Monday: Hili dialogue

October 30, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, October 30, 2023; in one week I’ll be in Paris! It happens to be the worst food day of the year, National Candy Corn Day, celebrating what happens to be the world’s worst confection: a triangular mixture of artificial flavoring, sugar, and paraffin (yes, they contain “edible wax”!). I can already hear some readers commenting, saying, “I like the stuff!”

And, as this video shows, the stuff is made in Chicago!

It’s also Buy A Doughnut Day, Pumpkin Bread Day, Sugar Addiction Awareness Day, Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions (former Soviet republics, except Ukraine), and Mischief Night in Ireland, Canada, United Kingdom, United States and other places.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the October 30 Wikipedia page.

Wine of the Day: This may be the first wine from Uruguay I’ve ever had, and it certainly left a good impression. Only recently I paid $14 for the bottle, even though it’s eight years old. It’s also made from a grape I haven’t had: tannat, grown in France but considered “the national wine of Uruguay.” (This makes me want to go there!)

This is the perfect food wine: not too complex or pricey for everyday drinking with food, but delicious: not too tannic, ripe, with strong berry flavors, and a complement with food—not an afterthought or a lubricant, but a true complement.  Here’s a review from Jancis Robinson, who knows her onions:

Colour of elderberry juice. Dark and rocky and so mineral on the nose. Fresh and juicy but with such fine dry tannins. Tension from the finesse of the tannins. More intense than the 2014. Compact yet with real finesse. Dark chocolate and graphite on the finish. Dark and so savoury but then also juicily drinkable but needs more time and/or food. (JH) 17.5/20 points.

Well, as of now it doesn’t need more time: it’s good to go. If you can find this vintage at a good price, buy a case. For other vintages, look up what others have said or buy a bottle and try it out.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first; Matthew Perry, one of the stars of the immensely popular television comedy “Friends,” has died at the young age of 54.

Matthew Perry, the Emmy-nominated “Friends” star, has died at 54 years old.

The actor rocketed to stardom on “Friends,” an NBC comedy about six friends living in New York, from 1994 until the series finale in 2004. The TV show became one of the most watched sitcoms of all time, turning Perry and his co-stars—Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer—into household names.

The actor was found dead at his home, according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner. The cause of death is still under investigation, the coroner’s record said.

Perry released a memoir last year, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” Its revelations about Hollywood and its straightforward honesty about his substance abuse struggles made it an instant bestseller.

Perry was born in the U.S. but moved to Canada with his mother following his parents’ separation when he was a baby, according to IMDB. He lived in Canada until he was a teenager, when he went to live in the California home of his father, an actor and model.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who went to school with Perry, said he was shocked by the news of the actor’s death.

He was heavily addicted to opioids and alcohol, and nearly died from it several times. This may have been the last; other sources says that he drowned in a hot tub.

Here’s an interview he did with Diane Sawyer describing his battles with addiction and also showing some scenes from “Friends”; it’s worth watching.

*The war news changes rapidly; below is yesterday evening’s from the NYT, and you can see this morning’s here.

The Israeli military on Sunday signaled a heavier assault on Gaza, saying it had expanded its ground invasion while President Biden urged Israel’s leader to protect the lives of civilians.

The precise number of soldiers operating in the territory since Friday remained unclear, but the Israeli military’s chief spokesman said that it was “gradually expanding the ground activity and the scope of our forces,” and that they were “progressing through the stages of the war according to plan.”

Mr. Biden spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Sunday and reiterated the right of Israel to protect itself, but also “underscored the need to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law that prioritizes the protection of civilians,” according to a summary of the call released by the White House. Mr. Biden asked Israel to “immediately and significantly” increase the amount of humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza, where a three-week siege and a bombardment of Israeli airstrikes have killed thousands of people and forced hundreds of thousands more from their homes, according to officials in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

Mr. Biden also spoke with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, whose country has been the sole route into Gaza for relief trucks, including 33 that carried food, water and medical supplies into the enclave on Sunday — the most in a single day since trucks were first allowed in more than a week ago.

