PCC(E) is in Israel, recovering from his journey.
Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili is contemplating the changing seasons:
Hili: We are entering into a season of falling apples.
A: Does it scare you?
Hili: No, but I’m checking whether anybody is sitting under the tree.
.
.
In Polish:
Hili: Znów wkraczamy w sezon spadania jabłek.
Ja: Straszą cię?
Hili: Nie, ale sprawdzam czy nikt nie siedzi pod drzewem.
What’s the E for in PCC(E)?
(Emeritus).
“Emeritus” – Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) since his retirement and assumption of emeritus status on the U of Chicago faculty.
Hili speaking of apples. There is a hedgerow behind our place and it can be a bother. Lots of hedge apples falling in our yard. I just throw them back.
And there you have, in one throw over the hedge, the interplay of the variability of outcome that comes from sexual reproduction, versus the relative consistency you get from planting monocultures of clones (grafted branches, which self-fertilize by overwhelming numbers). The difference between flies and bees, if you want (though the analogy isn’t perfect).
On this day:
1192 – The Treaty of Jaffa is signed between Richard I of England and Saladin, leading to the end of the Third Crusade.
1666 – The Great Fire of London breaks out and burns for three days, destroying 10,000 buildings, including Old St Paul’s Cathedral.
1752 – Great Britain, along with its overseas possessions, adopts the Gregorian calendar.
1789 – The United States Department of the Treasury is founded.
1792 – During what became known as the September Massacres of the French Revolution, rampaging mobs slaughter three Roman Catholic bishops, more than two hundred priests, and prisoners believed to be royalist sympathizers.
1859 – The Carrington Event is the strongest geomagnetic storm on record.
1885 – Rock Springs massacre: In Rock Springs, Wyoming, 150 white miners, who are struggling to unionize so they could strike for better wages and work conditions, attack their Chinese fellow workers killing 28, wounding 15 and forcing several hundred more out of town.
1901 – Vice President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt utters the famous phrase, “Speak softly and carry a big stick” at the Minnesota State Fair.
1923 – Kantō Massacre: Amid rumors that Koreans had been conducting acts of sabotage in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, lynch mobs of Japanese begin massacring thousands of civilians over the course of several weeks, mainly ethnic minorities such as Koreans and Chinese.
1935 – The Labor Day Hurricane, the most intense hurricane to strike the United States, makes landfall at Long Key, Florida, killing at least 400.
1939 – World War II: Following the start of the invasion of Poland the previous day, the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) is annexed by Nazi Germany.
1945 – World War II: The Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed by Japan and the major warring powers aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
1960 – The first election of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. The Tibetan community observes this date as Democracy Day.
1984 – Seven people are shot and killed and 12 wounded in the Milperra massacre, a shootout between the rival motorcycle gangs Bandidos and Comancheros in Sydney, Australia.
1987 – In Moscow, the trial begins for 19-year-old pilot Mathias Rust, who flew his Cessna airplane into Red Square in May.
1990 – Transnistria is unilaterally proclaimed a Soviet republic; the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev declares the decision null and void.
1998 – The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda finds Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide.
2008 – Google launches its Google Chrome web browser.
Births:
1805 – Esteban Echeverría, Argentinian poet and author (d. 1851).
1820 – Lucretia Peabody Hale, American journalist and author (d. 1900).
1873 – Lily Poulett-Harris, Australian cricketer and educator (d. 1897).
1910 – Donald Watson, English activist, founded the Vegan Society (d. 2005).
1917 – Laurindo Almeida, Brazilian-American guitarist and composer (d. 1995). [He and Bud Shank were pioneers in the creation of bossa nova. Almeida was the first guitarist to receive Grammy Awards for both classical and jazz performances. His discography encompasses more than a hundred recordings over five decades.]
1928 – Horace Silver, American pianist and composer (d. 2014).
1944 – Janet Simpson, English sprinter (d. 2010).
1946 – Marty Grebb, American keyboardist, guitarist, saxophonist, and music producer/arranger (d. 2020).
1946 – Billy Preston, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor (d. 2006).
1948 – Christa McAuliffe, American educator and astronaut (d. 1986).
1949 – Moira Stuart, British broadcaster.
1950 – Michael Rother, German guitarist, keyboard player, and songwriter. [Best known for being a founding member of the influential bands Neu! and Harmonia, and an early member of the band Kraftwerk.]
1951 – Mik Kaminski, English musician, rock violinist. [A member if the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), hence the “rock violinist” label.]
1957 – Steve Porcaro, American keyboard player and songwriter.
1962 – Keir Starmer, English lawyer and politician, Leader of the Labour Party. [He has recently gone from from saying that “it is wrong” to say that only women have a cervix to stating that “99.9% of women don’t have a penis” and now says that women are adult human females. He is travelling in the right direction, but only now that he has seen the way the wind is blowing here in the UK. I trust him about as far as I can spit. I could never vote Conservative and have been politically homeless for a while now…]
1964 – Keanu Reeves, Canadian actor, singer, and producer.
