modifying nouns? That’s your job!”
The duck cartoon reminded me of perhaps one of the most significant presentations given at an AAAS convention, Doug Zongker’s groundbreaking “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken.”
Not sure if I should link, but a search of “chicken chicken chicken” will bring it up on YouTube.
I was especially impressed by his third pullet point
Can we talk about how accurate the comic is? The tip of a stegosaurus’ tail is actually named a “Thagomizer” in honor of a panel that Gary Larson did.
In 1989 the University of Chicago named a new Louse species after him as well