Category: Hili Dialogue

Saturday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

July 3, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Saturday, July 3, 2021: Sabbath for Jewish cats and National Chocolate Wafer Day (a KitKat is one example).

It’s also National Eat Beans Day, International Cherry Pit Spitting Day (the world record is 28.51 meters or 93 feet, 6 inches!), National Fried Clam Day, and American Redneck Day. And, according to Wikipedia, it’s “The start of the Dog Days according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac but not according to established meaning in most European cultures.”

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) honors the life and work of neurologist Ludwig Guttmann, born on this day in 1899 (died 1980), who pioneered sports activities for people with disabilities by founding the Stoke Mandeville Games. These evolved into the Paralympics.

Wine of the Day: This Jermann Tuninia from 2015 is an unusual Italian white wine, made from a mixture of grapes: Friulano, Picolit, Ribolla, and Malvasia. I’ve heard of only the last one. But the reviews, all emphasizing its mixture of fruity flavors, made me choose it to accompany my go-to simple meal: black beans and rice with sauteed onions and a bit of thick Greek yogurt mixed in for creaminess.  (I could have chosen a German Riesling Spätlese, but that may have been too sweet.) You don’t want a bone-dry Chardonnay for a dish like that.

It was an estimable wine, laden with fruit and not resembling any white I’ve ever had. Full-bodied, a tad off-dry, and redolent with melon and pear flavors (I have trouble detecting other fruits in wines), it was a good accompaniment for my abstemious but healthy meal.  It was not over the hill by any means. I paid thirty bucks for it, and it goes for about twice that now. Would I pay that much again? Yes, I suppose, for the experience of such an unusual wine, but this will not be a regular in my lineup as the price/value ratio is too high.

News of the Day:

After nearly twenty years, the U.S. is pulling its troops out of Afghanistan, leaving Bagram Air Base just yesterday. By September 11, according to Biden, we will be gone. And what will happen is inevitable: the Taliban will take over, and the freedoms that everyone (but especially woman and girls) have enjoyed will disappear. Will Leftists now beef that Afghanistan is an “apartheid state” when women are no longer allowed to go to school and must wear burqas? Don’t count on it!

Reader Ken tells me that yesterday that, according to the Guardian, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of a Washington State florist who was fined $1000 for refusing to create a floral arrangement for a gay wedding. The florist, Barronelle Stutzman, apparently violated an anti-discrimination law and was ordered to henceforth make floral arrangements for gay weddings if she made them for same-sex weddings.  You may recall that the Court ruled a different way in an earlier case, allowing a cakemaker not to bake a cake for a gay wedding because it violated the baker’s religion. From Ken:

In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Court dodged the issue of civil rights laws vs. the Free Exercise Clause by deciding the case on the very narrow grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had employed the wrong standard in determining what constituted “religious neutrality.”

In this case, Arlene’s Flowers, Inc. v. Washington, the Court decided not to open that can of worms (or cakes or flowers) again. I was happily surprised to see that Amy Coney Barrett didn’t jump at the chance to join with other rightwingers to vote to take the case. It means the Ninth Circuit’s decision compelling the florist to provide her services to the gay couple stands.
And when I asked him why he was “happily surprised” by her decision, he replied that Barrett probably does want to use religious freedom to quash gay rights, but that this may have not been the right case:

There’s some speculation that Justice Barrett’s decision not to vote to grant cert was motivated by her desire to await the perfect case in which to rule for religious freedom over gay rights — or by her concern that the lawyers for the homophobic Alliance for Defending Freedom were not up to the task of presenting the case in its best light. See this tweet:

The WaPo has an analysis how three Justices: Coney Barrett, Roberts, and Kavanaugh, are moving the Court towards the right, though slowly and cautiously. But is this news? We are doomed until past my lifetime to have our laws interpreted by a bunch of religious conservatives.

Here are the results from my “Will Trump go to jail” contest in yesterday’s Hili Dialogue. By a large majority, people think Trump will never do the perp walk:

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 604,629, an increase of 230 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,981,135,, an increase of about 8,800 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on July 3 includes:

The Army, first commanded by Washington, lasted from 1775-1783.

  • 1819 – The Bank for Savings in the City of New-York, the first savings bank in the United States, opens.
  • 1863 – American Civil War: The final day of the Battle of Gettysburg culminates with Pickett’s Charge.

Under Robert E. Lee’s orders, 12,500 Confederate soldiers charged Meade’s Union army over an open field. It was a disaster: the Confederates were repulsed with more than 50% casualties. This has been described as the high-water mark of the Confederacy, and from then on it was downhill to defeat. Here’s a picture of a Union gun that repelled the charge:

(From Wikipedia): “A gun and gunners that repulsed Pickett’s Charge” (from The Photographic History of the Civil War). This was Andrew Cowan’s 1st New York Artillery Battery.
  • 1884 – Dow Jones & Company publishes its first stock average.
  • 1886 – Karl Benz officially unveils the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the first purpose-built automobile.

And here it is; only 25 were manufactured:

Here’s that reunion, with the graybeards shaking hands:

(From Wikipedia): Now the “Friendly” Angle One of the most affecting sights witnessed during the present reunion of Confederate and Federal veterans at Gettysburg is depicted in this photograph. Across the stone wall, which marks the boundaries of the famous “Bloody Angle” where Pickett lost over 3,000 men from a force of 6,000 these old soldiers of the North and South clasped hands in fraternal affection / / International News Service, 200 William St., New York.

It’s now in Edinburgh Castle, but here it was before it was in England, and then was stolen and returned to Scotland in 1996. Queen Elizabeth was crowned sitting over this block of red sandstone.

From the Daily Fail: The artefact – also known as the Stone of Scone – was used in the inauguration of Scottish kings until 1296, when King Edward I seized it and had it built into a new throne at Westminster Abbey in London. Pictured: King Edward I’s coronation throne containing the stone
  • 2013 – Egyptian coup d’état: President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi is overthrown by the military after four days of protests all over the country calling for Morsi’s resignation, to which he did not respond. President of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt Adly Mansour is declared acting president.

Notables born on this day include:

Every Fourth of July when I was a kid I’d watch the 1942 movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” with James Cagney playing George M. Cohan. I loved it, and Cagney’s performance was outstanding. Here’s the ending of the movie when Cohan gets a medal from FDR and then joins a parade singing Cohan’s song “Over There”.  Admit it; doesn’t it make you feel just a wee bit patriotic?

Kafka in 1906:

  • 1908 – M. F. K. Fisher, American author (d. 1992)
  • 1937 – Tom Stoppard, Czech-English playwright and screenwriter

My brush with fame at the Hay Festival, June, 2010 (later I smoked one of his cigarettes with him):

  • 1947 – Dave Barry, American journalist and author
  • 1962 – Tom Cruise, American actor and producer

Those who became the Dearly Departed on July 3 include:

  • 1904 – Theodor Herzl, Austrian journalist and playwright (b. 1860)
  • 1935 – André Citroën, French engineer and businessman, founded the Citroën Company (b. 1878)
  • 1969 – Brian Jones, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer (b. 1942)
  • 1971 – Jim Morrison, American singer-songwriter (b. 1943)

Here’s a live version of one of my favorite Doors songs (“Riders on the Storm” is up there, though I’m not as keen as others on “Light My Fire”:

And here’s Jim Morrison’s grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (now guarded and fenced in because of vandalism and theft), photographed by me in November, 2018:

  • 2012 – Andy Griffith, American actor, singer, and producer (b. 1926)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn: Hili and Szaron discuss their plans:

Szaron: Are we going into the forest?
Hili: No, I’m going back home.
In Polish:
Szaron: Idziemy do lasku?
Hili: Nie, ja wracam do domu.

And Leon is weary of the week:

Leon: Is it Friday yet?

In Polish: Juz piątek mamy?

Here’s a confusing sign from reader David. I believe this is what happens when your math skills are deficient:

From Bruce:

From Jesus of the Day:

Titania adds part 37 to her list of things that have been deemed racist:

Two tweets from Luana: two statues get toppled in Canada.

. . . and religion in America continues its inexorable decline:

With this tweet, reader Ken adds: “One would think that the lawyers for the guy most likely to be “Unindicted Coconspirator #1″ in the Trump Org/Weisselberg indictment had advised their client to STFU on national tv.”

One would think that the lawyers for the guy most likely to be “Unindicted Coconspirator #1” in the Trump Org/Weisselberg indictment had advised their client to STFU on national tv.

Tweets from Matthew. I had no idea that the first of July was International Polychaete Day. Here’s a lovely specimen.