“The two leaders committed to the significant acceleration and increase of assistance flowing into Gaza beginning today and then continuously,” according to a White House summary. Both leaders affirmed a commitment to “work together to set the conditions for a durable and sustainable peace in the Middle East to include the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Here’s what else to know:

  • The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 surpassed 8,000 people, including 3,342 children, a spokesman for the Hamas-run health ministry said on Sunday. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that even though Hamas has placed its rocket infrastructure among civilians and used them as human shields, Israel remained responsible under international humanitarian law “to distinguish between terrorists and civilians and to protect the lives of innocent people.”

  • Videos released by the Israeli military and geolocated by The New York Times indicated at least three separate places where Israeli troops have crossed the border into Gaza over the past few days.

And some good news from the WSJ about humanitarian aid and actions:

Humanitarian aid: Palestinians broke into U.N. food warehouses in Gaza, and wheat flour and other basic items were taken. A U.S. official said the U.N. can handle as many as around 100 trucks of aid each day, and that Israel agreed to accelerate aid as such. The Israeli military said it was preparing a humanitarian zone in the Khan Younis area of Gaza for displaced Palestinians.

*Oh, and they’re hunting for Jews in Dagestan, of all places, a republic of Russia on the NW coast of the Caspian Sea.

The authorities in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan moved to restore order early Monday morning after hundreds of young men tried to storm the local airport to protest the arrival of a commercial flight from Tel Aviv.

At least 20 people were injured in the riot on Sunday, and dozens of people were arrested. The government in the predominantly Muslim republic said that the outburst had been calmed and vowed to prevent further clashes. Russian aviation authorities said that the airport, in Makhachkala, the republic’s capital, would reopen on Tuesday.

But the riot shocked Jews in Russia and beyond and highlighted the challenges that the Kremlin faces in managing the various parts of its vast multiethnic and multireligious country.

It also underscored how the Kremlin’s decision to distance itself from Israel and from Israel’s mission to drive out Hamas terrorists can cause instability at home.

There was a riot as locals tried to apprehend Jews. They even looked for Jews in the plane’s engines! (Tweets from Matthew.)

*Biden is pushing for a two-state solution after the Hamas/Israel war ends.

 As the 3-week-old Israel-Hamas war enters what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says could be a “long and difficult” new stage, President Joe Biden is calling on Israeli and Arab leaders to think hard about their eventual postwar reality.

It’s one, he argues, where finally finding agreement on a long-sought two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict should be a priority.

“There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on Oct. 6,” Biden told reporters, referring to the day before Hamas militants attacked Israel and set off the latest war. The White House says Biden conveyed the same message directly to Netanyahu during a telephone call this past week.

“It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and in our view it has to be a two-state solution,” Biden said.

. . .Now, at a moment of heightened concern that the Israel-Hamas war could spiral into a broader regional conflict, Biden has begun to emphasize that once the bombing and shooting stop, working toward a Palestinian state should no longer be ignored.

Until this year that was my dream as well, but then you have to realize that Palestine has rejected statehood (and some of the offers were good ones) at least five times, that any Palestinian state with terrorists or their enablers in charge (like Abbas) will be untenable because it will be contiguous with Israel and terrorists will still do their thing, and, finally, many Palestinians, if Hamas really is eliminated (along with a number of civilians used as human shields), they’ll be so angry at Israel that all they’ll want to do is attack Israel any way they could.  I really don’t see the way clear to any kind of two-state solution unless Arab states get together, help settle the issue, and prevent terrorists from dominating the Palestinian state. Given what Iran wants, and their big-time funding of terrorists, I think that’s impossible.

*Hollywood is often said to “be run by Jews,” and, indeed, there’s a strong Jewish presence among artists, screenwriters, and managers. But Hollywood is also “progressive,” which has led to this NYT article, “Reaction to Hamas attack leaves some Jews in Hollywood feeling unmoored.” (The subtitle is “The response to the Oct. 7 assault, and to Israel’s retaliation, has revealed a schism in the entertainment world that many did not realize was there.”)

Many say they are disillusioned — and angered — by the trickle of public condemnation from Hollywood regarding the Oct. 7 attack. There was no flood of support on social media from celebrities. Most studios initially tried to duck, staying silent. One leading union, the Writers Guild of America, refused to put out a statement, and stuck with its decision in the face of enormous backlash from hundreds of its members.

“The silence has been deafening,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, told The Wrap, an entertainment trade news site, on Oct. 12.

