Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 1, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to  Wednesday, May 1, 2024, a hump day (“የሃምፕ ቀን ” in Amharic ) AND MAY DAY, which we’ll celebrate with “The Lusty Month of May” sung by Julie Andrews in Camelot, It’s also National Chocolate Parfait Day, but it’s better to hear this song:

It’s also Bread Pudding Recipe Exchange Day, Save the Rhino Day, World Carnivorous Plant Day, National Salad Day, Lei Day, International Workers’ Day, International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day, and these two May Day celebrations: Calan Mai in Wales and the Gaelic holiday of Beltane.

And today’s Google Doodle (click to access information), celebreates Meena Alexander (1951-2018), described as “an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In his hush money trial, Trump has been held in contempt for violating a gag order and, if he continues to blather, might even go to jail (you can see the contempt order here):

The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan held him in contempt on Tuesday, fining the former president $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order and warning that he could go to to jail if he continued to attack witnesses and jurors.

“The court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders,” the judge, Juan M. Merchan, said as Mr. Trump’s trial reconvened for a third week. He added that while he was “keenly aware of, and protective of, defendant’s First Amendment rights,” he would jail Mr. Trump “if necessary and appropriate.”

Justice Merchan determined that Mr. Trump had flouted the gag order by making nine public statements on social media and on his campaign website in which he attacked witnesses and the jury. He ordered Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, to remove the posts by Tuesday afternoon.

The judge’s ruling and admonition came one week after a fiery hearing in which prosecutors had argued that Mr. Trump’s statements threatened the trial.

One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, claimed that the former president had not violated the order, but Justice Merchan chastised Mr. Blanche that day for failing to marshal facts or legal precedent in support of Mr. Trump, the first American president to face criminal prosecution. “You’ve presented nothing,” Justice Merchan scolded Mr. Blanche.

The ruling that ensued Tuesday marked a nadir in relations between the court and Mr. Trump, who stands accused of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn star. Mr. Trump has been at the trial every day, though he has largely been relegated to the sidelines, complaining to cameras afterward about the gag order and the judge. But now, with the financial penalty — and the specter of jail time — his fury could reach a boiling point.

Already, prosecutors have alerted the judge to four new potential violations. Those were not covered by Justice Merchan’s Tuesday order and will be discussed at another hearing on Thursday morning.

Four new violations! Wouldn’t it be cool to see the Orange Man in an orange suit at last? He wouldn’t be in there long, but he’d be humiliated.

*The Columbia University pro-Palestinian protestors have escalated their demonstration in a big way, breaking into a University building, smashing windows, and briefly holding some people hostage.

[UPDATE: The NYC police cleared the building, Hamilton Hall, and arrested dozens of protestors.  It’s not clear whether the students among them will be suspended (In a letter, President Shafik has asked the police to maintain a presence on campus until at least May 17.]

Protesters at Columbia University, the epicenter of anti-Israel protests that have upended college campuses across the United States, broke into a building on the New York school’s campus on Tuesday, barricaded themselves inside and unfurled an “intifada” banner from a window.

Videos and photos from Hamilton Hall showed at least one individual smashing a window with a hammer.

Doors to the building were shut and blocked from inside with tables, chairs, metal barricades and other objects or sealed with locks, zip ties or ropes by dozens of protesters, the student paper reported.

Protesters at Columbia University, the epicenter of anti-Israel protests that have upended college campuses across the United States, broke into a building on the New York school’s campus on Tuesday, barricaded themselves inside and unfurled an “intifada” banner from a window.

Videos and photos from Hamilton Hall showed at least one individual smashing a window with a hammer.

Doors to the building were shut and blocked from inside with tables, chairs, metal barricades and other objects or sealed with locks, zip ties or ropes by dozens of protesters, the student paper reported.

According to the Columbia Spectator, demonstrators also allegedly held workers there against their will for a short period of time.

The newspaper reported that a maintenance worker exited the building at 12:40 a.m. after yelling to be released, telling the crowd as he left that he had been “held hostage” inside. Three other workers reportedly left some 30 minutes later after the barricades blocking one door were removed.