Matthew sent this tweet with a link and a comment: “Here’s the site Francesca’s correspondent refers to – really quite extraordinarily bonkers.” That’s an understatement!

Now here’s an unusual find: click on the link to the article to see the beetle, which is indeed amazingly preserved in a coprolite:

Friday: Hili dialogue

July 2, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Friday, July 2, 2021: National Anisette Day. It’s also World UFO Day, Comic Sans Day, and Freedom from Fear of Speaking Day (see below, though the holiday isn’t really about Freedom of Speech, but about a phobia). Nevertheless, the man in the painting almost surely had to overcome his fear of speaking:

Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” from the Four Freedoms series. Photographed at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, October, 2012

I saw a possum crossing the street on my way to work this morning.

News of the Day:

Well. of course the big news is that criminal charges have come down on the Trump organization. The Orange Man faces no personal charges, but the Manhattan District Attorney accused the Trump organization of tax fraud, paying people without keeping records. And one of the executives, Alan Weisselberg, who was Trumps chief financial officer, is accused of grand larceny and tax fraud for evading taxes on $1.7 million in perks. Is Trump next? The NYT says this:

And while the indictment is narrowly focused on the scheme to evade taxes based on the provision of the benefits, the charges could lay the groundwork for the next steps in the investigation, which will focus on Mr. Trump.

The broader investigation into Mr. Trump and his company’s business practices is continuing. The prosecutors in the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., have been investigating whether Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization manipulated property values to obtain loans and tax benefits, among other potential financial crimes, The New York Times has reported.

Let’s have a poll!

Will Trump see prison time from the criminal investigations in New York?

View Results

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The Supreme Court handed down a decision that doesn’t look good for those of us who oppose the new Republican-led restrictions on voting enacted by  several states. The court upheld by a 6-3 vote, with the voting politically down the line, that several provisions of Arizona’s new voting-restrictions laws were legal, even if they imposed slight burdens on minority voters.  Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissented. (The Court’s decision is here, with Kagan’s dissent particularly strong.)

Reader Ken sent me this note yesterday: “Today’s the last day of the Court’s term. The only remaining business is a decision in the California donor disclosure case, and whether 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer will announce his retirement, giving Uncle Joe the opportunity to nominate his successor while the Dems have the Senate votes to confirm.” It looks as if Breyer won’t resign, since that’s traditionally announced before the end of the Court’s term.

In the Surfside, Florida condo collapse, 18 people are now confirmed dead and 145 are still missing. After a week without water, it seems unlikely that anybody is still alive, but friends and relatives of the missing are still holding out hope. The search and rescue mission (it hasn’t been changed to the dreaded “recovery mission”) was paused today as workers worried that the rest of the building might come down.

On the lighter side, the San Diego Tribune reports a clutch of ten ducklings hatched in the nearby Oceanside Civic Center fountain, but had no way of getting out of the water. (You must know by now that baby ducks have to dry off on land from time to time). A kindly maintenance engineer built them a ramp to make their egress, which they haven’t yet used, but they have a ledge to stand on. That’s is NOT good enough: they should put a big platform attacked to the foundation. Most important, there’s no food there: they need to feed the ducks!! The report adds, “Wildlife rescue officials have been contacted and may come take the birds away, she said.Wildlife rescue officials have been contacted and may come take the birds away.” It will be hard to catch the entire brood AND the mother, as you want to keep the family together if you’re moving them to a more suitable location.  (h/t Susan)

Here’s a photo of the precarious ledge. I hope the ducks get proper help.

A British man has broken the Guinness world record for constructing the tallest stack of M&Ms.  Guess how tall it is? Not high; the answer is below (h/t Ginger K.)

Yep, just five. I’d think a Guinness guy would have to provide the M&Ms and be on the spot lest someone engage in chicanery with glue or other sticky substances.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 604,756, an increase of 263 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,972,356, an increase of about 8,500 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on July 2 includes:

  • 1698 – Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine.
  • 1776 – American Revolution: The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with the Kingdom of Great Britain although the wording of the formal Declaration of Independence is not published until July 4.
  • 1816 – The French frigate Méduse strikes the Bank of Arguin and 151 people on board have to be evacuated on an improvised raft, a case immortalised by Géricault‘s painting The Raft of the Medusa.

Here’s that painting, from 1818-1819, which you can see in the Louvre. Of the 151 passengers, only 15 were alive when the raft was rescued 13 days later.

The mutineers were freed by the Supreme Court on the grounds that they were rightfully revolting against the slave trade, which had been declared illegal.

Here’s a photo of that first Zeppelin flight:

  • 1934 – The Night of the Long Knives ends with the death of Ernst Röhm.
  • 1937 – Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan are last heard from over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first equatorial round-the-world flight.

Here’s Earhart just before leaving on her last flight. The plane is a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra.

  • 1964 – Civil rights movement: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant to prohibit segregation in public places.
  • 1976 – End of South Vietnam; Communist North Vietnam annexes the former South Vietnam to form the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
  • 1990 – In the 1990 Mecca tunnel tragedy, 1,400 Muslim pilgrims are suffocated to death and trampled upon in a pedestrian tunnel leading to the holy city of Mecca.
  • 2002 – Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo around the world nonstop in a balloon.

Here’s the gondola of his balloon, the Spirit of Freedom; the flight, leaving from and landing in Australia, lasted 13 days and 8 hours.

Steve Fossett’s Bud Light Spirit of Freedom Balloon Capsule (A20030128000) on display in the “Pioneers of Flight” exhibit (Gallery 208), Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., April 19, 2006. Photo by Eric Long. [SI-2006-5549]
Notables born on this day include:

When I was a teenager, I read several books by Hesse but didn’t like them. I didn’t know what he looked like, so I just looked him up, and he looks pretty much like I imagined.

That’s the shirt with the alligator on it.

Marshall was the first black Supreme Court Justice, appointed by LBJ in 1967. Here he is in the Oval Office, presumably after a chat with the President:

  • 1925 – Medgar Evers, American soldier and activist (d. 1963)
  • 1937 – Richard Petty, American race car driver and sportscaster
  • 1947 – Larry David, American actor, comedian, producer, and screenwriter
  • 1956 – Jerry Hall, American model and actress

When I was researching my children’s book about cats in Bangalore, the hero, Mr. Das, acquired a new stray female kitten. I proposed to call her Jerry, but Mr. Das said that women weren’t named Jerry. I then googled Jerry Hall and showed her to him, and he agreed to name the cat after me.

  • 1990 – Margot Robbie, Australian actress and producer

Those who perished from this Earth on July 2 include:

  • 1566 – Nostradamus, French astrologer and author (b. 1503)
  • 1961 – Ernest Hemingway, American novelist, short story writer, and journalist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1899)

Here’s a photo of Hemingway from the Daily Beast accompanying a misguided article called “Why the hell are we still reading Ernest Hemingway?” Perhaps because he wrote some really terrific stuff.

  • 1973 – Betty Grable, American actress, singer, and dancer (b. 1916)

Here’s Grable in what was undoubtedly the most popular “pin up girl” affixed to walls by soldiers in World War II. The caption: “Grable’s iconic over-the-shoulder pose from 1943 (due to the fact she was visibly pregnant) was a World War II bestseller, showing off her ‘Million Dollar Legs'”. The photo was by Frank Powolny.

  • 1977 – Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-born novelist and critic (b. 1899)
  • 1991 – Lee Remick, American actress (b. 1935)
  • 1997 – James Stewart, American actor (b. 1908)
  • 2007 – Beverly Sills, American operatic soprano and television personality (b. 1929)
  • 2016 – Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, activist, and author (b. 1928)

Here’s Wiesel photographed in the concentration camp of Buchenwald on April 16, 1945, four days after the camp was liberated. I’ve circled him:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron have a chinwag about a snack:

Hili: Did you see something tasty?
Szaron: I did but it flew away.
In Polish:
Hili: Widziałeś gdzieś coś smacznego?
Szaron: Widziałem, ale odfrunęło.

And we have Mietek and Leon together! Malgorzata explains:

“This is an old saying which means that two heads are better than one, or two people can solve problems better than just one. I don’t know whether you have something like that in English.”

Indeed we do! So let the caption be “two cat heads are better than one.”

In Polish: Co dwie głowy to nie jedna

From Nicole:

From Jesus of the Day. If you don’t understand this, you’re too young.

A clever ad from reader David:

A tweet from Barry, whose email says, “Aliens have visited Earth. . . . I just had no idea that they’d be so cute!”