Now the Screen Writer’s Guild should have an ideologically neutral policy, so they don’t have to put out statements about any issues, but they haven’t had that, so they got into trouble, just like many colleges. Then they just made things worse by saying this stuff:

The situation with the writers’ guild intensified on Oct. 15 when a group of more than 300 writers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Eric Roth (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) sent an open letter to guild leaders asking why they had not publicly denounced the attack on Israel, as the other major Hollywood unions had. The initial response to the letter came in an email to members from Meredith Stiehm, president of the Writers Guild of America West. She wrote that the lack of a public response was because “the board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach.”

That made the situation worse. Faced with a growing rebellion, the guild ultimately released a public statement in which it condemned the attack and tried to explain its initial silence. It said it was not “because we are paralyzed by factionalism or masking hateful views” but rather because “we are American labor leaders, aware of our limitations and humbled by the magnitude of this conflict.”

The letter isn’t public, as far as I know, but the explanation just made things worse.  “Humbled by the magnitude of this conflict”? Like World War II? Give me a break?  Anyway, there are lot of other ruptures detailed in the article, like this one:

Divisions were also on display when a prominent agent at the Creative Artists Agency posted messages on Instagram that used the word “genocide” in describing Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza. The agent, Maha Dakhil, represents stars like Natalie Portman and Reese Witherspoon. She quickly removed the post, issued an apology and resigned from an internal leadership position at the company.

Ms. Dakhil lost a prominent client: the screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin, who decamped for a rival agency and said in a statement, “Maha isn’t an antisemite, she’s just wrong.”

Dakhil was free to say what she wanted on social media, and her clients were free to leave. But taking down a post because you lose clients is a bit cowardly.

*And some good news about religious freedom. Students who were forcibly proselytized by Christians are about to get a unit on the First Amendment:

A West Virginia school district has passed a policy mandating annual religious freedom training as part of a lawsuit settlement after an evangelical preacher held a revival assembly during the school day in 2022 that some students were required to attend.

As part of a settlement finalized Thursday, Cabell County’s Board of Education’s policy makes clear that it is “not the province of a public school to either inhibit, or advance, religious beliefs or practices,” board lawyer Brian D. Morrison said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“Students must remain free to voluntarily express their individual religious beliefs, or lack thereof, as each student sees fit,” Morrison said.

Four families in West Virginia’s second-largest city of Huntington sued the district in February 2022, accusing the school system in the southwestern part of the state of having a systematic history of disregarding the religious freedom of its students and instituting Christian religious practices.

And get a load of this:

The lawsuit said two Huntington High School teachers escorted their entire homeroom classes to an assembly hosted by evangelical preacher Nik Walker, who had been leading revivals in the Huntington area in recent weeks.

Students, including a Jewish student who asked to leave but was not permitted to do so, were instructed to close their eyes and raise their arms in prayer, according to the lawsuit. The teens were asked to give their lives over to Jesus to find purpose and salvation. Students said they were told that those who did not follow the Bible would “face eternal torment.”

. . . The policy requires the district superintendent and principals “to attempt in good faith” to monitor school-sponsored activities to ensure policy compliance. Principals must report potential violations to the superintendent within seven days of discovering them. The superintendent is “authorized to investigate and take remedial action,” according to the policy.

It was the students who got this off the ground, and each student plaintiff will get a $2000 scholarship, presumably from the school. That’ll teach them to stop making students praise Jesus!  If only we could get our first-year students at Chicago to take a unit on the First Amendment, too—concentrating not on freedom of religion, but on freedom of speech.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pondering her narcissism:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: I wonder how others see me.
In Polish:
Ja: O czym myślisz?
Hili: Zastanawiam się jak mnie widzą inni.

And a picture of Paulina cuddling her beloved Kulka (whom she found and saved):

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

From a FB site I forgot:

From Ant: a terrific Halloween costume:

From Not Anothcr Science Cat Page:

And Anna Krylov’s and Jay Tanzman’s British shorthair cat, Mishka:

From Masih: A member of Iran’s “morality police” admits that her outfit killed Armita Geravand for not wearing her hijab (she died yesterday several weeks after she was assaulted in Tehran).

Rashida Tlaib still hasn’t corrected her claim that Israel bombed the hospital in Gaza. Readers have added “context.”  A false claim left up after correction is a lie.

From Barry: Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle-Owl (Bubo bubo) who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in February, is still making it in Central Park! I guess they haven’t been able to capture him, but winter is coming.

