Sunday: Hili dialogue

14 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

1. On this day:
   1789 – The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth by William Hill Brown, is printed in Boston.

   1793 – After being found guilty of treason by the French National Convention, Louis XVI of France is executed by guillotine.

   1861 – American Civil War starts, and Jefferson Davis resigns from the United States Senate.

   1908 – New York City passes the Sullivan Ordinance, making it illegal for women to smoke in public, only to have the measure vetoed by the mayor.

   1911 – The first Monte Carlo Rally takes place.

   1925 – Albania declares itself a republic. [King Zog I served as the head of state for a seven-year term, which is weird for a republic.]

   1931 – Sir Isaac Isaacs is sworn in as the first Australian-born Governor-General of Australia.

   1942 – The Jewish resistance organization, Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, based in the Vilna Ghetto was established.

   1943 – As part of Operation Animals, British SOE saboteurs destroy the railway bridge over the Asopos River, and guerrillas of the Greek People’s Liberation Army ambush and destroy a German convoy at the Battle of Sarantaporos.

   1950 – American lawyer and government official Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury.

   1954 – The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, is launched in Groton, Connecticut by Mamie Eisenhower, the First Lady of the United States.

   1960 – Little Joe 1B, a Mercury spacecraft, lifts off from Wallops Island, Virginia with Miss Sam, a female rhesus monkey on board.

   1968 – Vietnam War, Battle of Khe Sanh: One of the most publicized and controversial battles of the war begins.

   1968 – A B-52 bomber crashes near Thule Air Base, contaminating the area after its nuclear payload ruptures. One of the four bombs remains unaccounted for after the cleanup operation is complete.

   1976 – Commercial service of Concorde begins with the London-Bahrain and Paris-Rio routes.

   1981 – Production of the DeLorean sports car begins in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.

   1997 – The U.S. House of Representatives votes 395–28 to reprimand Newt Gingrich for ethics violations, making him the first Speaker of the House to be so disciplined. [That kind of consensus is unimaginable now.]

   2004 – NASA’s MER-A (the Mars Rover Spirit) ceases communication with mission control. The problem lies in the management of its flash memory and is fixed remotely from Earth on February 6.

   2009 – Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip, officially ending a three-week war it had with Hamas. However, intermittent fire by both sides continues in the weeks to follow.

   2017 – Over 400 cities across America and 160+ countries worldwide participate in a large-scale women’s march, on Donald Trump’s first full day as President of the United States.

   Births:
   1714 – Anna Morandi Manzolini, Spanish anatomist (d. 1774). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

   1788 – William Henry Smyth, Royal Navy officer, hydrographer, astronomer and numismatist (d. 1865). [Noted for his involvement in the early history of a number of learned societies, for his hydrographic charts, for his astronomical work, and for a wide range of publications and translations.]

   1815 – Horace Wells, American dentist (d. 1848). [Pioneered the use of anesthesia in dentistry, specifically the use of nitrous oxide (or laughing gas).]

   1824 – Stonewall Jackson, American general (d. 1863).

   1840 – Sophia Jex-Blake, English physician and feminist (d. 1912). [Led the campaign to secure women access to a university education, was the first practising female doctor in Scotland, and was involved in founding two medical schools for women, in London and Edinburgh, at a time when no other medical schools were training women.]

   1845 – Harriet Backer, Norwegian painter (d. 1932).

   1865 – Heinrich Albers-Schonberg, German gynecologist and radiologist (d. 1921).

   1869 – Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic (d. 1916).

   1889 – Edith Tolkien, wife and muse of J. R. R. Tolkien (d. 1971).

   1899 – John Bodkin Adams, British general practitioner and convict (d. 1983). [Convicted fraudster, and suspected serial killer. Between 1946 and 1956, 163 of his patients died while in comas, which was deemed to be worthy of investigation. In addition, 132 out of 310 patients had left Adams money or items in their wills.]

   1905 – Karl Wallenda, German-American acrobat and tightrope walker, founded The Flying Wallendas (d. 1978).

   1910 – Rosa Kellner, German athlete (d. 1984).

   1916 – Zypora Spaisman, Polish midwife; American and Yiddish-language actress; producer of the Yiddish stage (d. 2002).

   1924 – Shafiga Akhundova, Azerbaijani Composer, first professional female author of an opera in the East (d. 2013).

   1922 – Telly Savalas, American actor (d. 1994).

   1924 – Benny Hill, English actor, singer, and screenwriter (d. 1992). [ “Yakety Sax” will now be my earworm of the day.]

