Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili answers a question and gives an order:
A: Do you like this cat food?
Hili: It’s excellent. Write down the name and buy it again tomorrow.
.
.
In Polish:
Ja: Smakuje ci ta karma?
Hili: Świetna, zapisz nazwę i kup ją jutro znowu.
On this day:
1492 – The first grammar of the Spanish language (Gramática de la lengua castellana) is presented to Queen Isabella I.
1590 – John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.
1612 – The trial of the Pendle witches, one of England’s most famous witch trials, begins at Lancaster Assizes. [But hey, no dissing indigenous ways of knowing!]
1634 – Urbain Grandier, accused and convicted of sorcery, is burned alive in Loudun, France.
1783 – A huge fireball meteor is seen across Great Britain as it passes over the east coast.
1826 – Major Gordon Laing becomes the first European to enter Timbuktu.
1868 – French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.
1877 – American astronomer Asaph Hall discovers Phobos, one of Mars’s moons.
1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho allegedly flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers.
1917 – A Great Fire in Thessaloniki, Greece, destroys 32% of the city leaving 70,000 individuals homeless.
1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.
1923 – The first British Track and Field championships for women are held in London, Great Britain.
1940 – World War II: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain, takes place. At that point, it is the largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides.
1958 – Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita is published in the United States.
1958 – Brojen Das from Bangladesh swims across the English Channel in a competition as the first Bengali and the first Asian to do so, placing first among the 39 competitors.
1963 – Civil rights movement: James Meredith becomes the first African American to graduate from the University of Mississippi.
1971 – Vietnam War: Australia and New Zealand decide to withdraw their troops from Vietnam.
1976 – The Soviet Union’s robotic probe Luna 24 successfully lands on the Moon.
1977 – Steve Biko is arrested at a police roadblock under Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967 in King William’s Town, South Africa. He later dies from injuries sustained during this arrest, bringing attention to South Africa’s apartheid policies.
2003 – One-year-old Zachary Turner is murdered in Newfoundland by his mother, who was awarded custody despite facing trial for the murder of Zachary’s father. The case was documented in the film Dear Zachary and led to reform of Canada’s bail laws.
2017 – The first terrorist attack ever sentenced as a crime in Finland kills two and injures eight.
2019 – One hundred activists, officials, and other concerned citizens in Iceland hold a funeral for Okjökull glacier, which has completely melted after having once covered six square miles (15.5 km2).
Births:
1587 – Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke, first child born to English parents in the Americas (date of death unknown).
1629 – Agneta Horn, Swedish writer (d. 1672).
1685 – Brook Taylor, English mathematician and theorist (d. 1731).
1750 – Antonio Salieri, Italian composer and conductor (d. 1825).
1855 – Alfred Wallis, English painter and illustrator (d. 1942).
1900 – Ruth Bonner, Soviet Communist activist, sentenced to a labor camp during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge (d. 1987).
1902 – Margaret Murie, American environmentalist and author (d. 2003).
1906 – Curtis Jones, American blues pianist and singer (d. 1971).
1911 – Amelia Boynton Robinson, American activist (d. 2015).
1911 – Klara Dan von Neumann, Hungarian computer scientist and programmer (d. 1963).
1914 – Lucy Ozarin, United States Navy lieutenant commander and psychiatrist (d. 2017).
1920 – Shelley Winters, American actress (d. 2006).
1921 – Lydia Litvyak, Russian lieutenant and pilot (d. 1943).
1928 – Sonny Til, American R&B singer (d. 1981).
1933 – Roman Polanski, French-Polish director, producer, screenwriter, and actor.
1934 – Gulzar, Indian poet, lyricist and film director.
1936 – Robert Redford, American actor, director, and producer.
1952 – Patrick Swayze, American actor and dancer (d. 2009).
1957 – Denis Leary, American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter.
1961 – Huw Edwards, Welsh-English journalist and author. [Currently suspended pending a BBC investigation.]
1969 – Edward Norton, American actor.
1969 – Christian Slater, American actor and producer.
1978 – Andy Samberg, American actor and comedian.
Dead and never called me mother!
1823 – André-Jacques Garnerin, French balloonist and the inventor of the frameless parachute (b. 1769).
1850 – Honoré de Balzac, French novelist and playwright (b. 1799).
1886 – Eli Whitney Blake, American inventor, invented the Mortise lock (b. 1795).