From Jez: a “new generation traffic system”:

From Simon, who says, “Jeez; this crap again!” You can see his quotes (from 2016) at this link.

 

From Malcolm, a peacemaker cat!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a man who survived less than a month. His expression is haunting:

And another lonely and agéd tweet from Dr. Cobb, who has gone off Twitter. It’s a cactus that blooms only at night, so I’d probably miss it (second tweet):

21 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1806 – War of the Fourth Coalition: Convinced that he is facing a much larger force, Prussian General von Romberg, commanding 5,300 men, surrenders the city of Stettin to 800 French soldiers. [Whoops!]

    1831 – Nat Turner is arrested for leading the bloodiest slave rebellion in United States history.

    1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing a massive panic in some of the audience in the United States.

    1941 – Holocaust: Fifteen hundred Jews from Pidhaytsi are sent by Nazis to Bełżec extermination camp.

    1942 – World War II: Lt. Tony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier drown while taking code books from the sinking German submarine U-559.

    1944 – Holocaust: Anne and Margot Frank are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they die from disease the following year, shortly before the end of WWII.

    1945 – Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs signs a contract for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the baseball colour line.

    1953 – President Eisenhower approves the top-secret document NSC 162/2 concerning the maintenance of a strong nuclear deterrent force against the Soviet Union.

    1961 – The Soviet Union detonates the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful explosive device ever detonated.

    1961 – Due to “violations of Vladimir Lenin’s precepts”, it is decreed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from its place of honour inside Lenin’s tomb and buried near the Kremlin Wall with a plain granite marker.

    1975 – Prince Juan Carlos I of Spain becomes acting head of state, taking over for the country’s ailing dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco.

    1980 – El Salvador and Honduras agree to put the border dispute fought over in 1969’s Football War before the International Court of Justice.

    1985 – Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off for mission STS-61-A, its final successful mission.

    1995 – Quebec citizens narrowly vote (50.58% to 49.42%) in favour of remaining a province of Canada in their second referendum on national sovereignty.

    2005 – The rebuilt Dresden Frauenkirche (destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden during World War II) is reconsecrated after a thirteen-year rebuilding project.

    2014 – Sweden becomes the first European Union member state to officially recognize the State of Palestine.

    Births:
    1632 – Christopher Wren, English physicist, mathematician, and architect, designed St Paul’s Cathedral (d. 1723).

    1728 – Mary Hayley, English businesswoman (d. 1808).

    1741 – Angelica Kauffman, painter (d. 1807).

    1751 – Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Irish-English poet, playwright, and politician, Treasurer of the Navy (d. 1816).

    1857 – Georges Gilles de la Tourette, French-Swiss physician and neurologist (d. 1904).

    1878 – Arthur Scherbius, German electrical engineer, invented the Enigma machine (d. 1929).

    1881 – Elizabeth Madox Roberts, American poet and author (d. 1941).

    1885 – Ezra Pound, American poet and critic (d. 1972).

    1886 – Zoë Akins, American author, poet, and playwright (d. 1958).

    1892 – Charles Atlas, Italian-American bodybuilder (d. 1972).

    1894 – Peter Warlock, English composer and critic (d. 1930).

    1930 – Clifford Brown, American trumpet player and composer (d. 1956).

    1935 – Robert Caro, American journalist and author.

    1935 – Michael Winner, English director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2013).

    1939 – Eddie Holland, American singer-songwriter and producer.

    1939 – Grace Slick, American singer-songwriter and model.

    1941 – Otis Williams, American singer-songwriter and producer.

    1944 – Ahmed Chalabi, Iraqi businessman and politician (d. 2015). [In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the assistance of lobbying powerhouse BKSH & Associates, provided a major portion of the information on which U.S. Intelligence based its condemnation of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, including reports of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda. Most, if not all, of this information has turned out to be false and Chalabi has been called a fabricator. Chalabi was found guilty in the Petra Bank scandal in Jordan. In January 2012, a French intelligence official stated that he believed Chalabi to be “acting on behalf of Iran”.]

    1945 – Henry Winkler, American actor, comedian, director, and producer.

    1954 – Mario Testino, Peruvian-English photographer.

    1956 – Juliet Stevenson, English actress.

    1960 – Diego Maradona, Argentinian footballer, coach, and manager (d. 2020).