   1926 – Steve Reeves, American bodybuilder and actor (d. 2000).

   1940 – Jack Nicklaus, American golfer and sportscaster.

   1941 – Plácido Domingo, Spanish tenor and conductor.

   1941 – Richie Havens, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2013). [Best known for being the opening act at Woodstock.]

   1942 – Edwin Starr, American singer-songwriter (d. 2003). [Altogether now, “War! HUH! What is it good for?” – second earworm of the day and it’s only 10.30 a.m.]

   1945 – Martin Shaw, English actor and producer.

   1950 – Billy Ocean, Trinidadian-English singer-songwriter.

   1955 – Jeff Koons, American painter and sculptor.

   1956 – Geena Davis, American actress and producer.

   1972 – Cat Power, American singer, musician and actress. [Included for her wonderful name. Sadly, she was born Charlyn Marie Marshall and took her stage name from the name of her first band.]

   1974 – Kim Dotcom, German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur and political activist.

   1976 – Emma Bunton, English singer. [Baby Spice – the Spice Girls are going to be the first all-female band to appear on British postage stamps.]

   2007 – Luke Littler, English darts player. [Made the news recently when he became the youngest ever player to reach the finals of the the PDC World Darts Championship final, aged 16 years. It turns out that Stephen Fry is a big darts fan – who knew?!]

   The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever. (Georg Buchner):
   1670 – Claude Duval, French highwayman (b. 1643).

   1814 – Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, French botanist and author (b. 1737).

   1924 – Vladimir Lenin, Russian lawyer and politician (b. 1870).

   1932 – Lytton Strachey, English writer and critic (b. 1880). [Founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit.]

   1937 – Marie Prevost, Canadian-American actress and singer (b. 1896).

   1950 – George Orwell, British novelist, essayist, and critic (b. 1903).

   1959 – Cecil B. DeMille, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1881).

   1959 – Frances Gertrude McGill, pioneering Canadian forensic pathologist (b. 1882).

   1967 – Ann Sheridan, American actress (b. 1915).

   1983 – Lamar Williams, American bass player (b. 1949).

   1984 – Jackie Wilson, American singer (b. 1934).

   1998 – Jack Lord, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1920).

   2002 – Peggy Lee, American singer (b. 1920).

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

   2019 – Emiliano Sala, Argentine footballer (b. 1990).

   2020 – Terry Jones, Welsh actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1942).

   1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Anna Morandi Manzolini (born on this day in 1714, died 9 July 1774) was an internationally known anatomist and anatomical wax modeller, and was lecturer of anatomical design at the University of Bologna.

      Morandi was born in 1714 in Bologna, Italy. She was raised in a traditional home where marriage, children, and a domestic lifestyle were natural choices for women. Women were expected to be wives, raise their children and essentially tend to their husbands needs and wants. This wasn’t the case for Anna Morandi. She became a wife and had children, but instead of tending to her husband, she worked side by side with him. In 1736, Morandi married her childhood sweetheart, Giovanni Manzolini, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna. She was 20, and he was 24 years old. After five years of marriage, she became the mother of six children.

      Giovanni Manzolini opened a studio in their home for Anna to practice her work. The studio was not only for art but became an anatomy “school” and laboratory for them both. The couple worked together dissecting bodies and learning from them. Between Giovanni’s expertise in human anatomy and Anna’s artistic abilities, they were able to recreate such incredible pieces by remodeling human anatomy through sculpture. They taught an abundance of medical students because they had access to many body parts and cadavers. Giovanni and Anna quickly became well known around, not only in Bologna but Italy as a whole being that by the early 1750s, the couple had been recognized locally and internationally.

      When Morandi’s husband became ill with tuberculosis, she received special permission to lecture in his place.

      In the year 1755, her husband passed away, leaving both her and her two surviving children without reliable support. As a result, she had to place one child, Guiseppe, in an orphanage. She received tempting job offerings from other universities, but she preferred to remain in her native city, Bologna. After appealing to the pope and passing a strenuous examination by the Bolognese Senate, Manzolini was granted a small annual amount of 300 liras for support. Additionally, she received a post at the University of Bologna as an anatomical demonstrator with access to cadavers from the Bologna hospital. She was appointed Lecturer in Anatomy in her own name by the Institute of Bologna in 1756.