Here’s a tweet sent by Luana and issued by Democratic Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts; it shows the the inequity of heat distribution:

Tweets from Matthew. The Hebrew translation is “Summer school.” That is one happy hog!

This is like a calving iceberg. It’s geology, Jake!

A tweet from Matthew.  What I want to know is how Matthew knew that Harry was dreaming about drinking tea!

The higher-flying individual is almost as high as the summit of Mount Everest (8849 meters). There’s not much oxygen that high, and one wonders if that’s a problem for the snipes.

Cat encounters Honorary Cat®:

It’s only July 2, so I can pronounce this as Tweet of the Month:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

July 1, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a Thursday and the first day of July in 2021.  It’s finally stopped raining at last in Chicago, and we’ve been spared the extreme heat of the East and West coasts.

It’s also National Gingersnap Day (a cookie or, as you Brits say, a “biscuit”). It’s also these food months all at once:

National Baked Bean Month
National Culinary Arts Month
National Hot Dog Month
National Ice Cream Month
National Picnic Month
National Pickle Month

As for other “days,” it’s also Canada Day, (see below under 1980), International Chicken Wing Day, Zip Code Day, celebrating the introduction of these numbers on this day in 1963 (see below), National Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day, International Reggae Day, and Early Bird Day (I’ve always been one; ergo, my surfeit of worms).

News of the Day:

It’s been 161 days since Joe Biden took office, amidst promises that the First Family would acquire a cat.  In April, Jill Biden says that “she” (the cat) is “waiting in the wings”.  That means they knew the cat that they wanted to adopt, and they had even tested it for amiability with the Bidens’ only surviving dog, Major (see below). The cat passed. So is there now a FIRST CAT?  NOT ON YOUR LIFE! What kind of conspiracy is going on here; could someone ask Jen Psaki? #Whereisthefirstcat

The Big Lie:

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under Ford and W., died Tuesday at 88 in Taos, New Mexico. A snippet from his NYT obituary:

Encores are hardly rare in Washington, but Mr. Rumsfeld had the distinction of being the only defense chief to serve two nonconsecutive terms: 1975 to 1977 under Mr. Ford, and 2001 to 2006 under Mr. Bush. He also was the youngest, at 43, and the oldest, at 74, to hold the post — first in an era of Soviet-American nuclear perils, then in an age of subtler menace by terrorists and rogue states.

A staunch ally of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who had been his protégé and friend for years, Mr. Rumsfeld was a combative infighter who seemed to relish conflicts as he challenged cabinet rivals, members of Congress and military orthodoxies. And he was widely regarded in his second tour as the most powerful defense secretary since Robert S. McNamara during the Vietnam War.

A tweet from Matthew; people make fun of this statement, but it actually makes sense.

And this is surprising news: Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction, for which he’s serving 3-10 years (he’s been in for two), was overturned yesterday by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Given the circumstances, he is now a free man and won’t be retried. When I asked reader Ken, who sent me the news, if Cosby was now free to leave prison without retrial, he responded:

Yes. Part of the basis for the reversal is that the prior district attorney gave Cosby a quasi-immunity agreement, which induced him to waive his Fifth Amendment privilege and testify in a pending civil case. This bars a retrial.

Another part of the opinion faults the trial judge for allowing additional victims to testify at his retrial to Cosby’s similar, but uncharged, bad acts. Had this been the only ground for reversal, Cosby would be subject to retrial.
The court’s opinion is here. On the NBC News last night, they had a parade of furious women who said they were also victims of Cosby’s assaults, or were arguing that the Court’s decision would make women less likely to report sexual assault. They said they a “glitch” in the law should not allow a sexual predator to go free. While I sympathize with them and feel their anger (I did, after all, think that Cosby was indeed a sexual predator), if a legal agreement was violated, and the Court agrees, the man must go free. I would emphasize this: to keep people’s confidence in our legal system, these “glitches”, like Miranda warnings, search warrants, and the like, must be observed. And if they’re not, the result is that the guilty go free.

A C-SPAN informal poll of historians, conducted each time a Presidential administration ends, led to a list of U.S. Presidents ranked in order from best to worst in qualities of leadership. I bet you’re thinking that Trump was at rock bottom, but he wasn’t:

So who ranked worse than Trump? According to the historians, presidents Franklin “Bleeding Kansas” Pierce, Andrew “First to Be Impeached” Johnson and James “Failed to Stop the Civil War” Buchanan, who came in last.

And the best?:

Even with all the new historians participating, the top and bottom rankings remained unchanged. Since 2009, the top four presidents have been: 1) Abraham Lincoln 2) George Washington 3) Franklin D. Roosevelt and 4) Theodore Roosevelt. (Washington and FDR switched places in the 2000 survey.) The bottom three have been always been Pierce, Johnson and Buchanan, in that order.

You can see the overall rankings here. Note that while Obama is #10, he ranks a notch below Ronald Reagan. Lincoln and George Washington have held steady at #1 and #2 respectively since the 2000 survey.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 604,356, an increase of 256 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,963,895, an increase of about 9,000 over yesterday’s total.

Lots of stuff happened on July 1, including:

And you don’t think that morality, even within the Catholic Church, has improved?

  • 1770 – Lexell’s Comet is seen closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of 0.0146 astronomical units (2,180,000 km; 1,360,000 mi).
  • 1846 – Adolphe Sax patents the saxophone.

A photo of Sax and one of his saxophones. Note how similar it is to the modern instrument (Sax also invented several other instruments like the saxotromba and saxtuba, which are extinct):

A BIG DAY IN THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY!

Here’s the typewriter as manufactured by Remington. I guess the pedal moves the carriage back.

  • 1898 – Spanish–American War: The Battle of San Juan Hill is fought in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.
  • 1903 – Start of first Tour de France bicycle race.

The race was won by Maurice Garin, shown here after the race with his bike:

“SOS” does not really stand for anything like “save our souls,” but is used because the pattern is distinctive (and it was created by Germans).

  • 1916 – World War I: First day on the Somme: On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 19,000 soldiers of the British Army are killed and 40,000 wounded.

To compare, in the entire World War II, 291,000 Americans were killed.

Here’s that plane, the Winnie Mae, now displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It took Post and Gatty eight days and sixteen hours to make that flight.

  • 1963 – ZIP codes are introduced for United States mail. [See above]
  • 1972 – The first Gay pride march in England takes place.
  • 1979 – Sony introduces the Walkman.

The first Walkman:

  • 1980 – “O Canada” officially becomes the national anthem of Canada.
  • 1990 – German reunification: East Germany accepts the Deutsche Mark as its currency, thus uniting the economies of East and West Germany.
  • 2007 – Smoking in England is banned in all public indoor spaces.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1804 – George Sand, French author and playwright (d. 1876)

Sand was, of course, a woman, and named Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. She used a man’s name because a woman writer would be dismissed. Here’s a photo from 1864:

  • 1869 – William Strunk Jr., American author and educator (d. 1946)
  • 1899 – Thomas A. Dorsey, American pianist and composer (d. 1993)
  • 1912 – David Brower, American environmentalist, founded Sierra Club Foundation (d. 2000)
  • 1916 – Olivia de Havilland, British-American actress (d. 2020) 

Notice that de Havilland lived to be 104, and died just last year. Here’s a famous scene from Gone with the Wind with de Havilland as Melanie and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy:

  • 1929 – Gerald Edelman, American biologist and immunologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2014)
  • 1941 – Twyla Tharp, American dancer and choreographer
  • 1952 – Dan Aykroyd, Canadian actor, producer and screenwriter
  • 1961 – Diana, Princess of Wales (d. 1997)

Those who croaked on the first of July include:

A weird tale (from Wikipedia):

(born Jemima Wilkinson; November 29, 1752 – July 1, 1819) was an American preacher born in Cumberland, Rhode Island, to Quaker parents. After suffering a severe illness in 1776, the Friend claimed to have died and been reanimated as a genderless evangelist named the Public Universal Friend, and afterward shunned both birth name and gendered pronouns. In androgynous clothes, the Friend preached throughout the northeastern United States, attracting many followers who became the Society of Universal Friends.

  • 1860 – Charles Goodyear, American chemist and engineer (b. 1800)
  • 1896 – Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author and activist (b. 1811)
  • 1925 – Erik Satie, French pianist and composer (b. 1866)
  • 1974 – Juan Perón, Argentinian general and politician, President of Argentina (b. 1895)
  • 1983 – Buckminster Fuller, American architect, designed the Montreal Biosphère (b. 1895)
  • 1995 – Wolfman Jack, American radio host (b. 1938)
  • 2000 – Walter Matthau, American actor (b. 1920)
  • 2004 – Marlon Brando, American actor and director (b. 1924)
  • 2009 – Karl Malden, American actor (b. 1912)

Here’s a clip from the documentary “Listen to me Marlon” in which Brando describes his own acting. (Can you name the movie in which Brando and Malden both appeared?)