    1981 – Ivanka Trump, American model and businesswoman.

    All people have had ill luck, but Jairus’s daughter & Lazarus the worst: [I’ve been quoting Mark Twain on death here for the past week or so – he’s a right little ray of sunshine on the subject!]
    1910 – Henry Dunant, Swiss activist, founded the Red Cross, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1828).

    1979 – Barnes Wallis, English scientist and engineer, inventor of the “bouncing bomb” (b. 1887).

    1988 – T. Hee, American animator and screenwriter (b. 1911).

    1998 – Florence Nagle, English trainer and breeder of racehorses (b. 1894). [Trained her first racehorse in 1920, the Irish-bred colt Fernley. At that time women were forced to employ men to hold a Jockey Club trainers licence on their behalf, or to have licences in their husbands’ names. Nagle worked peacefully to redress such injustices to her sex. She successfully challenged the well-established leading gentlemen’s clubs of the racing and canine worlds over their gender inequality, and in 1966 became one of the first two women in the United Kingdom licensed to train racehorses.]

    2000 – Steve Allen, American actor, television personality, game show panelist, and talk show host (b. 1921).

    2002 – Juan Antonio Bardem, Spanish actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1922).

    2004 – Phyllis Frost, Australian philanthropist, founded Keep Australia Beautiful (b. 1917).

    2004 – Peggy Ryan, American actress and dancer (b. 1924).

    2007 – Washoe, American chimpanzee (b. 1965).

    2009 – Claude Lévi-Strauss, French anthropologist and ethnologist (b. 1908).

    Reply

    1. 1935 – Robert Caro, American journalist and author.

      By my reckoning, that makes you 88, Mr. Caro. Are you gonna finish your LBJ biography, or what? When you left off at the end of volume four, you still had a whole lot to go, including almost the entirety of Landslide Lyndon’s presidency.

      Please don’t leave us hanging, puh-lease.

      Reply

  2. “If only we could get our first-year students at Chicago to take a course on the First Amendment…”. I see no reason why the university cannot do this if they are still serious about the First Amendment. They have already created a forum on free speech and expression which can at least provide a framework for such a curriculum – whether it be two-, four-, or sixteen, etc. weeks. However, after a strong inaugural event a few weeks ago with a half a dozen excellent discussion panels which I watched live-streamed remotely, the program has failed to post any of the archived videos except the first which includes the introduction by the University President. In an email exchange two weeks ago, the university said that they were working on editing the rest of the panel videos…how long can editing existing one-hour videos and posting take? I question the seriousness of this initiative’s value for educating a significant population…one that is larger than the choir that already attends the live events.

    Reply

  3. There was a discussion about Matthew Perry on the morning radio. I had no idea that he struggled with various addictions thru his career on the Friends television show, and that it got really bad multiple times. He apparently does not watch episodes of the show since he would only see signs of this or that addiction based on how he looked in a given season. After the series, he gained much control back and he became very dedicated to directly helping other people in recovery from their addictions. He said that that was what he mainly wanted to be remembered for.

    Reply

    1. The whole storyline where Chandler Bing went to work in Tulsa was designed so that he didn’t need to be in the studio every day because Perry was actually in rehab at the time.

      Reply

  4. Matthew Perry was also a good dramatic actor. Here’s where Aaron Sorkin first put Perry and Bradley Whitford together, on The West Wing. I love this pivotal scene (Perry shows up for only two or three episodes of the show):

    https://twitter.com/MOVIEDEATHBLOWS/status/1718430233437589771

    And then Sorkin decided to make Perry and Whitford co-stars for his follow-up series, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which is about a Friday night sketch comedy show:

    https://twitter.com/thatKevinGuy/status/1718439477243220325

    Reply

  5. I just glanced at the article, but didn’t watch the video.

    …you evolve from the primordial slime…

    I don’t think we teach that. But he won the votes and that’s what was required. He must be smart. Otherwise smart people would not have voted for him. I wonder if his views have evolved since 2016.

    Reply

    1. Johnson is also a lawyer and the main architect of Republicans’ attempt to overturn the 2020 election (the fake electors plot). MAGA wanted him in place because of that (the GOP should pick the POTUS, not the electorate) and because he’s a true believer: Trump is handpicked by God to be POTUS. Based on that sound logic, any means are applicable to keep Trump in that position…hopefully until he dies.