A group calling themselves the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) declared on X that the activists had “reclaimed” Hamilton Hall and renamed it “Hind Hall in honor of Hind Rajab, a martyr murdered at the hands of the genocidal Israeli state at the age of six years old.”

An Israel Defense Forces investigation in February, immediately after the Gazan girl’s body was found, said there were no troops in the area at the time of her death.

There’s no good end to this. Columbia has vowed not to use police to remove the encampment, and they want to take over the campus. What will happen? Meanwhile, from the NYT:

Columbia University suspended the lead student negotiator for the main pro-Palestinian encampment on its campus this morning.

The student, Mahmoud Khalil, represents, but says he is not part of, the student coalition that has been running the encampment for the past two weeks. He added that the students who are occupying Hamilton Hall are an “autonomous subgroup” of the coalition, and that he does not yet know their demands because they have not communicated them to the larger group.

Can they keep suspending enough students to end the occupation? I doubt it because many in the occupation are not students, nor will a suspended student leave the occupation area, which is, as you see below, guarded by chowderheaded faculty. Stay tuned.

*Meanwhile, the pro-Palestinian campus protests have leapt the pond and are occurring in Europe and the Middle East

 Students across the Middle East and globally are downing their pens, ditching class and joining in with pro-Palestinian protests in solidarity with a wave of campus protests that have swept across the United States in recent weeks.

From Kuwait to Lebanon, in Egypt and Ramallah, students have occupied central locations on campus and waved placards Monday and Tuesday calling for an end to the war in Gaza and divestment by their universities from companies that do business with Israel.

Similar protests have taken place in Sorbonne University in Paris and elsewhere, including Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia as the global student demographic piles pressure on administrators and governments almost seven months into the war. Those protesting said they were directly inspired by U.S. students.

“Palestine wasn’t initially their thing, but now they are doing more than we are, and [we] felt ashamed and that we should do more,” said Ali Tayyar, a student organizer at Lebanon’s American University of Beirut at a protest on Tuesday. “We needed to at least show some support for our friends in the U.S.”

Protests took place in at least five universities in Lebanon on Tuesday, including at the nearby Lebanese American University where business major student, Batoul, 19, who declined to give her full name for safety reasons, said that “as Arabs, it is our duty to be present here today.”

Batoul did not agree that the protests were solely inspired by U.S. students. “We inspired them not the other way around. American students were inspired by us,” she said, noting what she called a shift in perception toward the Palestinian cause among American students.

The American University of Beirut’s President, Fadlo R. Khuri, said in an interview that the university has a long history of student protests and support for Arab nationalist and Palestinian causes.

“This was a case of the students mobilizing for a passionately held issue,” he said of the ongoing protests. “We strive to give the faculty, students and staff as much space as possible, and interfere as little as possible, unless there is violence, of which there was none.”

So it goes.  When there are real genocides all over the world, like Syria, and people are starving in many places in much greater number, like Yemen, Somalia and Sudan.

*The National Park Service of America is cracking down on people who harass animals, often trying to take selfies with them. One deluded fool, however, decided to kick a bison, and got exactly what he deserved: a double whammy.

A man who allegedly harassed bison at Yellowstone national park by kicking one of the animals was injured in return and arrested in the first such encounter at the famed site this year.

Officials said on Monday that police received a report about a man kicking a bison in the leg and being injured by one of the animals about seven miles from the park’s entrance, near Seven Mile Bridge, on 21 April.

It is not uncommon for tourists who get too close to the wild animals to be hurt. Park officials have reported injuries each year at the national park, which is hugely popular with tourists.

The last such case involving a bison was in July 2023, when a 47-year-old Arizona woman was gored during mating season after she turned to walk away. In 2022, a woman who approached a bison near the Old Faithful geyser was tossed 10ft into the air and was gored.

The man’s injuries from 21 April were not described. Upon being notified of the most recent case, police said they arrested Clarence Yoder, 40, in the town of Yellowstone, Montana.