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has malaise. Malgorzata explains: “Hili is looking at the world with reluctance and explains her feelings to Andrzej. She feels no enthusiasm for anything and that’s why the world and life seem boring. So how is she to look at it with anything but reluctance?

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m looking reluctant.
A: Why?
Hili: Because of the lack of enthusiasm.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Patrzę niechętnie.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Z braku entuzjazmu.

Found on Facebook. Could this be a Gary Larson cartoon? And look, I’m in there!

A cartoon by the late Leo Cullum sent by Jean:

From Nicole. Well, it’s a flying chicken with a kazoo:

Two political tweets from Ken, who says about the first one, “Paul Gosar is the wingnut Arizona congressman whose siblings all got together during the 2018 campaign to do a tv ad urging his constituents to vote against him. Nick Fuentes is a self-described white nationalist known (among other things) for his antisemitic statements.”

And Ken’s followup tweet, showing Fuentes denying the Holocaust flat out. And oy, his metaphors!

A tweet from Barry,

From Simon, who asks, “Where is WEIT on this list?” I don’t know, but Neil’s book is also #1 in Creationism, while I’m only #88. I’m jealous!

Tweets from Matthew. I suppose mine would be an extreme example of crypsis, like a moss frog. Or perhaps it would be the way parasites commandeer the brains of some of their insect hosts, making the insect behave in a way to facilitate the parasite’s transmission to the next host. You can see other peoples’ answers at Neo.Life.

There’s gonna be a prequel to The Sopranos! Here’s a trailer and the first two minutes of the film. But Matthew asks, as do I, “But will it have the complexity of the series, or will it be just another gangster film?”

Why is this mother duck behaving this way?

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 30, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a humpish Wednesday, June 30, 2021: National Mai Tai Day (here’s a recipe for this “tropical” cocktail) and a photo of a Mai Tai below. The drink contains white rum, orange curaçao, freshly-squeezed orange juice, orgeat syrup, and dark rum.

It’s also National Parchment Day (still used for baking, but not in the animal-skin version), National Meteor Day, and International Asteroid Day, marking the day in 1908 when the Tunguska Event occurred in Siberia, flattening 80 million trees. It’s thought to have involved the atmospheric disintegration of a celestial body like a meteor or small asteroid. Below is a famous photo, taken in 1927 (19 years after the event), of some of the fallen trees it’s not known if any people were killed, but three might have been.

Most important, it’s my sister’s birthday, exactly six months from my own birthday; we were born precisely 2.5 years apart. (See below.) Happy birthday, Sis!

News of the Day:

It’s been 161 days since Joe Biden took office, and the White House is still catless. When will this discrimination end?

The East Coast of the U.S., and much of the midwest, has faced floods, the Southeast is under tropical storm warnings, and the Pacific Northwest (including parts of Canada) have experienced record heat. Look at these temperature (in degrees Fahrenheit) reached in the NW, posted by the Phoenix branch of the U.S. National Weather Service. A new high temperature for all of Canada!

Reader Ken notes that Clarence Thomas, of all the justices, has issued a statement doubting whether the federal government can legally prohibit growing or using marijuana. The case was one in which the federal government denied a tax benefit to a Colorado marijuana dispensary despite the use of the drug being legal in the state (see more here). The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the tax denial to stand, and Thomas issued a statement implying that maybe the U.S. government has no right to regulate marijuana production or use.

Ken sez:

Justice Clarence Thomas (really, no shit, Clarence Thomas) issued a statement yesterday regarding the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in Standing Akimbo, LLC v. United States, in which he expressed grave doubts about the constitutionality of federal laws prohibiting the intrastate use or cultivation of marijuana.

(You may recall that SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of such laws in Gonzles v. Raich in 2005, but the federal government has been all over the place regarding its enforcement of such laws ever since.

You can read Thomas’s statement here.

And here’s a tweet with a short excerpt of his statement:

Here’s a hugely embarrassing own goal by Spain:

It’s a major tournament moment that Spain’s national soccer team goalkeeper, Unai Simón, will definitely want to forget.

A momentary lapse in concentration saw the shot-stopper score a shocker of an own goal during Spain’s second-round European Championships game against Croatia on Monday.

Midfielder Pedri passed the ball back to Simón, but it skipped off his boot and rolled into the net to give Croatia a 1-0 lead.

Fortunately, Spain redeemed themselves, winning 5-3 in extra time.

This headline is unbelievable, and yet it’s true (click to read screenshot):

Here’s the offending anti-discrimination statement by April Powers (a woman Jew “of color”), which was considered offensive (it was issued when attacks on Jews worldwide rose following the recent conflict with Gaza:

The SCBWI unequivocally recognizes that the world’s 14.7 million Jewish people (less than 0.018% of the population) have the right to life, safety, and freedom from scapegoating and fear. No person should be at risk because of their heritage, religion, disability, or whom they love. In the last several years, antisemitism has been on the rise globally, and has fueled a 75% increase in hate speech and random violence against Jewish people in the last few weeks alone. Because antisemitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred, it has its own name. It is the example from which many forms of racism and violence are perpetrated. As writers, illustrators, and translators of children’s literature, we are responsible for promoting equity and humanizing people in our work-all children and all families.
Silence is often mistaken for acceptance and results in the perpetration of more hatred and violence against different types of people. As proof, it saddens us that for the 4th time this year we are compelled to invite you to join us in not looking away and in speaking out against all forms of hate, including antisemitism.

But why did Oliver have to resign for a statement like that? Guess, and then read here. What a world! What a world!

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 604,069, an increase of 272 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,954,806, an increase of about 8,300 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 30 includes:

Here’s Blondin on the rope, and he has no safety line. This was his 1859 walk, but he did it several times thereafter, even putting a chair down in the middle of the rope and sitting on it.

This is, of course, the debate in which Bishop Wilberforce was put down by Thomas Henry Huxley. Wikipedia reports it this way, but there are several versions. All we know is that somehow Huxley clashed with the Bishop about human evolution:

The debate is best remembered today for a heated exchange in which Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.

Guiteau killed Garfield (who took two months to die from infection) because the President failed to give Guiteau with a consulship as a reward for campaigning for the candidate. Here’s Guiteau, who looks pretty scary, and then his preserved skull with its rotten teeth:

Caption for the photo below from Wikipedia: “Skull of Charles Guiteau in the National Museum of Health and Medicine collection. Note the advanced tooth decay at age 40.”

Crikey!

This was Einstein’s “miracle year”, when he published on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity. Here’s the relativity paper:

  • 1908 – The Tunguska Event, the largest impact event on Earth in human recorded history, resulting in a massive explosion over Eastern Siberia. [See above.]
  • 1921 – U.S. President Warren G. Harding appoints former President William Howard Taft as Chief Justice of the United States.
  • 1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler’s violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, takes place.
  • 1937 – The world’s first emergency telephone number, 999, is introduced in London.
  • 1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan.

Here is the first model of ‘Vette rolling off that assembly line:

  • 1966 – The National Organization for Women, the United States’ largest feminist organization, is founded.
  • 1972 – The first leap second is added to the UTC time system.
  • 1990 – East Germany and West Germany merge their economies.
  • 2019 – Donald Trump becomes the first sitting US President to visit the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

Mission not accomplished! (Whatever the mission was. . . ):

Two autocrats/loons

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1911 – Czesław Miłosz, Polish novelist, essayist, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
  • 1917 – Lena Horne, American actress, singer, and activist (d. 2010)

Here’s Horne’s great classic from the eponymous movie in 1943:

  • 1926 – Paul Berg, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
  • 1942 – Robert Ballard, American lieutenant and oceanographer
  • 1952 – Susan Jane Coyne, sister of your host. Here’s a photo of the two of us with our mom; this was our passport picture when we traveled to Greece in the mid-Fifties:

 

Those who took their last breath on June 30 include:

  • 1882 – Charles J. Guiteau, American preacher and lawyer, assassin of James A. Garfield (b. 1841) [See above]
  • 1961 – Lee de Forest, American inventor, invented the audion tube (b. 1873)
  • 1973 – Nancy Mitford, English journalist and author (b. 1904)
  • 1984 – Lillian Hellman, American author and playwright (b. 1905)
  • 2001 – Chet Atkins, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1924)
  • 2003 – Buddy Hackett, American actor and comedian (b. 1924)

Buddy Hackett was born to a Jewish family, and his real name was Leonard Hacker. Here he is telling a gypsy joke (now “Roma joke’) on Johnny Carson’s show (you’ll have to watch on YouTube).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili waxes philosophical

Hili: The world is full of illusions.
A: Is this the first time you’ve noticed it?
Hili: The first time today.
In Polish:
Hili: Świat jest pełen złudzeń.
Ja: Pierwszy raz to zauważyłaś?
Hili: Dzisiaj pierwszy.