1919 – Joseph E. Seagram, Canadian businessman and politician, founded the Seagram Company (b. 1841).
1940 – Walter Chrysler, American businessman, founded Chrysler (b. 1875).
1945 – Subhas Chandra Bose, Indian activist and politician (b. 1897).
1961 – Learned Hand, American lawyer, jurist, and philosopher (b. 1872).
1964 – Hildegard Trabant, Berlin Wall victim (b. 1927).
1981 – Anita Loos, American author and screenwriter (b. 1889).
1983 – Nikolaus Pevsner, German-English historian and scholar (b. 1902).
1990 – B. F. Skinner, American psychologist and philosopher, invented the Skinner box (b. 1904).
2009 – Rose Friedman, Ukrainian-American economist and author (b. 1910).
2017 – Bruce Forsyth, English television presenter and entertainer (b. 1928).
2018 – Kofi Annan, Ghanaian diplomat and seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations (b. 1938).
Judge Learned Hand – I have always thought that to be a great name!
“2019 – One hundred activists, officials, and other concerned citizens in Iceland hold a funeral for Okjökull glacier, which has completely melted after having once covered six square miles (15.5 km2).”
Note that funerals are religious ceremonies.
Note that all other citizens – assumed from Iceland – are left to be categorized as unconcerned – or perhaps concerned, but not religious – or perhaps a small secular ritual was conducted, but wasn’t widely reported.
I think it is fairer to say that funerals are ceremonies that have been co-opted by the religious.
Well played dialectical inversion. The resulting sublation has liberated the critical consciousness.
I must apologize for understating NASA’s current role in aeronautics research in my comment here yesterday. I perhaps implied that it was zero which as Van Rijn pointed out is not the case. It IS a small percentage of the total agency budget ($900M out of $25B and supports research and technology development spread across four field laboratories which also do considerable space-funded work). Readers can refer to the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate for information on current projects. Also the atmospheric flight mechanics knowledge and skills of aeronautical types is used for launch and return of space-bound missions and for flight in other planetary atmospheres such as the Mars helicopter and atmospheric entry, descent and landing of various probes.
The Mars helicopter has been a resounding success!
Indeed it has. In the 90’s there were a number of more conventional airplane designs competing to be the first airplane to fly in Martian atmosphere. At least one was flight tested in a balloon launch at 100,000 ft above earth to simulate Mars atmospheric density. These aircraft were designed to record data over a much larger footprint than surface rovers could achieve and with better resolution than orbiters. It was a nice collaboration between scientists who wrote data and Mars surface location requirements documents instrumentation engineers, and aero engineers who designed the vehicle. I do not recall what became of that project.
Couldn’t help but notice the first British track and field championship for women was 1923. 100 years on and the female athlete is still under threat and having to fight for space to compete in a fair competition.
Bungling athletic administrators having the starting gun aimed at their collective foot (or is that head) womens’ sports still hasn’t made it to the finishing line it seems.
Indeed! The Guardian is still trying to gaslight us on the issue of men in women’s, including this piece from yesterday which insists in calling Mboma “she” despite referencing “her” Y chromosome and internal testes… https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/aug/17/i-know-i-can-run-as-fast-christine-mboma-on-the-medical-minefield-of-world-athletics-dsd-ruling
D’oh! “the issue of men in women’s sports”.
I don’t mind calling Mboma she as it has no bearing on competing against biological females but what I didnt like was the general tone of the peice as if, she was the one being wronged here. All the hours of training she does against all the training a biological female athlete does… just to come against a biological male on some artificial program of drugs. With the inference that it doesn’t seem to have any effect anyway.
Until its sorted another resolution has to be found. What level of testosterone is acceptable though looks like to be on a sliding scale for the individual and THAT is a problem.
If only our cats could tell us what they want like Hili. Well, actually they kind of do.
Yes. And then they change their minds… ;o)
Hili is a true connoisseur.
This was posted at 4:28 AM?! PCC(E) needs to get some more sleep!
Matthew is posting the Hili dialogues from England, so it’s much later for him.
In the spirit of memento mori, I’d point out that it’s always later than one realizes, too.
I once took a “senior seminar” at University titled Memento Mori. Among other projects, we had to keep a journal with a daily meditation on our own demise. It was quite strange yet liberating, though I was in my 20’s, so mori was never taken too seriously…now I’m in my 50’s, and I still don’t take it too seriously. 🙂