Yoder, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, was charged with disorderly conduct, approaching wildlife, disturbing wildlife and being intoxicated “to a degree that may endanger oneself”, police said.

A companion who was allegedly driving Yoder, 37-year-old McKenna Bass, also of Idaho Falls, was arrested on counts of drunk-driving, failure to yield and disturbing wildlife.

Both men subsequently pleaded not guilty in court.

*A town in Japan, famous for its views of Mount Fuji, is fed up with tourists who overwhelm the town to take photos. So they put up a big black screen blocking the view (this seems remarkably un-Japanese!):

The town of Fujikawaguchiko has had enough of tourists.

Known for a number of scenic photo spots that offer a near-perfect shot of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji, the town on Tuesday began constructing a large black screen on a stretch of a sidewalk to block the view of the mountain. The reason: misbehaving foreign tourists.

“Kawaguchiko is a town built on tourism, and I welcome many visitors, and the town welcomes them too, but there are many things about their manners that are worrying,” said Michie Motomochi, owner of a cafe serving Japanese sweets “ohagi,” near the soon-to-be-blocked photo spot.

Motomochi mentioned littering, crossing the road with busy traffic, ignoring traffic lights, trespassing into private properties. She isn’t unhappy though — 80% of her customers are foreign visitors whose numbers have surged after a pandemic hiatus that kept Japan closed for about two years.

. . . Fujikawaguchiko has tried other methods: signs urging visitors not to run into the road and to use the designated crosswalk in English, Chinese, Thai and Korean, and even hiring a security guard as crowd control. None worked.

. . .The black mesh net, when completed in mid-May, will be 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) high and 20 meters (65.6 feet) long, and will almost completely block the view of Mount Fuji, officials said.

Here’s a video of a student visiting Fujikawaguchiko to see Mount Fuji:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is enjoying the spring:

Hili: Lilacs outside, lilacs inside, it’s probably an exaggeration.
A: Not exaggeration but a tradition.
In Polish:
Hili: Bzy na dworze, bzy w domu, chyba przesada.
Ja: Nie przesada, tylko tradycja.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Not Another Science Cat Page:

From Masih; an Iranian woman walks with her hair flying, defying the regime:

From Luana, my (ecch) colleagues protecting an illegal demonstration at Columbia (see above). Their teachings promoted it, and now they’re protecting the results:

From Malcolm: cat and d*g play:

From Bryan, who says this: “This eXtweet has a video montage of Oprah demonstrating her gnostic wizardry of occult theosophy – taking “God” and making it some new thing. Theosophy is a tradition featuring Helena Blavatsky as the possible originator, from the 19th century”:

This changing of the guard is always a competition. It reminds me of a Māori haka in New Zealand:

From the Auschwitz Memorial. a woman gassed on arrival, age 12:

Two tweets from Matthew. In the first, women get kicked out for defending women’s sports against natal men:

A 43-second video of an amazing robberfly:

36 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The India/Pakistan border changing of the guard reminded me absolutely of the “Ministry of Silly Walks” performed by John Cleese in Monty Python! In fact, I think it’s likely that was the inspiration for the Silly Walks.

    2. Much too much testosterone at work there, talk about strutting idiots, I will not denigrate Peacocks in this instance and more worrying both states have nuclear weapons! Phew.

      1. Think of it more as the well-choreographed dance routine ending with a handshake and a smile that it is, and it tends to lose its aggressive appearance.

        1. Having seen a longer, professionally produced video of this nightly ritual I see it the same as you. Knowing that Robert Ladley flew the nuclear deterrent himself, I usually defer to him on such matters. Demurring, deterrence is a carefully choreographed respectful ritual intended to make intentions clear without provoking a panicked, low-information response. A Vulcan bomber making a low pass and a zoom climb, banking out over Lake Ontario to point its exhausts at an air show audience made the ground shake with a wall of sound. I know Avro chose the delta wing for aerodynamic reasons but the “aluminium overcast” was theatrical in its own right, not so different from the lads at the border strutting their stuff high in the mountains.