From Beth:

A famous Gary Larson cartoon posted on Facebook. In contrast, I’m afflicted with Anatidaephilia:

From Beth, a Doug Savage cartoon:

A tweet from Ginger K. Don’t chuckle: he may be right!

Tweets from Matthew. First, stag beetles in flight—afternoon delight! Two videos! Sound up:

I think the cranes are checking out the gator.

The Wimbledon court goes wild applauding Dr. Gilbert, and well she deserves it!

The answer is probably “yes,” but it’s not certain:

Read more about this original color photo and how they tracked down its subject here.

A cloned “worker” bee whose clones do not work is a danger to the ecosystem. Read the article linked below:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 29, 2021 • 6:30 am

Welcome to Tuesday, June 29, 2021: It’s National Almond Buttercrunch Day, as well as National Waffle Iron Day (who has one?), and National Camera Day (who wants some 35-mm film using Nikons; I have several).

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the life and work of Mexican artist Pedro Linares Lópes (1906 – 1992), a Mexican artisan famous for creating the papier-mâché figurines called alebrijes. The craft spread throughout Mexico, and you can see examples of these fantastical figures at the preceding link. Lópes was born on this day in 1906.

Here are some alebrijes on sale at the market in Oaxaca (photo from Wikipedia):

Alebrijes en Oaxaca, Mexico

News of the Day:

It’s been 160 days since Biden took office, and, despite Joe’s promises, the White House is still catless. If not now, when?

When India ran out of oxygen: the New York Times reports some horrible events in India’s disastrous covid crisis, with hospitals suddenly running out of oxygen and masses of people on ventilators dying all at once. Both the NYT and I blame this on the Modi government, which was never really prepared for a crisis that seemed inevitable. An excerpt:

India is a major producer of compressed oxygen. But the Indian government moved too late to distribute supplies.

State governments feuded over oxygen and seized tankers, creating bottlenecks and delays.

Delhi city officials didn’t build systems to produce or store oxygen and struggled to allocate dwindling supplies. When tight supplies and government missteps led oxygen to run out at Jaipur Golden [Hospital], some families said the hospital offered no warning.

And now, with a shortage of vaccine, India may be about to get itself into a third wave of infection.

The website of my surrogate parents Malgorzata and Andzej, Listy z naszego sadu (“letters from our orchard”; Hili is the editor, and note her photo at the top) has just published a piece written by Andrzej about the erroneous reporting of the NYT, writing that’s duplicitous in the sense that known mistakes were never corrected. It’s about the death of Palestinian children during the recent battles with Israel. The piece was translated from Polish into English by Malgorzata and her English friend Sarah Lawson.

The death toll in Chicago last weekend: 74 shootings and six deaths between Friday evening and early Monday morning. It was one of the most violent weekends of one of our most violent years, and remember: we have the Fourth of July weekend coming up. The chief of police attributes much of the violence to “too many guns in the hands of the wrong people.”

Buffets are back! Or so says the Wall Street Journal, reporting on doings in Buffet City, otherwise known as Las Vegas. As a foodie, I love buffets, though it will take some time before they return in full form. Reopened ones, for instance, often forbid you to serve yourself, make you wear gloves, and at one buffet near me in Cicero, Illinois you aren’t even allowed to dip your own fruit into the chocolate fountain (this is for obvious reasons). Soon it will be “all you can eat” again!

Over at the NYT, Carl Zimmer has an informative article about the discovery and features of “Dragon Man,” an ancient hominin that lived between 309,000 and 146,000 years ago. It’s been designated as a member of a new species of Homo: H. longi. And it’s said to be more closely related to modern H. sapiens than what we used to think was our closest relative, the common ancestor of the Neanderthals and Denisovans (who split from each other after branching off the lineage that led to us). Some paleoanthropologists dissent, though, considering H. longi to be a Denisovan, a population that has not generally been seen as a species distinct from H. sapiens (there was interbreeding). Stay tuned.

Here’s a digital reconstruction of the beautifully preserved skull: a screenshot from a video at the NYT:

(from NYT): A digital reconstruction of the cranium nicknamed “Dragon Man” which could be a new species of ancient human. Video by Xijun Ni.CreditCredit…Xijun Ni

The Washington Post, to my dismay, is getting woker and woker, to the extent that it’s barely distinguishable in its biases from HuffPo. Here’s a screenshot of all the editorials highlighted on the front page yesterday afternoon. (And yet I still subscribe to the WaPo, the NYT, and the Wall Street Journal.) I don’t read the news or op-eds just to have my own opinions confirmed, but the “MSM” increasingly fails to challenge what I think.

Here’s a lovely comment that came in this morning. I banned the moron, of course, but it’s worth putting up:

The Jews won’t be happy until whites and white culture are eradicated forever. We should’ve oven crisped them all when we had the chance.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 603,758, an increase of 289 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,946,517, an increase of about 6,100 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 29 includes:

A second Globe Theatre was built in 1614 and closed 28 years later.  Here’s a “conjectural reconstruction of the [first] Globe theatre by C. Walter Hodges based on archaeological and documentary evidence.”

  • 1864 – At least 99 people, mostly German and Polish immigrants, are killed in Canada’s worst railway disaster after a train fails to stop for an open drawbridge and plunges into the Rivière Richelieu near St-Hilaire, Quebec.
  • 1888 – George Edward Gouraud records Handel‘s Israel in Egypt onto a phonograph cylinder, thought for many years to be the oldest known recording of music.

The first video plays Gouraud’s recording. Now, however, the earliest known recording dates from 1860, a lot earlier. You can hear that one in the second video below:

The earliest known recording of a human voice. See this NPR article for more information (the sound has been restored a bit):

  • 1889 – Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships vote to be annexed by Chicago, forming the largest United States city in area and second largest in population at the time.
  • 1922 – France grants 1 km2 at Vimy Ridge “freely, and for all time, to the Government of Canada, the free use of the land exempt from all taxes”.
  • 1927 – The Bird of Paradise, a U.S. Army Air Corps Fokker tri-motor, completes the first transpacific flight, from the mainland United States to Hawaii.

The flight took 25 hours and 50 minutes from San Francisco to Oahu; here’s its arrival at Wheeler Field in Hawaii:

  • 1956 – The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 is signed by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System.
  • 1972 – The United States Supreme Court rules in the case Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
  • 1974 – Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with the Kirov Ballet.
  • 1975 – Steve Wozniak tested his first prototype of Apple I computer.

Here’s what Wikipedia captions as “Original 1976 Apple 1 Computer in a briefcase. From the Sydney Powerhouse Museum collection.” It went on the market at the Satanic price of $666.66.

  • 1987 – Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, the Le Pont de Trinquetaille, was bought for $20.4 million at an auction in London, England.

The painting below, not even a great specimen of Van Gogh, was re-sold for $34 million (plus $3.7 million in fees) in a Christie’s auction on May 13 of this year.

  • 2006 – Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that President George W. Bush’s plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law.
  • 2007 – Apple Inc. releases its first mobile phone, the iPhone.

And here’s that first iPhone:

(From Wikipedia): First iPhone on display under glass at the January 2007 Macworld show
  • 2014 – The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant self-declared its caliphate in Syria and northern Iraq.

