PCC(E) is decompressing from travel.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has her mind on one thing:
Hili: We have to summon our courage.A: And dowhat?Hili: Check what we have in the fridge.
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In Polish:
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Hili: Musimy się zdobyć na odwagę.
Ja: I co zrobić?
Hili: Sprawdzić co mamy w lodówce.
Ja: I co zrobić?
Hili: Sprawdzić co mamy w lodówce.
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On this day:
1533 – Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn. [Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well…]
1554 – São Paulo, Brazil, is founded by Jesuit priests.
1585 – Walter Raleigh is knighted, shortly after renaming North America region “Virginia”, in honour of Elizabeth I, Queen of England, sometimes referred to as the “Virgin Queen”.
1755 – Moscow University is established on Tatiana Day.
1765 – Port Egmont, the first British settlement in the Falkland Islands near the southern tip of South America, is founded.
1819 – University of Virginia chartered by Commonwealth of Virginia, with Thomas Jefferson one of its founders.
1858 – The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn is played at the marriage of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia, and becomes a popular wedding processional.
1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.
1890 – Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days.
1909 – Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra receives its debut performance at the Dresden State Opera.
1915 – Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates the U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco.
1918 – The Ukrainian People’s Republic declares independence from Soviet Russia.
1924 – The 1924 Winter Olympics opens in Chamonix, in the French Alps, inaugurating the Winter Olympic Games.
1947 – Thomas Goldsmith Jr. files a patent for a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device”, the first ever electronic game.
1949 – The first Emmy Awards are presented in the United States; the venue is the Hollywood Athletic Club.
1960 – The National Association of Broadcasters in the United States reacts to the “payola” scandal by threatening fines for any disc jockeys who accept money for playing particular records.
1961 – In Washington, D.C., US President John F. Kennedy delivers the first live presidential television news conference.
1964 – Blue Ribbon Sports, which would later become Nike, is founded by University of Oregon track and field athletes.
1971 – Charles Manson and four “Family” members (three of them female) are found guilty of the 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders.
1971 – Idi Amin leads a coup deposing Milton Obote and becomes Uganda’s president.
1995 – The Norwegian rocket incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.
1996 – Billy Bailey becomes the last person to be hanged in the United States.
2003 – Invasion of Iraq: A group of people leave London, England, for Baghdad, Iraq, to serve as human shields, intending to prevent the U.S.-led coalition troops from bombing certain locations.
2011 – The first wave of the Egyptian revolution begins throughout the country, marked by street demonstrations, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labour strikes, and violent clashes. [I wonder what the world would be like if the Arab Spring had succeeded?]
2019 – A mining company’s dam collapses in Brumadinho, Brazil, a south-eastern city, killing 270 people.
Births:
1627 – Robert Boyle, Anglo-Irish chemist and physicist (d. 1691).
1736 – Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Italian-French mathematician and astronomer (d. 1813).
1759 – Robert Burns, Scottish poet and songwriter (d. 1796).
1783 – William Colgate, English-American businessman and philanthropist, founded Colgate-Palmolive (d. 1857).
1796 – William MacGillivray, Scottish ornithologist and biologist (d. 1852).
1813 – J. Marion Sims, American gynecologist and physician (d. 1883). [His most famous work was the development of a surgical technique for the repair of vesicovaginal fistula, a severe complication of obstructed childbirth. He is also remembered for inventing the Sims speculum, Sims sigmoid catheter, and the Sims position. Against significant opposition, he established, in New York, the first hospital specifically for women. He was forced out of the hospital he founded because he insisted on treating cancer patients; he played a small role in the creation of the nation’s first cancer hospital, which opened after his death.]
1816 – Anna Gardner, American abolitionist and teacher (d. 1901).
1874 – W. Somerset Maugham, British playwright, novelist, and short story writer (d. 1965).
1882 – Virginia Woolf, English novelist, essayist, short story writer, and critic (d. 1941).
1895 – Florence Mills, American singer, dancer, and actress (d. 1927).
1899 – Sleepy John Estes, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1977).
1900 – Theodosius Dobzhansky, Russian-American geneticist and pioneer of evolutionary biology (d. 1975). [Our host’s academic grandfather.]
1905 – Margery Sharp, English author and educator (d. 1991).
1915 – Ewan MacColl, English singer-songwriter, actor and producer (d. 1989).
1922 – Raymond Baxter, English television host and pilot (d. 2006).
1923 – Arvid Carlsson, Swedish pharmacologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2018).
1923 – Shirley Ardell Mason, American psychiatric patient (d. 1998). [Reported to have dissociative identity disorder (previously known as multiple personality disorder). Her life was purportedly described, with adaptations to protect her anonymity, in 1973 in the book Sybil, subtitled The True Story of a Woman Possessed by 16 Separate Personalities. Two films of the same name were made, one released in 1976 and the other in 2007. The diagnosis remains controversial, with Mason later claiming that the symptoms had not been genuine.]
1924 – Speedy West, American guitarist and producer (d. 2003).