          1. Back in the mists of time I lived 12 miles from RAF Waddington, in Lincolnshire, England, which was an operating base for Vulcans, so I regularly saw (and heard) them being put through their paces. I couldn’t begin to count how many times I watched them overhead but it was a sight I never tired of. There was something otherworldly about them. I even got to go inside one: after they were retired the Air Museum on the outskirts of Newark had one on display for several years. Even stripped of most of its equipment it was surprisingly cramped inside.

    4. Whatever it is, it brought a smile to my face, like the Pink Panther stuffed animals

  2. Oprah is working in the prisca theologia – “ancient theology” – zone, that claims all religions are mere facets of a single unified religion. It’s funny I never paid attention until now – because I judged it moronic daytime TV bilge.

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisca_theologia

    It is how cults started – they have the secret knowledge the orthodox churches don’t want anyone to know about, e.g. how to redeem yourself in this life … so you don’t have to wait for the whole death mythos to complete …come with us..

    “In 1875, New York City, Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society with [Henry] Olcott and William Quan Judge.”

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky

    Also check out the graphic here :

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy

    … notice anything in that logo?

    Cray-zee stuff. Also I can sense it is very potent and seductive. But Oprah doesn’t stop there! See that thread for more from crazytown.

    1. As a 17yr old I stumbled across the Theosophical Society I was impressed by their motto.
      “There is no religion higher than truth”
      Not to mention a very cool building they based themselves in. It has all gone now and I didn’t notice.
      I read some of what the library had to offer and moved on.

  3. The case of that transgender girl in WV is interesting, because she has been on puberty blockers for years and has therefore unquestionably never undergone male puberty. (This is the reason that the supreme court ruled she could play on girls’ teams.) The upshot is that, if it is true that all of the male sports advantage is due to testosterone and male puberty, the only thing she has that natal girls don’t is a penis. Should that alone be a basis for objecting to the inclusion of trans girls on girls’ sports teams? I personally think not, but I’m open-minded.

    1. I think being male is a sufficient basis to be excluded from women’s sport, full stop. This madness has to end. Parents have to stop transing their gender-nonconforming kids. Medical doctors have to stop prescribing Lupron to treat unhappiness. Sport inclusion is an incentive to this craziness, and ending that incentive seems like a good thing for everyone.

      [edit to add: Agree with Emily@4]

      1. I agree that this madness has to end. Although gender dysphoria is very real, we also know that it often disappears when a child reaches adulthood. Given all the serious downsides of medical transitioning, I agree with a lot of people who advise that the best course of action in cases of childhood gender dysphoria is to hold off treatment until the child has reached adulthood.

        That said, the issue here isn’t whether or not kids should be allowed to take puberty blockers. The issue is athletic fairness, and the main argument against letting trans girls/women play on female sports teams has been that male puberty* confers unfair advantages on trans females. That argument does not apply here, and it’s kind of moving the goal posts to argue that even if a kid hasn’t gone through puberty, she still ought not to be allowed to play because the whole trans thing has gone too far.

        * Of course, if the male athletic advantage begins in the womb, as Sastra suggests, then that would be an argument against letting even pre-pubertal trans females play on female teams.

    2. Apparently there’s evidence that the changes testosterone makes in the womb also gives boys a physical advantage, as well as making them more aggressive.

    5. If the rest of the states and Canada will adopt the recommendations of the Cass Report, the prescription of puberty blockers to children for <genderwang will become unethical or illegal and there should not be cases of male athletes being allowed to play against women or girls on account of their having been denied normal puberty. England’s Secretary of State for Health has pledged to strike off doctors who prescribe these drugs, as will happen to doctors in the states that have banned them already.

      For those working on policy in your states, be aware that it is not strictly necessary to start with the class of drugs known as puberty blockers to chemically mutilate adolescents. Merely prescribing testosterone to a girl will masculinize her and block female puberty, including the capacity for fertility. For boys, blockade or suppression of testosterone (and the abolition of puberty) can be accomplished with drugs that don’t act centrally, in addition to estrogen. (I have to confess I feel sick even typing this.).