Notables born on this day include were few, and include:

  • 1858 – George Washington Goethals, American general and engineer, co-designed the Panama Canal (d. 1928)
  • 1919 – Slim Pickens, American actor and rodeo performer (d. 1983)

Here’s the scene from which we all know Slim Pickens; as Major Kong in Stanley Kubrik’s movie Dr. Strangelove, Pickens (previously an actor in Westerns) rides the Big H-Bomb to destruction and war:

  • 1941 – Stokely Carmichael, Trinidadian-American activist (d. 1998)

Those whose lives were discontinued on June 29 include:

  • 1852 – Henry Clay, American lawyer and politician, 9th United States Secretary of State (b. 1777)
  • 1895 – Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist (b. 1825)
  • 1933 – Roscoe Arbuckle, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1887)
  • 1940 – Paul Klee, Swiss painter and illustrator (b. 1879)

First, a photo of Klee with his cat, and then his famous “Cat and Bird” painting, in which a cat thinks of a bird (notice too the heart-shaped nose):

  • 1964 – Eric Dolphy, American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1928)
  • 1967 – Jayne Mansfield, American actress (b. 1933)
  • 1995 – Lana Turner, American actress (b. 1921)

Turner was involved in a scandal about the death of her abusive boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, a mobster. Angered that he wasn’t allowed to go to the Academy Awards ceremony with Turner, he attacked her when she returned home, whereupon Turner’s daughter Cheryl stabbed him in the stomach, killing him. Cheryl was found not guilty because it was “justifiable homicide.”  Here’s Stompanato with Lana Turner.

  • 2002 – Rosemary Clooney, American singer and actress (b. 1928)
  • 2020 – Carl Reiner, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1922)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seems to be kvetching about the weather report, even though she doesn’t like rain. But that interpretation is wrong, as Malgorzata explains:

“She is not kvetching about the rain. She is full of disdain for experts, which is so very fashionable these days. There is never a mistake; there must be bad intentions. The good old rule ‘Do not ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to stupidity’ (or ignorance, or just the fact that there is knowledge humanity hasn’t yet obtained) is not popular. Unfortunately, Hili is following fashion here.”

Hili: They said it would be raining.
A: So what?
Hili: They lied again.
In Polish:
Hili: Mówili, że będzie padać.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Znowu kłamali.

And a photo of little Kulka taken by Andrzej:

From Facebook:

A clever painting sent in by Bruce:

From reader Paul, who wrote this: “I saw the attached last week while driving through rural North Carolina.  It’s a bit of a puzzle…”  Indeed it is! Does that mean all atheists are in Heaven, in limbo, or where?

From reader Barry, who says, “A funny tweet, and the two responses are great, too (one plays into your recent comment about Darwin’s attitude about slavery):

From Ginger K., a Gary Larson cartoon. (He was the best!)

Tweets from Matthew. This first photo must have been taken right after the scene in which Sonny is brutally murdered at a toll booth.

Poor Wally the Walrus! Nobody loves him, and he’s always being kicked off of boats or booted off of boat slips. He’s lonely and looking for a friend!

Winston Churchill’s version of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”:

Is it just the term “UFO”, or are aliens particularly attracted to America?

Monday: Hili dialogue (and Szaron monologue)

June 28, 2021 • 6:30 am

Welcome to a dreary Monday; it’s June 28, 2021: National Tapioca Day, a comestible that has made a big comeback with the advent of Asian-style tapioca-ball drinks. It’s also Paul Bunyan Day, International Body Piercing Day, INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY, and Tau Day, described by Wikipedia as “a day similar to Pi Day celebrating the number Tau, which is equivalent to 2*Pi”. [JAC: in American notation it’s 6/28, which is roughly twice π.

Wine of the Day. As I said, I’m breaking into my pricier wines to treat myself in dispiriting times. The bottle below,  nigh on $35 when I bought it (but still a damn sight cheaper than a good wine in a good restaurant; see “news” below), is a French version of a chenin blanc, and, according to Robert Parker, who rated it a high “95”, could age for a long time to come. So perhaps I’m committing infanticide drinking it two years after the vintage. The food: fettucine Alfredo containing a pound of fresh garden peas from the farmer’s market. (I use Trader Joe’s excellent fettucine sauce, and bucatini noodles sent to me by a very kind reader.)

This was the most complex and finest example of chenin blanc that I’ve had. It was dry, but full of fruit in the nose (I detected honeydew melon and pear). Amazingly, it tasted a tad off-dry with the fettucine, which was great; it was a good pairing. I will have the other half  ofthe bottle to drink tomorrow, but, sadly, I have only one bottle, so I won’t be able to test Parker’s assertion: ” A terrific and buoyant Vouvray that any Chenin lover should try—or, better yet, cellar!” Even if this is outside your budget, you should be investigating chenin blancs as go-to summer whites, for there are some terrific values out there.

News of the Day:

We’re now 158 days into the Biden administration, and there’s still no sign of a White House cat. Uncle Joe doesn’t even bipartisanship to get one; has he lied to us?

The death toll at the collapsed Surfside, Florida condominium has climbed from four to nine as more bodies have been recovered. But more than 150 people are still missing, and investigators are taking DNA from relatives of those not yet found. It’s already been reported that scattered body parts have turned up in the wreckage.

You may find Nicholas Kristof a bit unctuous, but his latest NYT column (click on screenshot below) is worth a read, for it describes a black musician, Daryl Davis, who hangs out with neo-Nazis and genuine Klan members, trying to convert them. And it often works, at least according to Kristof. Here’s a summary of Davis’s methods:

One of Davis’s methods — and there’s research from social psychology to confirm the effectiveness of this approach — is not to confront antagonists and denounce their bigotry but rather to start in listening mode. Once people feel they are being listened to, he says, it is easier to plant a seed of doubt.

In one case, Davis said, he listened as a K.K.K. district leader brought up crime by African Americans and told him that Black people are genetically wired to be violent. Davis responded by acknowledging that many crimes are committed by Black people but then noted that almost all well-known serial killers have been white and mused that white people must have a gene to be serial killers.

When the K.K.K. leader sputtered that this was ridiculous, Davis agreed: It’s silly to say that white people are predisposed to be serial killers, just as it’s ridiculous to say that Black people have crime genes.

The man went silent, Davis said, and about five months later quit the K.K.K.

Davis claims to have converted over 200 bigots this way. While Kristof adds, “society can hardly ask Black people to reach out to racists, gay people to sit down with homophobes, immigrants to win over xenophobes, women to try to reform misogynists, and so on. Victims of discrimination have endured enough without being called upon to redeem their tormentors”, that’s what his hero is doing, so maybe he’s just saying, ashe does at the end, that you should talk to family members whose views contradict yours. That’s an anodyne lesson, typical of Kristof.  I would like to meet Davis, though!

A woman holding a cardboard sign stepped into the road in front of Tour de France riders near the beginning of the race on Saturday, causing a massive crash (see video below). As the Washington Post reports:

A woman holding a large sign bearing the words “ALLEZ OPI-OMI!” (German terms of endearment for grandparents) clipped Germany’s Tony Martin, who lost his balance and set off a chain reaction that sent cyclists sprawling across the pavement as she stepped in front of the peloton to display the sign for TV cameras. Several spectators and cyclists were injured in the first crash.

“We are suing this woman who behaved so badly,” Pierre-Yves Thouault, the tour’s deputy director, told Agence France-Presse. “We are doing this so that the tiny minority of people who do this don’t spoil the show for everyone.”

The problem is that the woman fled the scene and they can’t find her.

Here’s a tweet that shows the onlooker with the sign:

I visited Venice only once:  for just a few hours on a day trip from a conference in Padua. Even though it was off season, the main part of the city was intolerably crowded. In season, it’s much worse. The city, already declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is now up for status of World Heritage in Danger sites. The AP reports:

The recommendation by UNESCO’s World Heritage Center took into account mass tourism, in particular the passage of cruise ships through the historic center, a steady decline in permanent residents as well as governance and management problems.

“This is not something we propose lightly,” Mechtild Roessler, director of the World Heritage Center, told AP. “It is to alert the international community to do more to address these matters together.”

Veneto regional officials have submitted a plan for relaunching the tourism-dependent city to Rome that calls for controlling arrivals of day-trippers, boosting permanent residents, encouraging startups, limiting the stock of private apartment rentals and gaining control over commercial zoning to protect Venetian artisans.

Lettie Teague, the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnist, is running a three-part series to acquaint would-be oenophiles to the basics of tasting wine, buying it, and pairing it with food. Have a look, especially if you’re just getting into wine: here are the first two articles:

Wine Tasting 101: An accessible guide to key grapes, terms, and techniques. 

and

How to order wine in a restaurant: pairing tips and sommelier strategies. 

She left out two of Coyne’s Lessons, though:

1). Always bring your own wine to a restaurant if you can, and pay corkage (the fee they charge to open and serve your own bottle) so long as that fee reasonable. Even at $15 a bottle, corkage is still considerably cheaper than buying the restaurant’s wine, which is nearly always unconscionably overpriced

2). Do NOT let the sommelier pour the wine for the table. The host should do all the pouring. (In this I agree totally with Christopher Hitchens.)