1936 – Diana Hyland, American actress (d. 1977).
1938 – Etta James, American singer (d. 2012).
1949 – John Cooper Clarke, English poet and critic.
1949 – Paul Nurse, English geneticist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate. [Awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle. Nurse’s mother went from London to Norwich and lived with relatives while awaiting Paul’s birth (at the age of 18) in order to hide illegitimacy. For the rest of their lives, his maternal grandmother pretended to be his mother, and his mother pretended to be his sister. He only discovered the truth in his 50s when he had to obtain a full birth certificate to apply for a US green card.]
1952 – Peter Tatchell, Australian-English journalist and activist. [His writings apparently supporting paedophilia are controversial. He claims, somewhat incredibly, to have been misinterpreted.]
1963 – Molly Holzschlag, American computer scientist and author (d. 2023).
1978 – Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine and actor.
1981 – Alicia Keys, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actress.
Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.’ (Christopher Hitchens):
1640 – Robert Burton, English physician and scholar (b. 1577).
1742 – Edmond Halley, English astronomer (b. 1656).
1891 – Theo van Gogh, Art dealer, the brother of Vincent van Gogh (b. 1857).
1947 – Al Capone, American gangster and mob boss (b. 1899).
1966 – Saul Adler, Belarusian-English microbiologist and parasitologist (b. 1895).
1968 – Louie Myfanwy Thomas, Welsh writer (b. 1908).
1975 – Charlotte Whitton, Canadian journalist and politician, 46th Mayor of Ottawa (b. 1896).
1990 – Ava Gardner, American actress (b. 1922).
2001 – Alice Ambrose, American philosopher and logician (b. 1906).
2009 – Eleanor F. Helin, American astronomer (b. 1932). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
2015 – Demis Roussos, Egyptian-Greek singer (b. 1946).
2017 – John Hurt, English actor (b. 1940).
2017 – Mary Tyler Moore, American actress and producer (b. 1936).
Woman of the Day
[Text from Wikipedia]
Eleanor Francis “Glo” Helin (née Francis; some sources give her name as Eleanor Kay Helin) was born on 19 November 1932 and died on this day in 2009. An American astronomer, she was principal investigator of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Helin was a prolific discoverer of minor planets and several comets, including periodic comets 111P/Helin–Roman–Crockett, 117P/Helin–Roman–Alu and 132P/Helin–Roman–Alu. She is credited as the discoverer of the object now known as both asteroid 4015 Wilson–Harrington and comet 107P/Wilson–Harrington. Although Wilson and Harrington preceded her by some decades, their observations did not establish an orbit for the object, while her rediscovery did. In total, Helin discovered or co-discovered 903 asteroids and several comets.
She was born an only child to Fred and Kay Francis. At the age of five, she became ill with polio, which caused her to be bed-ridden for several months.
She studied geology at Occidental College, leaving just shy of her graduation in 1954. She married Ron Helin and started working at California Institute of Technology, where she and Bruce C. Murray started the Lunar Research Lab to prepare for lunar landing missions.
Helin was active in planetary science and astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for over three decades. Her studies of lunar craters raised interest about near Earth Objects, and in the early 1970s, she initiated the Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey (PCAS) from Palomar Observatory. This program is responsible for the discovery of thousands of asteroids of all types including more than 200 in high inclination orbits, other asteroids in rare and unique types of orbits, 20 comets, and approximately 30 percent of the near-Earth asteroids discovered worldwide. Using the 18-inch Schmidt telescope, Helin discovered her first asteroid on July 4, 1973.
In 1980, Helin started working at JPL, where she organized and coordinated the International Near-Earth Asteroid Survey (INAS) during the 1980s, encouraging and stimulating worldwide interest in asteroids. In recognition of her accomplishments, she received NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal. The Mars-crossing asteroid 3267 Glo, discovered by Edward Bowell in 1981, was named after her nickname.
After conducting the PCAS photographic search program from Palomar for nearly 25 years, Helin concentrated on the new, upgraded Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) search program using electronic sensors on a large aperture telescope. She was the principal investigator for this program operating from JPL, for which she received the 1997 JPL Award for Excellence. She also received NASA’s Group Achievement Award for the NEAT Team.
In operation from 1995 to 2007, NEAT was the first autonomous observing program; no JPL personnel were on-site, only the JPL Sunspark computer which ran the observing system through the night and transmitted the data back to JPL each morning for team member review and confirmation. NEAT detected over 26,000 objects, including 31 near-Earth asteroids, two long period comets and the unique object, 1996 PW, the most eccentric asteroid known (e = 0.99012940), which moves in a long-period (4110.50 a), comet-like orbit (semi-major axis 256.601 AU).
In 1991, the USS Helin debuted on the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The ship was named after her for “having discovered an unprecedented number of asteroids and comets”.
In 1998 she was inducted to the Women in Technology Hall of Fame.
Helin retired from NASA in 2002, and died on January, 2009.