      Remember the selling points of gonadotropin releasing hormone agonists are that they are reversible and give time to think, and that they are fabulous lucrative. Only the last claim is true. Other than the financial losses, the gender industry could give up GRHAs and still carry on its business. It just has to sell commitment to cross-sex hormones earlier in puberty. Efforts to stop it must focus on the goal of gender-“affirming” care globally and not get distracted with individual drugs. The states have already legislated as a package, of course, and the English are going to do so as well, a remarkable evidence-based turnaround for them. The province of Alberta, alone in Canada, plans a similar approach to England’s.

      Indeed, the only reason to prescribe GHRAs now to an 11-year-old is in the hope that by the time she has stopped “thinking about it” and demands testosterone, all this treatment will have become illegal, or the fad will have passed on into history. But for now, without GHRAs you have to prescribe irreversible hormones immediately or be charged with illegal conversion therapy by a petulant, emancipated adolescent.

  4. Oh wow, I had no idea the boy is on puberty blockers. That is a medical intervention bereft of empirical substantiation, it irreparably harms its recipients, and it underscores the boy’s status as a casualty of adult ineptitude even more so than the young girls who contested his inclusion.

    He should not play on the girls’ team due to the fact that he’s not a girl, irrespective of any perceived advantage.

    A sane society would recognize his “trans” identity as a historically contingent societal contrivance, that it lacks grounds for normalization or accommodation, similar to transracialism. It would get that boy the kind of psychological help he needs, not fail him by blocking his puberty or entrenching his disordered beliefs about himself by affirming them, and then force his presence on noncompliant girls.

    This society has gone off the rails.

    The anti-Israel protests scare me, and I’m not even Jewish. If that level of mass action can be marshaled for “Palestine” in the aftermath of 10/7 then antisemitism is a much bigger problem in America than I thought.

    1. With the youth it is a WAAAY bigger problem than I thought also. I’d kind of relegated it to yesterday’s concerns… until lately. (outside the Islamosphere of course, I’m under no misapprehensions about antisemitism there, though most westerns don’t have a clue.)

      The move of the protests from the streets to the campus is a good one though: the issue can be relegated to demented, woke, “low mate value” students – skewing strongly female. And masked. With high neurosis as a personality trait.
      Shall I go on?
      My articles do: https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
      I write about quite a few issues but lately only Israel/Middle East – actually where my education and life experience concentrate.

      D.A.
      NYC

  5. Four new violations! Wouldn’t it be cool to see the Orange Man in an orange suit at last?

    Not particularly. If the legal process goes through and he is found guilty, sure. Other than that, no. I try not to get my emotions mixed up in the affairs of politics. But I suppose he could wear an orange suit and an orange tie in court. That would be nice.

  6. I think either Trump’s advisors or Trump himself is of the opinion that a brief stint in jail will almost guarantee him the White House. It will be spun as the wicked Libtard Demoncrats attempting to overthrow democracy by unjustly incarcerating a viable presidential candidate that YOU want to vote for. For no good reason!

    As far as Trump’s loyal fans are concerned, every charge against Trump is a trumped-up charge.

  7. The New York Post has a handy map of colleges where students have been arrested over the Hamas protests. It was published before Columbia happened. There are a lot more schools shown than I had heard about even having protests.

  8. The business of those girls being suspended is nonsense. Frankly, I think it is time for women and girls to withdraw from existing school teams, and create their own leagues and teams with themselves in charge.

    1. DrB: Not likely to help. The NOW website says, “Girls and women who are transgender should have the same opportunities as girls and women who are cisgender to enjoy the educational benefits of sports”.
      Progressive women are some of the biggest supporters of allowing boys and men to join girls’ and women’s teams and share locker room space.

      1. The statement is deeply dishonest. I don’t know of anybody who is saying that trans girls and trans women should not have the same opportunities as those who are cisgender, it’s just that they should compete in the category designated for their sex.

        The majority of people who think trans women should be able to compete in the female category are not, themselves, really interested in sport.