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 603,597, an increase of 308 deaths over yesterday’s figure.  The reported world death toll is now 3,940,422, an increase of about 6,700 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 28 includes:

Here, from Wikipedia, is “Sir George Hayter‘s view of the 1838 coronation.”

  • 1859 – The first conformation dog show is held in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
  • 1865 – The Army of the Potomac is disbanded.
  • 1870 – The US Congress establishes the first federal holidays (New Year Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving, and Christmas).
  • 1880 – Australian bushranger Ned Kelly is captured at Glenrowan.

A “bushranger” refers to an armed robber in old-time Australia.  Here’s a photo of Kelly on November 10, 1880, the day before he was hanged for murder:

Here’s the Archduke’s bloodstained uniform, shown on Wikipedia. Because of this assassination, 20 million people died, and for nothing.

Here’s the cover of the English version of the treaty:

  • 1922 – The Irish Civil War begins with the shelling of the Four Courts in Dublin by Free State forces.
  • 1969 – Stonewall riots begin in New York City, marking the start of the Gay Rights Movement.

The police raid on the Stonewall Inn was indeed an iconic moment. Here’s a photo from Wikipedia showing the protestors confronting the police, who had been regularly paid off by the bar for protection (the Stonewall was owned by the Genovese crime family). This form of extortion was called “gayola.”

(From Wikipedia): This photograph appeared in the front page of The New York Daily News on Sunday, June 29, 1969, showing the “street kids” who were the first to fight with the police.
  • In 1971, the recombinant DNA debate began on this day. Here’s a relevant tweet from Matthew, who’s writing a book on the topic:

  • 1978 – The United States Supreme Court, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke bars quota systems in college admissions.

Note that the ruling was made on the basis that diversity itself was a desirable outcome, not as a form of reparations for centuries of repression of minorities.

  • 1987 – For the first time in military history, a civilian population is targeted for chemical attack when Iraqi warplanes bombed the Iranian town of Sardasht.
  • 1997 – Holyfield–Tyson II: Mike Tyson is disqualified in the third round for biting a piece off Evander Holyfield‘s ear.

Here’s a video of the ear-biting (trigger warning: some blood):

  • 2001 – Slobodan Milošević is extradited to the ICTY in The Hague to stand trial.

Notables born on this day include:

Here are some big cats by Rubens in “Daniel in the Lions’ Den” (1614-1616).

  • 1703 – John Wesley, English cleric and theologian (d. 1791)
  • 1824 – Paul Broca, French physician, anatomist, and anthropologist (d. 1880)
  • 1873 – Alexis Carrel, French surgeon and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1944)

Carrel, whose photo is below, appears due for reexamination and/or cancellation. As Wikipedia describes him:

Alexis Carrel (French: [alɛksi kaʁɛl]; 28 June 1873 – 5 November 1944) was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles A. Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. His positive description of a miraculous healing he witnessed during a pilgrimage earned him scorn of some of his colleagues. This prompted him to relocate to the United States, where he lived most of his life. He had a leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.

  • 1902 – Richard Rodgers, American playwright and composer (d. 1979)
  • 1926 – Mel Brooks, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter

Still alive at ninety-five!

In 1974, Johanson and his team discovered the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton called “Lucy”. It was a remarkably complete hominin skeleton, though we don’t know if it’s one of our direct ancestors. As I noted in WEIT, it’s an apelike cranium sitting atop a remarkably “human” postcranial skeleton.

  • 1946 – Gilda Radner, American actress and comedian (d. 1989)

What a comedic talent! I always thought that she and John Belushi were the two most talented cast members of Saturday Night Live (Dan Akroyd comes close behind).  Here’s Radner as a child presenting the “I Hate Jennifer Show”.  I don’t know any adult who can do a child better.

  • 1971 – Elon Musk, South African-born American entrepreneur

Those who began pushing up daisies on June 28 include:

  • 1914 – Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria (b. 1863)
  • 1975 – Rod Serling, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1924)
  • 2001 – Mortimer J. Adler, American philosopher and author (b. 1902)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is philosophical again. Malgorzata explains:

“To kid oneself, to lie to oneself, to convince oneself about something which is convenient, is a feature common to all humans. It’s easier to fool yourself than to fool other people. Here Andrzej suggests putting a stop to such behavior, and wise Hili, who knows her humans, is surprised what reasons could Andrzej have for proposing something so radical and so against human nature.”

A: Let’s not kid ourselves.
Hili: Is there any reason for introducing such radical politics?
In Polish:
Ja: Nie oszukujmy się.
Hili: Czy jest jakiś powód do wprowadzania tak drastycznej polityki?

Meanwhile, Szaron is on Malgorzata’s pillow in bed and tells her to go elsewhere:

Szaron:  Go sleep on the sofa.

In Polish: Idź spać na sofę.

A Mark Parisi cartoon sent by Diana MacPherson. If you don’t get it, a reader will no doubt explain it:

From Nicole:

From Jesus of the Day:

A tweet from Ginger K., with a lovely self-portrait avec chat (Lotte Lasterstein is described here).

A tweet from Ana, whose dad is reader Jez:

Tweets from Matthew: First, an amazing display of male prowess (he’s clearly trying to impress a female with his leaps). Wikipedia notes this:

During the breeding season, males leap suddenly from the grass with a peculiar croaking or knocking call, flutter their wings and fall back with slightly open wings. At the apogee of the leap the neck is arched backwards and the legs folded as if in a sitting posture. These jumps are repeated after intervals of about three or more minutes. The displays are made mainly in the early mornings and late evenings, but during other parts of the day in cloudy weather.

Now here’s a boy fated to go places!

Larry the Cat, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, checks out the live reporting setup:

A pet hairless cow becomes enamored with an orphaned piglet. Such a sweet story! Sound up.

There are lots of cats today, but this one cannot be withheld! Bobcat mom and kittens!

Look at the antennae on this moth. WHY SO BIG?

Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

June 27, 2021 • 6:30 am

Welcome to Sunday, June 27, 2021: National Orange Blossom Day. While it celebrates the flower, the “Orange Blossom” is also a drink made with gin, vermouth, and fresh orange juice. It’s also National Indian Pudding Day (the best pudding ever; try it!), National Bingo Day, National Ice Cream Cake Day, Helen Keller Day (celebrating her birth on this day in 1880), Industrial Workers of the World Day, National HIV Testing Day, National PTSD Awareness Day, and, a bit north, Canadian Multiculturalism Day.

Today’s Google Doodle is a gif that honors Tommy Kono (1930-2016), a medalist in three Olympics who set world records in four different body weight classes (click on screenshot):

News of the Day:

It’s more than five months since Joe Biden moved into the White House, and there is still not a sign of a cat in their home.

According to the Washington Post, an engineer warned in 2018 that the Florida condo which collapsed last week was an accident waiting to happen. (h/t: Randy)

The engineer, Frank P. Morabito, said in a structural survey report that waterproofing had failed below the pool deck and entrance drive, allowing damaging leaks.

“Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially,” Morabito wrote. He said a “major error” had been made in the construction of the building, when waterproofing was laid on a flat slab rather than a sloped surface, to allow water to run off.

There were other problems too. But it’s premature to diagnose the cause or causes: it could even have been a sinkhole. At any rate, four people are dead, they have found other body parts in the wreckage, but no more survivors have turned up.  159 people remain unaccounted for, and it was heartbreaking to see the friends and relatives on last night’s news waiting an agonizing wait, hoping against hope that a “miracle” could happen but knowing in their hearts that things look grim.

A sad chapter in Canadian history has become even sadder with the discovery of the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous “First Nations” children who likely died in the care of “residential schools” designed to take the Indigenous culture out of the children. Doesn’t this sound familiar?

From the 1880s through the 1990s, the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 ​Indigenous children like Mr. Thomas from their homes and sent ​them t​o residential schools ​designed to sever them from their culture and assimilate them into Western ways — a system that a ​National Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008 ​called “cultural genocide.” At the schools, which were mostly run by the Catholic Church, sexual, physical and emotional abuse and violence were commonplace. Thousands of children went missing.

Abuse, sheer indifference, and racism on this scale is unthinkable, and yet it happened;  I’m sure many families lost their children and didn’t even know about it.

And an op-ed from the NYT: “What Jewish students need from University leaders right now.” It recounts the epidemic of demonization, abuse, and physical attacks on Jewish students in American colleges. Remember, these are nearly all American Jews, not Israelis. Of course all students are free to criticize Jews, Israel, and so on, but it’s not beyond a school’s mission to state that the kind of bullying and racism mentioned above seriously impedes the school’s mission to teach. I never thought I’d see the day when a wave of anti-Semitism swept over America.