1966 – Salma Hayek, Mexican-American actress, director, and producer.
Why was I born if it wasn’t forever?
1764 – Nathaniel Bliss, English astronomer and mathematician (b. 1700).
1768 – Antoine Deparcieux, French mathematician and theorist (b. 1703).
1834 – Thomas Telford, Scottish engineer and architect, designed the Menai Suspension Bridge (b. 1757).
1865 – William Rowan Hamilton, Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician (b. 1805).
1910 – Henri Rousseau, French painter (b. 1844).
1934 – Alcide Nunez, American clarinet player (Original Dixieland Jass Band) (b. 1884).
1937 – Pierre de Coubertin, French historian and educator, founded the International Olympic Committee (b. 1863). [I saw an urn containing his heart in Olympia in Greece, IIRC.]The
1973 – J. R. R. Tolkien, English novelist, short story writer, poet, and philologist (b. 1892).
1992 – Barbara McClintock, American geneticist and botanist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1902).
2000 – Elvera Sanchez, American dancer (b. 1905).
2022 – Frank Drake, American radio astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1930).
This was when they were officially designated as cakes, not biscuits.
In part leading to several towns in Scotland celebrating New Year on each of the three possible dates … because what’s better than celebrating New Year the once?
A personal connection, if I may be indulged, friends. In 1994, I was honored to participate in the 75th anniversary remembrance of the German invasion of Poland held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (https://www.ushmm.org/) I was singing as a member of the Lira Ensemble (https://liraensemble.org/), and we sang a cantata written especially for the occasion. This experience is one I will always treasure.
Please visit the USHMM whenever you’re in DC.
(Andrzej and Małgorzata, my time with Lira was when I learned Polish diction! “Dziś do ciebie przyjść nie mogę…”🎶)
55th anniversary– I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.🥴☕
Actually, it was the 75th in 2004. I need a double espresso.☕☕
Lily Poulett-Harris, cricketer and educationist died at age 23, one month short of 24. A Tasmanian (well immigrant, not Tasmanian
indiginous) instrumental in developing woman’s cricket, she was also a gifted piano and violin player. She clearly was an early bloomer and died of TB, sadly so very young.
Also, mark the passing of Jimmy Buffett yesterday. Born 12/25/1946.
L
No Linda. Please say it ain’t so.
So in Margaritaville everyone will be wearing black.
Means both the cats who handled the last two verses of the Dead’s “Ripple” on the cover below are gone now. I’m gonna miss those two:
Thanks, that song is magical, and this format heightens the experience. RIP Jimmy (and David)
Glad you made it! Let me know if you see any of those trees that we contributed to planting as kids. (There was a huge, and long-standing, giving campaign in the 1960’s to plant trees in the Land of Israel, the “Land of Milk and Honey,” where we were striving to reclaim the desert.)
Is there a Caturday Trifecta in the works? Here’s a lagniappe which I was going to send to PCCE before I remembered that he’s gone … what’s the Hebrew for “walkabout”?
This should be a video, but I’m not sure of my Twitter-fu, nor even if His Elonness has broken it. Again. Today.
https://twitter.com/Number10cat/status/1697883955557540262?s=20
Has anyone else started being greeted with a “subscribe for daily updates” banner from WordPress? I’ve been subbed since … under 2^15 (16Ki) subscribers. But I’ve been seeing reports of a lot of security problems with WordPress (the software, or the service? Not sure.) this week.
Wait a second – wasn’t the site pushing 2^17 (64Ki) subscribers a while ago? And now it’s back to under 2^16 (32Ki)? That’s … suggestive. (I count in powers of 2, because I’ve seen significant binary wrap-around bugs like this before. Many of them. In games, in public-release software and in subscription-only email-for-leasing-contract software.)
2^17 is 128k 2^16 is 64k and 2^15 is 32k.
I wasn’t going to mention it until PCC(E) came home but each time I visit the site, I get a pop up asking me if I want to subscribe.
Me too. It has been going on for a couple days. I thought I got it to stop, but it hasn’t stopped. It also will not autofill my login credentials no more. So I went directly to the WP site where these things don’t happen.
Me too. Formaybe thepast week. Been subscribed foryears. Did not wantto bother jerry since i can ignore it just by clicking continue reading.
Same for me.
+1
I posted that selfish kitty before. The original count included Twitter + WordPress subscribers, but somehow the Twitter subscribers got lost. We’re trying to restore them because I like big numbers. And there will be no more Caturday felids until I return to the U.S. (Saturday is sabbath here and there’s no working, though I will post.
The “subscribe” thing is annoying, I do get that. But I think WordPress inserted it automatically, or it’s some kind of glitch. My tech guy seems to have ghosted me, but I have made an inquiry.
Rudy’s mugshot here comes a close second to Trump’s: the defiant looks of people honoured to be involved in the case, because it is a fight for their way of life.