  10. I read somewhere, many years ago, that the India/Pakistan border ceremony, from the high-crested hats to the exaggerated, stiff strutting movements and postures, is based on the behaviour of the males of an Asian bird species, possibly of the pheasant family, when competing against each other for the affections of the females.

  11. On this day:
    1486 – Christopher Columbus presents his plans discovering a western route to the Indies to the Spanish Queen Isabella I of Castile.

    1707 – The Act of Union joining England and Scotland to form the Kingdom of Great Britain takes effect. [England had recognised Scotland as an independent state on this day in 1328.]

    1753 – Publication of Species Plantarum by Linnaeus, and the formal start date of plant taxonomy adopted by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

    1807 – The Slave Trade Act 1807 takes effect, abolishing the slave trade within the British Empire.

    1840 – The Penny Black, the first official adhesive postage stamp, is issued in the United Kingdom.

    1851 – Queen Victoria opens The Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in London.

    1866 – The Memphis Race Riots begin. In three days time, 46 blacks and two whites were killed. Reports of the atrocities influenced passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

    1886 – Rallies are held throughout the United States demanding the eight-hour work day, culminating in the Haymarket affair in Chicago, in commemoration of which May 1 is celebrated as International Workers’ Day in many countries.

    1894 – Coxey’s Army, the first significant American protest march, arrives in Washington, D.C. [The marchers protested against the unemployment caused by the Panic of 1893 and to lobby for the government to create jobs which would involve building roads and other public works improvements.]

    1915 – The RMS Lusitania departs from New York City on her 202nd, and final, crossing of the North Atlantic. Six days later, the ship is torpedoed off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,198 lives.

    1930 – “Pluto” is officially proposed for the name of the newly discovered dwarf planet by Vesto Slipher in the Lowell Observatory Observation Circular. The name quickly catches on.

    1931 – The Empire State Building is dedicated in New York City.

    1945 – World War II: German radio broadcasts news of Adolf Hitler’s death, falsely stating that he has “fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany”. The Soviet flag is raised over the Reich Chancellery, by order of Stalin.

    1946 – Start of the three-year Pilbara strike of Indigenous Australians.

    1956 – The polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is made available to the public.

    1960 – Cold War: U-2 incident: Francis Gary Powers, in a Lockheed U-2 spyplane, is shot down over the Sverdlovsk Oblast, Soviet Union, sparking a diplomatic crisis.

    1961 – The Prime Minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro, proclaims Cuba a socialist nation and abolishes elections.

    1978 – Japan’s Naomi Uemura, travelling by dog sled, becomes the first person to reach the North Pole alone.

    1999 – The body of British climber George Mallory is found on Mount Everest, 75 years after his disappearance in 1924.

    2003 – Invasion of Iraq: In what becomes known as the “Mission Accomplished” speech, on board the USS Abraham Lincoln (off the coast of California), U.S. President George W. Bush declares that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”.

    2004 – Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia join the European Union, celebrated at the residence of the Irish President in Dublin.

    2009 – Same-sex marriage is legalized in Sweden.

    Births:
    1527 – Johannes Stadius, German astronomer, astrologer, mathematician (d. 1579). [One of the important late 16th-century makers of ephemerides, which gave the positions of astronomical objects in the sky at a given time or times.]

    1602 – William Lilly, English astrologer (d. 1681). [In 1647, during the English Civil War, he published Christian Astrology, a huge compendium of astrological technique. This was the first of its kind to be printed in the English language rather than Latin, and is said to have tutored “a nation in crisis in the language of the stars”. By 1659, Lilly’s fame was widely acknowledged and his annual almanac was achieving sales of around 30,000 copies a year.]

    1751 – Judith Sargent Murray, American poet and playwright (d. 1820). [One of the first American proponents of the idea of the equality of the sexes.]

    1764 – Benjamin Henry Latrobe, English-American architect, designed the United States Capitol (d. 1820).

    1769 – Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Irish-English field marshal and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1852).

    1823 – Jemima Wedderburn Blackburn, Scottish painter and illustrator (d.1909). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1831 – Emily Stowe, Canadian physician and activist (d. 1903).