Caltech Optical Observatories hosted a Helin Commemorative Workshop on 28 September 2010 to honour the contributions of Eleanor and Ronald Helin. Palomar Observatory opened an exhibit dedicated to her and her work with the 18-inch Schmidt telescope in September 2013.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_F._Helin#/search
The Attagirls chose a different Woman of the Day:
The full story is here: https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1750420867501175141
Xavi Hernández was born on this day in 1980.
1819 University of Virginia: I might give Mr. jefferson more credit than “one of the founders”. He noted himself as “father of the University of Virginia” on his gravestone. After graduating from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, he spent much of his life, trying to modernize the College from a faculty of churchmen as founded in 1693, to one of scientists and general scholars. Unsuccessful in doing that even with the influence from having been the Governor of Virginia and the President of the United States, he simply founded the modern college he wanted with the creation of the University of Virginia just down the mountain from his home at Monticello. Among members of my generation who attended the University, it continues to be known as Mr. Jefferson’s university.
Related to Anne of the Thousand Days, I’ll never forget this mnemonic from history class:
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
A year after the first French settlement was established, at “Port Louis” (later “Puerto Soledad”, then “Puerto Luis”, then “Anson’s Harbour”, then “Port Louis”), by de Bougainville (of “bougainvillia” – the garden plants?).
Even then, the appropriate nationality of the islands was disputed – often at gunpoint. A habit not lost on recent politicians.
Is anyone taking bets on where the current PM is going to have his election-supporting war? Is the current sabre-rattling around the Aden Straits where he’ll turn squaddies’ blood into votes? Or will he find somewhere else, less fraught?
I memoriam Bobby Burns:
https://youtu.be/XBE1y7u_dBs?si=pYYvzzAxRSD98HRI
🙂
Regarding today’s news, from today’s NPR “Morning Edition”:
“Alabama is set to become the first state to execute an inmate using nitrogen gas”
Host A Martinez: “This Nitrogen that we’ve been talking about – is it like ‘laughing gas,’ is that what we’re talking about?”
Reporter: “No, that is Nitrous Oxide. This is pure Nitrogen gas.”
In a strong field of examples of basic scientific illiteracy, this is in the 99th percentile. This from the folks who tell us “What you need to know.” There may be facts about reality more basic than the composition of air, but I can’t think of any at the moment. This seems like something one ought to have learned no later than fifth grade.
A bit later the reporter comments on the use of Nitrogen to euthanize animals:
“It’s [Nitrogen] been deemed by vets to be, quote, ‘unacceptable’ for the use of euthanization of mammals other than pigs, because of its potential for causing distress to those animals.”
What is this “potential” babble? Either Nitrogen thusly administered causes distress in at least some animals, or it does not. And on what rational basis is it deemed acceptable to thusly administer Nitrogen to pigs? Pigs can never possibly be distressed? Is the pig’s anatomy and physiology radically and monumentally different from that of other mammals? Or is it simply that pigs are not worthy of a few crumbs of consideration from humans?
Their anatomy is so different that they’re frequently used as substitute humans in that most sensitive of scientific pursuits – the design of weapons for killing humans. And surgeons use them to develop operative techniques. While biological engineers are working on making “rejection-free” strains of pigs, whose organs might be harvested to go into humans.
Oh, no, it couldn’t possibly be that. You might leave people distressed at the idea that humans might not live up to the standards of behaviour they espouse to other humans.
Note that it was reported that Melanie Safka passed away on Tuesday, January 23. Better known as simply “Melanie,” she recorded the #1 hit “Brand New Key” and the anthemic “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” While the former song is a goof and a good candidate for most disliked song ever, I will brave the slings and arrows of this website’s distinguished musical mavens and say that “Lay Down” is the best song to memorialize Woodstock. Yes, I think it is a better song than Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” I love Mitchell and of course Melanie can’t hold a candle to her, but Melanie’s vocals on “Lay Down” are amazing and moving, far better than Mitchell’s on her own song.
Roger that. Thanks for the tribute. Gotta give credit to the Edwin Hawkins Singers, too.
I grew up in a small city in the heart of southern Ontario’s farm belt. A popular parody on the farmer-rock-country AM radio station that my parents had on all the time was, “I’ve got a brand-new combine harvester, I’ll give you the key.” It actually had clever lyrics.
+1
“Lay Down” has always gone straight into the center of my heart and moved me deeply, and Melanie’s voice has much to do with it.
I saw Melanie at the Glastonbury Festival in ’83. RIP.
Have been listening a lot to Melania recently, so sorry to hear that. Also love her Dylan covers.
“1995 – The Norwegian rocket incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.”
When are the Russians never paranoid?
Completely random thoughts of the two commercial aircraft they downed when I woke this morning. Note to myself, never go anywhere near Russian airspace.
As others have already mentioned, Melanie Safka has died. Here’s her song “The Saddest Thing” (1970), which always moves me to tears when I hear it.
“Oh, good time, goodbye
It’s time to cry
But I will not weep nor make a scene
Just say ‘thank you
Life for having been’.”