Mr Trump’s mugshot reminds me of a petulant child that has just been reprimanded. Same look, same recalcitrance. I know it is not acceptable anymore, but in earlier years he’d be in for a ‘good spanking’. My mother -an otherwise mild woman- would not have hesitated.
I hope this topic is appropriate here. I have to assume that most here have been at least aware of Canada’s residential school mass grave phenomena.
It is interesting to me partly because I don’t live in Canada, and can view it from a distance.
Most of it seems to be about soil disturbances noted through instrumentation in the sites of old orchards, neglected graveyards, or near very old buildings. Small areas of disturbed ground, when detected, were identified as a grave. Large areas of disturbed soil as “mass graves”.
My background would suggest that study of the history of the site would be appropriate, and of course confirmation by respectful excavation.
Instead of doing those things, the results were announced, perpetrators named, official apologies demanded and received, and tens of billions of dollars set aside for compensation and reform.
A typical headline-
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mass-grave-residential-schools.html
To take it further, Some in government there very much want questioning any element of the narrative to be classified as a hate crime, and people have already lost their livelihoods in response to even mild pushback.
Also, the sites that have been excavated have not been found to contain human remains, which we are told changes nothing.
Of course, the residential school program had goals and methods that we would not approve of today, but that is very different from mass murder.
‘Also, the sites that have been excavated have not been found to contain human remains, which we are told changes nothing.’ That makes no sense whatsoever, IMMO. Graves that do not contain remains are still considered graves? I’ll use a stronger term, that is plainly idiotic. What is the argument that ‘that changes nothing’?
“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths.”
I guess, to me at least, this issue seems like some of the others discussed here. There is an enforced narrative, which does not seem to be easily defended by evidence.
The majority of the alleged deaths occurred in the early to mid 20th century, a time when bureaucracy and it’s devil handmaiden, paperwork, were fully entrenched. Obviously, children died while enrolled at the schools. However, the death certificates are being digitized, and are available to view. The death certificates were signed by doctors, and usually a parent or guardian, and include the normal details any death certificate would contain, including what funeral home did the interment, and where.Also, whether an autopsy was performed, by who, and the doctor’s statement on whether he felt the school staff acted promptly and professionally regarding the patients care, when the illness or injury happened at school.
Reading them, quite a few died from accidents outside the school, doing things like riding freight trains, or unable to escape a fire while visiting home on holidays. Then there was the Spanish flu, tuberculosis, and other ailments common to the period.
Here are some of the records-
https://indianresidentialschoolrecords.com/death-records/
One thing they are doing here is including “missing” as victims of genocide. That might include a person who finished school, but went off to work in a lumber camp instead of returning home. Also, much is being made of “unmarked” graves, and implying that a neglected grave where the wooden marker is no longer present is the same as a murder victim being found in a shallow grave.
Anyone who works in archaeology knows that there are generally more graves than markers around old churches.
Max, I commend you for taking the trouble to inform yourself about our current national obsession and giving it some international perspective. To be fair to the advocates who are milking this for all it’s worth to extract cash out of a craven government and de-stabilize our society, reports that there were “mass graves” at the Kamloops site seems to have been a mis-reading of the claim of Chief Casimir of the Kamloops band. Her original written press release erroneously described 215 “remains” in the apple orchard on the Reserve, but she did not in writing claim that they were a mass grave.
There was nothing about the soil disturbances revealed by ground-penetrating radar that was inconsistent with there being separate individual burials in the expected Christian fashion. Nonetheless the immediate media reports, such as you linked to, invariably called them mass graves and the accusation spread around the world. I don’t know where the idea came from that the burials (if indeed there were any, which now seems unlikely) were of the mass-grave type, where a trench is dug, multiple bodies tossed into it, and covered haphazardly with dirt.
Mass graves obviously require that large numbers of people die all at once. This typically occurs after massacres (where the graves are dug hastily and left unmarked, in hopes that no one will find the evidence) or during urban epidemics with high death rates among people too poor to pay for funerals. Mass graves of paupers will have some respectful religious commemoration and indeed there are such memorials in eastern Canada to shiploads of immigrants who died of typus, smallpox, and cholera. Most deaths in any infectious disease are of poor people.
What is true is that the soil disturbances are not currently marked as graves. This may be a straightforward result of their not being graves at all. (The Kamloops site was extensively excavated for infrastructure work in the past.) In some cases these are known cemeteries in which the simple wooden markers have deteriorated and rotted away as the cemetery itself fell into ruin and decay, owing to neglect by the families or tribal relatives of the deceased. (The cemeteries and potential burial sites are on Reserve land under the control of the resident bands.) It’s also true that in homesteading days in the West, most white people who died were buried behind the sod huts where they died and have no marker.
Imaginary graves and imaginary missing children fit an imaginary narrative driven for political purposes that the Canadian government carried out genocide against indigenous people after Confederation which continues on to this day. But no evidence of criminal mass graves has ever been advanced.