    1852 – Calamity Jane, American frontierswoman and professional scout (d. 1903).

    1852 – Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish neuroscientist and pathologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1934).

    1857 – Theo van Gogh, Dutch art dealer (d. 1891).

    1864 – Anna Jarvis, American founder of Mother’s Day (d. 1948). [As the years passed, Jarvis grew disenchanted with the growing commercialization of the observation (she herself did not profit from the day) and even attempted to have Mother’s Day rescinded. She died in a sanitarium, her medical bills paid by people in the floral and greeting card industries.]

    1891 – Lillian Estelle Fisher, American historian of Spanish America (d. 1988).

    1895 – May Hollinworth, Australian theatre producer and director (d. 1968).

    1913 – Walter Susskind, Czech-English pianist, conductor, and educator (d. 1980). [He was giving a piano recital in Amsterdam in March 1939 when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, and his mother advised him not to return home. (She was later interned in Theresienstadt but survived the war). With the help of a British journalist and consular officials, he arrived in Britain as a refugee.]

    1916 – Glenn Ford, Canadian-American actor and producer (d. 2006).

    1918 – Jack Paar, American comedian, author and talk show host (d. 2004). [Time magazine’s obituary of Paar reported wryly, “His fans would remember him as the fellow who split talk show history into two eras: Before Paar and Below Paar.”]

    1923 – Joseph Heller, American novelist, short story writer, and playwright (d. 1999).

    1924 – Evelyn Boyd Granville, American mathematician, computer scientist, and academic (d. 2023).

    1925 – Scott Carpenter, American commander, pilot, and astronaut (d. 2013). [The second American (after John Glenn) to orbit the Earth and the fourth American in space, after Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Glenn.]

    1930 – Little Walter Jacobs, American blues harp player and singer (d. 1968).

    1937 – Una Stubbs, English actress and dancer (d. 2021).

    1939 – Judy Collins, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1945 – Rita Coolidge, American singer-songwriter.

    1946 – Joanna Lumley, English actress, voice-over artist, author, and activist.

    1953 – Glen Ballard, American songwriter and producer.

    1969 – Wes Anderson, American director, producer, and screenwriter.

    1982 – Jamie Dornan, Northern Irish model and actor.

    No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping. (David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul):
    1731 – Johann Ludwig Bach, German violinist and composer (b. 1677).

    1873 – David Livingstone, Scottish-English missionary and explorer (b. 1813).

    1904 – Antonín Dvořák, Czech composer and academic (b. 1841).

    1965 – Spike Jones, American singer and bandleader (b. 1911).The

    1985 – Denise Robins, English journalist and author (b. 1897). [A prolific author of romantic novels under a variety of pen names, at the time of her death her books had been translated into fifteen languages and had sold more than one hundred million copies. In 1984, they were borrowed more than one and a half million times from British libraries.]

    1986 – Hylda Baker, English comedian, actress and music hall performer (b. 1905).

    1994 – Ayrton Senna, Brazilian race car driver (b. 1960). [A three-time Formula One champion, he was killed in an accident during the San Marino Grand Prix.]

    1998 – Eldridge Cleaver, American author and activist (b. 1935).

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

    2011 – Henry Cooper, English boxer (b. 1934).

    2021 – Olympia Dukakis, American actress (b. 1931).

    2023 – Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1938).

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

      Jemima Wedderburn Blackburn (born on this day in 1823, died 9 August 1909) was a Scottish painter whose work illustrated rural life in 19th-century Scotland. One of the most popular illustrators in Victorian Britain, she illustrated 27 books. Her greatest ornithological achievement was the second edition of her Birds from Nature (1868). Most of the illustrations were watercolours, with early paintings often including some ink work. A few were collages in which she cut out a bird’s outline and transferred it to a different background, in a similar manner to John James Audubon. Her many watercolours showed daily family life in the late 19th-century Scottish Highlands as well as fantasy scenes from children’s fables. She achieved widespread recognition under the initials JB or her married name Mrs. Hugh Blackburn.