Insanity of the week:  Reader Ginger K. reports, via the Philly Voice, that a bunch of loons invaded a Home Depot in Pennsylvania to have an exorcism for dead trees made into lumber. What were they trying to excorcise? Tree sprites?:

A police report from Dickson City in Lackawanna County raised eyebrows this week for its bizarre description of an incident that happened Monday.

“3:26pm: Commerce Blvd. @ Home Depot for disorderly people having an exorcism in the lumber isle (sic) for the dead trees,” authorities wrote. “They were escorted out of the building.”

A call placed to Dickson City police elicited a chuckle from one officer.

“There were two people hanging out in the lumber department doing their little exorcism thing,” the officer said. “Some people at the store started picking up that something was happening that was not necessarily normal. Police were called to the store and they were escorted out of the building.”

Here’s your apartheid nation: Israel brought 35 children from diverse places, including the West Bank and Gaza, as well as  to their hospitals for free treatment for heart disease. Of course the Israel haters will call this the medical equivalent of “pinkwashing.” But why would they treat their enemies for free? Could it be they have a sense of ethics? Nawww. . . .this is Israel, the most evilest country in the world.

“It is our mission to bring children from developing countries and places where they can’t get or can’t afford life-saving treatments. Over half of the children whose lives are being saved in Israel are from the Palestinian Authority and Gaza. Doctors in Israel volunteer their time to conduct the heart surgeries,” Tamar Shapira, deputy executive director of SACH [Save a Child’s Heart] told The Algemeiner in an interview. “For us they are little ambassadors. We tell a different story of Israel which is not political.”

Founded 25 years ago and backed by South African-born philanthropist Morris Kahn, SACH has saved the lives of more than 5,800 children, the group says, with Israeli doctors providing open-heart surgery, life-saving catheterization and other care to children from 62 countries.

h/t: Malgorzata

The NYT reports that the Manhattan district attorney has informed the Trump organization that it could face criminal charges as early as next week. The DA has been building a case for a while against the chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, but the announcement that the organization itself could face charges is new, and involves financial improprieties including failure to report emoluments. What I don’t understand (I’m not a lawyer) is how they can charge a company and yet Trump himself may not face any criminal charges. What happens if the company is convicted? Does it go to jail? Or just get fined? I’m still curious about whether the Orange Man will one day be wearing an orange jump suit.

It rained like hell in Chicago yesterday; we face chances of rain daily for a week. And Seattle may break its all-time heat record of 108°F (42.2°C) as the Pacific Northwest and Idaho face an unprecedented heat wave. Let’s hope that Stephen Barnard stays cool.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 603,500, an increase of 307 deaths over yesterday’s figure.  The reported world death toll is now 3,933,756,,, an increase of about 7,700 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 27 includes:

  • 1743 – In the Battle of Dettingen, George II becomes the last reigning British monarch to participate in a battle.
  • 1844 – Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his brother Hyrum Smith, are killed by a mob at the Carthage, Illinois jail.
  • 1898 – The first solo circumnavigation of the globe is completed by Joshua Slocum from Briar Island, Nova Scotia.

The 37-foot “gaff rigged” oyster boat in which Slocum sailed around the world: “the Spray”. It took him three years and two months:

Here are the city’s Jews being rounded up, and the second photo shows some of the 8,000 Jews sent by train to the camps. Of these, nearly 80% died en route, and their bodies are being thrown out of the train. Before the pogram, in 1930, there were nearly 36,000 Jews living in Iași.  Now there are 300-600.

  • 1950 – The United States decides to send troops to fight in the Korean War.
  • 1954 – The FIFA World Cup quarterfinal match between Hungary and Brazil, highly anticipated to be exciting, instead turns violent, with three players ejected and further fighting continuing after the game.

I couldn’t find a good video of this violent match, but highlights are below:

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked the plane to Uganda, where the hijackers were supported by the odious dictator Idi Amin. The hijackers let the non-Israeli passengers go, but kept the Israelis under guard. After diplomatic efforts to resolve the situation failed, commandos of the Israeli Defense Forces plotted an elaborate scheme to rescue the hostages.

Wikipedia’s “Operation Entebbe” article has all the details. It was a very successful rescue:

The entire operation lasted 53 minutes – of which the assault lasted only 30 minutes. All seven hijackers present, and between 33 and 45 Ugandan soldiers, were killed. Eleven Soviet-built MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighter planes of the Uganda Army Air Force were destroyed on the ground at Entebbe Airport. Out of the 106 hostages, three were killed, one was left in Uganda (74-year-old Dora Bloch), and approximately 10 were wounded. The 102 rescued hostages were flown to Israel via Nairobi, Kenya, shortly after the raid.

Here are the happy survivors returning to Israel:

(From Wikipedia): Rescued passengers welcomed at Ben Gurion Airport

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1869 – Emma Goldman, Lithuanian-Canadian philosopher and activist (d. 1940)

Here’s Goldman, a great orator, preaching at Peter Kropotkin’s funeral procession in 1921.

From Wikipedia: Here, Emma Goldman delivers a eulogy at Peter Kropotkin’s funeral procession. Immediately in front of Goldman stands her lifelong comrade Alexander Berkman. Kropotkin’s funeral was the occasion of the last great demonstration of anarchists in Moscow—tens of thousands of people poured into the streets to pay their respects.
  • 1869 – Hans Spemann, German embryologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1941)
  • 1880 – Helen Keller, American author, academic, and activist (d. 1968) [see above]
  • 1913 – Willie Mosconi, American pool player (d. 1993)

Here are some trick shots by Willie Mosconi:

  • 1930 – Ross Perot, American businessman and politician (d. 2019)
  • 1975 – Tobey Maguire, American actor

Those who croaked on June 27 include:

  • 1839 – Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire (b. 1780)
  • 1957 – Hermann Buhl, Austrian soldier and mountaineer (b. 1924)

Buhl was perhaps the greatest mountaineer of his time, and one of the best of all time. His solo ascent of Nanga Parbat is an unmatched achievement; Wikipedia says this:

1953 German–Austrian Nanga Parbat expedition – First ascent of Nanga Parbat, 8126 m (26,660 ft) (solo and without bottled oxygen). On the way back from the summit he was forced to stand erect on a rock ledge for the entire night at 8000 m altitude, in order to survive until the following morning. [JAC: 31 men had died on that mountain before Buhl was the first to reach the summit.]

Here’s Buhl, frostbitten, after 41 hours on the mountain alone. It’s an iconic photo of an iconic climber. He died at age 31 when he stepped through a cornice on Chogolisa and fell 900 feet. His body is still in the ice.

And here’s Nanga Parbat, also called “the killer mountain”:

  • 1989 – A. J. Ayer, English philosopher and academic (b. 1910)
  • 2001 – Jack Lemmon, American actor (b. 1925)
  • 2005 – Shelby Foote, American historian and author (b. 1917)

Foote, a prominent presence in Ken Burns’s film “The Civil War”, has recently been severely criticized for his “lost cause” sympathies for the Confederacy and his patronizing attitude towards blacks.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains today’s Hili dialogue: “Hili’s face shows a bit of disgust and a bit of resignation. History taught her that humans can behave in disgusting ways (and often do it) and that one Polish cat cannot change it, hence—resignation and acknowledgement of the futility of her struggles.”

This is a wonderful portrait of Hili, taken by Andrzej.

Hili: I’m drawing conclusions from history.
A: I can see it.
In Polish:
Hili: Wyciągam wnioski z historii.
Ja: Właśnie widzę.

And Mietek is weary of riding in the car.

Mietek: Traveling is exhausting.

In Polish: Podróże są męczące

From Nicole:

From Bruce:

From Jesus of the Day, an adorable attempt at camouflage:

From Ginger K., a classic rock picture:

Tweets from Matthew. I love these enhanced and colorized old films, which really bring the past back to life:

As Matthew notes, “Pics of horse in France that visits patients in palliative care to cheer them up.” Have a look at the article for more photos.  The horse is said to be able to detect tumors and cancers, and stops by the rooms of only those so afflicted:

A cute but dumb idea:

If Duncan is the black cat, it looks as if he both starts and finishes stuff:

Sandworm mimic!

I haven’t read this paper, but the researchers use modern DNA from 26 populations to show a rapid evolution of virus-interacting-proteins (VIPs) that occurred 25,000 years ago, suggesting a coronavirus epidemic in East Asia at that time.

My pet skunk did exactly these threat behaviors when he was a baby. Below is a rescue skunk that will be released, so he’s not “descented”.