      And no, his views haven’t “evolved” (I like your word choice…deliberate?) since 2016. He’s still stuck in the 18th century or thereabouts.

      Reply

    1. Presumably when they’re broken out of the cornstarch molds, the kernels are sifted from the cornstarch which is then recycled, but they didn’t mention that.

      Reply

    2. I love candy corn. The worst candy, without a doubt, has to be Twizzlers – a sort of synthetic licorice made from recycled plastic bags with some sort of chemical flavoring added by someone with no idea what natural flavors taste like.

      Reply

  8. The lawsuit said two Huntington High School teachers escorted their entire homeroom classes to an assembly hosted by evangelical preacher Nik Walker, who had been leading revivals in the Huntington area in recent weeks.

    I don’t see how anyone holding a position of responsibility in a public school system could possibly think that this was constitutionally kosher.

    Reply

    1. This happened in West Virginia, which is a state not known for its education. I have a friend from there. She was raised by her grandmother on a farm in the williwogs of Boone County. She was 4 when she met her father when he showed up at the bar her alcoholic mother would take her to daily. My friend is extremely intelligent but had to fight hard to get any kind of education. She ended up pretty much teaching herself until she was old enough to strike out on her own. She has a master’s degree in English and specialized in teaching writing to disadvantaged kids. She has a saying for fellow West Virginians –“The last one out, turn off the light.”

      Reply

  9. The fungal outfit appears to be a creation by movie costume prosthetics designer Kevin Wasner. The earliest posting of that photo that I found on X-Twitter was in 2018.

    I don’t know what fungus is represented, but I’ve had a nice specimen for several decades that I found in a Marin County forest, just north of San Francisco. It was apparently fresh but hard and woody when I found it, near to the ground and poking out horizontally from a rotting tree log. It’s about 8 inches at the widest, and it still retains most of the original color, maroon-ish with some concentric tans.

    In retrospect I feel that I shouldn’t have harvested it for my personal enjoyment, especially since I haven’t seen it since — until I saw it represented on this costume.

    Reply

    1. Thanks for doing the research and clarification of the fungal fx. I thought it was an actor from the recent HBO series The Last of Us. It’s based on a popular video game where Cordyceps (yes, the “zombie-fungus” that makes ants do its bidding) mutates and is able to infect humans- zombie fungoid folk. It’s basically a more plausible “zombie apocalypse” scenario. I really enjoyed the series and have watched it a couple times. Pedro Pascal and his co-star Bella Ramsey have terrific chemistry.

      Reply

      1. Thanks. I haven’t definitively linked the outfit to Kevin Wasner because I haven’t seen anything with him saying so. I just found several sources — one seemingly authoritative — identifying it as his. And a number of authoritative sources show other work by him that match the artistry of this one. But I would be confident that it’s not from The Last of Us.

        While I can appreciate the costume artistry, I’m not so much a fan of zombie apocalypse movies. However, I am definitely fascinated by fungal infections of ants and other creatures that can take over a brain and direct it for the benefit of the fungus.

        Reply

        1. Yes, I think I’m in the minority of WEIT readers when it comes to television entertainment. I also enjoy the NFL. eek! 🙂

          Reply

          1. Ha! I assume you mean the National Forensic League…
            (Apparently a real thing in a list of acronyms.)

  10. I agree. The Arab states are key. They contributed to creating this problem and they will need to take an active role that may make them uncomfortable and be difficult. Otherwise, any peace agreement would be temporary, no peace agreement will survive the zero sum game mentality that dominates Palestinian politics without active, ongoing, counter-measures.

    “Until this year that was my dream as well, but then you have to realize that Palestine has rejected statehood (and some of the offers were good ones) at least five times, that any Palestinian state with terrorists or their enablers in charge (like Abbas) will be untenable because it will be contiguous with Israel and terrorists will still do their thing, and, finally, many Palestinians, if Hamas really is eliminated (along with a number of civilians used as human shields), they’ll be so angry at Israel that all they’ll want to do is attack Israel any way they could. I really don’t see the way clear to any kind of two-state solution unless Arab states get together, help settle the issue, and prevent terrorists from dominating the Palestinian state. Given what Iran wants, and their big-time funding of terrorists, I think that’s impossible.“

    Reply

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