      Blackburn was born in Edinburgh into a wealthy and well-connected family. (She was the youngest child of James Wedderburn, Solicitor General for Scotland, who died some months before her birth, and Isabella Clerk, whose family were holders of the baronetcy of Clerk of Penicuik.) On her mother’s side, Jemima was the first cousin of James Clerk Maxwell, who lived with her family in Edinburgh when he was a schoolboy and she a young woman; she encouraged him to learn to draw.

      Jemima was a friend and pupil of John Ruskin and Sir Edwin Landseer, both of whom praised her work highly. She married mathematician Hugh Blackburn, and they bought the Roshven estate in 1854. This home became the focus of visits from some of the most celebrated figures of the century, including the Duke of Argyll, Lord Kelvin, Lord Lister, Hermann von Helmholtz, Sir John Everett Millais, Anthony Trollope, and Benjamin Disraeli.

      Jemima Blackburn was a keen observer of bird behaviour, as evidenced by her writings. She describes the ejection of nestling meadow pipits (Anthus pratensis) by a blind and naked hatchling common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), accompanied by a small drawing. This behaviour had been reported by Edward Jenner [who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world’s first vaccine] in 1788 but dismissed as impossible by Charles Waterton in 1836. Blackburn’s account was originally published in a popular narrative for children, The Pipits in 1871. Charles Darwin refers to Blackburn’s observations in the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species. [John Gould, who identified the birds now known as “Darwin’s finches, had followed Waterton but corrected the error in his The Birds of Great Britain on seeing a copy of Blackburn’s illustration. Darwin cites verification of the cuckoo’s behaviour “from a ‘trustworthy source’ received by Gould” but doesn’t credit Jemima Blackburn by name.]

      Blackburn illustrated 27 books. A now lost oil painting, “Plough Horse Startled by a Railway Engine”, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849 and at the first exhibition of the Society of Female Artists in London in 1857. In the same year, she was asked to contribute to the first exhibition of contemporary British art in America. Her works have been exhibited in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London and examples have been acquired by the British Museum, the British Library, the Natural History Museum, Royal Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation.

      In 1868 Blackburn published Birds drawn from Nature, which won immediate public acclaim. The Scotsman wrote, “We have seen no such birds since Bewick’s. We say this not ignorant of the magnificent plates by Selby, Audubon, Wilson and Gould…”. A copy, hand coloured under Blackburn’s own supervision, was presented to the Zoological Society of London.

      Beatrix Potter, famous for her own illustrations of wild and domestic animals, was a fan of Blackburn from childhood. Potter recalls her delight when given a copy of Blackburn’s Birds drawn from Nature on her tenth birthday. As an adult, Potter assessed her as a “broad intelligent observer with a keen eye for the beautiful in Nature”, commenting: “I consider that Mrs Blackburn’s birds do not on the average stand on their legs so well as Bewick’s, but he is her only possible rival”. The two women met in 1894, when Blackburn was visiting Putney Park, near London, the home of a cousin of Potter’s. Potter found her an extraordinarily interesting woman. “I have not been so much struck by anyone for a long time.”

      It is quite likely that Blackburn’s work for “The Cat’s Pilgrimage” (1870) and other works influenced Potter’s 1894 illustrations for “Little Red Riding Hood”. The botanist Mary Noble argues that Potter modelled Jemima Puddle-duck, at least in name if not ornithological behaviour, on Jemima Blackburn. Blackburn died barely a year after Potter published her Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck to great success.

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

      1. Thanks for introducing me to “JB”. Her bird illustrations and paintings are gorgeous!

  12. Fuji wall: Japan is fairly xenophobic. Previously this didn’t matter much – if you speak Japanese you have no problem.
    In the last decade there has been a HUGE increase in tourism – particularly in small areas – leading to overtourism.

    And gaijin/foreign tourists there often misbehave by Japanese (or even human) standards.
    D.A.
    NYC
    (formerly of Tokyo)

  13. Change of guard on India-Pakistan border always reminds me of some avian territorial display.

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