      Tourists, especially medical practitioners, from all over the world came to see her work. Morandi’s collection of wax models was known throughout Europe as Supellex Manzoliniana, and was eagerly sought after to aid in the study of anatomy. Her work became the archetype of such models as the Vassourie collection and the creations of Dr. Auzoux made from papier mache, which were the forerunners of those used in today’s schools and colleges. A collection of her models was acquired by the Medical Institute of Bologna and is housed at the Institute of Science in Bologna. Her wax self-portrait showing her dissecting a human brain was placed from 1776 in the anatomy museum of the Institute of Sciences in Palazzo Poggi alongside her wax bust of her husband. They were returned to the Poggi in 2000.

      Morandi died in Bologna in 1774, at the age of 60.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Morandi_Manzolini

2. Anti-BDS laws such as Arkansas have been tested several times on First Amendment grounds without success — BDS advocacy is not covered and what is covered counts as conduct rather than speech.

3. I love “CTRL-SALT-DELETE”.

   Every winter in Scotland there is a naming of the lorries that plow, salt, and grit the roads. Here are some of my favourites:

   Sir Salter Scott
   Licence to Chill
   Basil Salty
   I Want to Break Freeze
   For Your Ice Only
   Veruca Salt
   Sled Zeppelin
   Ready, Spready Go!
   Gritallica
   Gritty Gritty Bang Bang

4. I think this may have escaped attention here. NY midwife gives out homeopathic nuggets instead of vaccinating kids that needed them, after NY abolished religious exemptions.

5. The rat hole is a charming bit of street art if you ask me. The shape is a bit too well formed to be an authentic animal print. But it’s worth preserving nonetheless.

   1. What do you get, when you put ducks in the tarmac?………Quacks in the pavement.

6. The rat hole is all over the news! It’s a bit of comic relief we can all use. It sure looks like the outline of a rat, but is it? A dead rat wouldn’t eat into the asphalt—unless, of course, it ate something caustic that spread throughout its body. Gasoline maybe. Science needs to come to the rescue and explain this anomaly.

   The arrest of the man in Sydney for carrying an Israeli flag is appalling.

   And so is the DEI lady from the University of Alberta appalling as well. She speaks in such a calm and friendly voice that one might be led to think that her message is something we should all get behind. If you listen carefully, however, she tells us how the University in fact positions DEI apparatchiks in faculty meetings so as to intimidate them into compliance. Very nice.

   And the rest of the new, as usual, is bad.

   1. The EDI conditions on Canadian university campuses are so bad. These are the first two lines from the abstract for a biology department’s *research* seminar tomorrow:

      “Western-trained scientists increasingly recognize how ecological research can and often does reproduce the imperial and colonial roots of the discipline. At the same time, the assumptions inherent in ecology may prime scientists, especially those of settler descent, to neglect the social contexts of their research, making them particularly susceptible to inadvertently perpetuating racist and colonial norms.”

      There is much more including an unintentionally hilarious positionality statement for the speaker (a 30-something postdoc from the Washington DC suburbs who is going to tell a roomful of new Canadian immigrant scientists that they are settler colonial racists).

      1. OMG!

         1. As I said to a friend, I’m hoping if I dye my settler colonial roots I’ll look ten years younger.

7. Because of a fuel leak, the Astrobotic lunar lander did not land on the Moon. But in order to prevent leaving a potential collision hazard to functioning spacecraft in cislunar* space, the company was able to redirect the lander on a course to disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere (which it did). The photo shown was taken on January 18 when the spacecraft was still about 30,000 miles from Earth.

   (This is the commercial science mission by a rocket company that would have brought some cremains to the surface of the Moon as part of a small piggyback effort by a non-rocket company specializing in off-Earth interments.)

   *Cislunar or cis-lunar: Latin for “on this side of the Moon” or “not beyond the Moon.” In other words, the volume within the Moon’s orbit (but not below geostationary Earth orbit).

8. I attended a university seminar ostensibly about eDNA at a particular island, though it was clear that DEI cheering was going to be part of it. I sat through 45 minutes of DEI cheering sure that soon they must get to their eDNA results. They did. The results were that they had collected 30 bottles of water and some dirt around the island. It should have been embarrassing for the two speakers and the department. It would not have been acceptable as a two minute, in-class research proposal from a freshman. I learned that a few ‘minority’ students got outside and a couple learned to drive a small boat. I’m happy for them, but I didn’t need to be informed. Another hour I will never get back.

9. Alas, our host is still Wrong about clam chowder. There are many variants (Connecticut semi-clear e.g.) and all of them–especially Manhattan style–are tastier than that viscous white Boston style (“New England style” is an egregious misnomer).
   I recommend the stuff served at the Freeport fishing pier on the south shore of Long Island.

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