Category: Hili Dialogue

Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 6, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s Sunday, June 6, 2021: National GingerBread Day (I love the cake, but why does it have two capital letters?). It’s also National Applesauce Cake Day, National Frozen Yogurt Day, National Hunger Awareness Day, National Cancer Survivors Day, National Huntington’s Disease Awareness Day, Drive-In Movie Day (do any of these places still exist? They would have been popular during the pandemic), and Atheist Pride Day. 

And, of course, it’s  D-Day Invasion Anniversary (see below).  In honor of the soldier who died during what I think is a just war, here’s the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan”, showing the slaughter visited on American soldiers storming Omaha Beach. (From what I hear, this is pretty realistic.).  WARNING: Gore and death. 

News of the day:

The bad news first: a federal judge in California has overturned the states’s 30-year-old ban on assault weapons. From the WaPo’s article:

In a 94-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California said that sections of the state ban in place since 1989 regarding military-style rifles violate the Second Amendment. Benitez characterized the assault weapons Californians are barred from using as not “bazookas, howitzers or machine guns” but rather “fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”

The judge then compared an AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife.

“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Benitez said in the ruling.

In California, “assault rifles” are defined by their “code”. The AR-15, mentioned by the judge, is a semi-automatic weapon that has often been used in mass shootings. It baffles me that this gun would be seen as good for inself-defense (unless you’re attacked by an army), much less as something that the founders would regard as useful for “a well regulated militia”.

Swiss Army knife? What does that mean? The loons are out in force, including those who think that the Supreme Court or some other venue could actually enable Trump to re-assume the Presidency this August! Those who believe this nonsense apparently include Trump himself. Listen to Jim Acosta’s measured but scathing assessment at CNN (click on screenshot to go to the 6-minute video). One quote from Acosta: “You are not well, sir. You need to get over this.” I like his paraphrase of “Wasted away again in Margaritaville.”

My high school in Arlington, Virginia, Washington-Lee High (spawner of alumni like Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty) recently decided to change its name because Robert E. Lee was head of the Confederate Army. I didn’t weigh in, for I thought the name change was inevitable, but the loss of my alma mater “W and L,” as we called it, is a bit discomfiting. Now, however, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia has decided not to change its name despite a lot of urging to do so. That surprises me, but the school is making changes to “separate itself from the Confederacy.”

The world’s oldest and longest-working disk jockey (DJ), Ray Cordeiro, has just retired at 96 after a 70-year career spinning records in Hong Kong (he’s of Portuguese descent). Among his honors are an MBE from Queen Elizabeth. Remember, 70 years ago was 1951, a few years before rock and roll got started, but during the years of Peggy Lee, Perry Como, and Dean Martin.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 596,967, an increase of 418 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,736,900, an increase of about 8,500 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened June 6 includes:

After a gun accident, St. Martin healed, but there was a connection between a hole in the skin and the stomach, leading Beaumont to study the digestion. Here’s a diagram of St. Martin’s fistula. The round thing is his nipple:

  • 1844 – The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) is founded in London.
  • 1889 – The Great Seattle Fire destroys all of downtown Seattle.

Here’s a Wikipedia photo of the fire labeled, “Looking south on 1st Ave. from Spring St. about one-half hour after the fire started.” It burned 25 city blocks, destroying all of downtown Seattle as well as the railroad station and much of the wharf district. 

Here’s the first drive-in in the year it opened. Pity they didn’t last, as they would have been useful during the pandemic:

  • 1942 – The United States Navy’s victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway is a major turning point in the Pacific Theater of World War II. All four Japanese fleet carriers taking part—Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū—are sunk, as is the heavy cruiser Mikuma. The American carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann are also sunk.
  • 1944 – Commencement of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, with the execution of Operation Neptune—commonly referred to as D-Day—the largest seaborne invasion in history. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops cross the English Channel with about 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating. By the end of the day, the Allies have landed on four invasion beaches and are pushing inland.

A Wikipedia photo of the aftermath of the landing, with Allied troops having a foothold on the continent:

From Wikipedia; English: Landing ships putting cargo ashore on Omaha Beach, at low tide during the first days of the operation, mid-1944-06
  • 1985 – The grave of “Wolfgang Gerhard” is opened in Embu, Brazil; the exhumed remains are later proven to be those of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz‘s “Angel of Death”; Mengele is thought to have drowned while swimming in February 1979.

The fact that Mengele escaped and died in Brazil (drowned while swimming) is proof that either there is no god, or the existing god is unjust.

Notables born on this day include:

Here is a Velásquez with a cat!: “The Spinners”, c. 1657.

  • 1875 – Thomas Mann, German author and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955)
  • 1902 – Jimmie Lunceford, American saxophonist and bandleader (d. 1947)
  • 1918 – Edwin G. Krebs, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2009)
  • 1936 – Levi Stubbs, American soul singer; lead vocalist of the Four Tops (d. 2008)

Stubbs was of course the lead singer of The Four Tops, and here he is in Paris in 1967 singing my favorite of the group’s songs, “Ask the Lonely.” This is surely one of the best live soul performances of all time.

  • 1956 – Björn Borg, Swedish tennis player; winner of eleven Grand Slam singles titles including five consecutive Wimbledons

Those who “passed” (I hate that euphemism) on June 6 include:

  • 1799 – Patrick Henry, American lawyer and politician, 1st Governor of Virginia (b. 1736)
  • 1941 – Louis Chevrolet, Swiss-American race car driver and businessman, founded Chevrolet and Frontenac Motor Corporation (b. 1878)
  • 1961 – Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (b. 1875)

Here he is, presented against my will:

  • 1968 – Robert F. Kennedy, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 64th United States Attorney General (b. 1925)
  • 1991 – Stan Getz, American saxophonist and jazz innovator (b. 1927)

Here’s a great 33 minutes of Getz, one of my favorite saxophonists:

  • 2005 – Anne Bancroft, American film actress; winner of the 1963 Academy Award for Best Actress for The Miracle Worker (b. 1931)
  • 2006 – Billy Preston, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor (b. 1946)
  • 2013 – Esther Williams, American swimmer and actress (b. 1921)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is taking it slowly:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m deliberating over my next step.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Rozważam następny krok.

A photo of little Kulka by Paulina:

A “meme” (not so mimetic) from Bruce:

From Jesus of the Day, an accidentally salacious Pooh:

From Nicole. I don’t even need to be sleepy to act like this; extreme logorrhea in someone talking to me will do it:

Two tweets from Ginger K., the first on hijabis:

And the second on kitty behavior. I’d like to see David Attenborough narrating this one:

Tweets from Matthew. Look at this cool stegosaur graph (Matthew’s favorite extinct animal):

Oh dear; Richard has put his foot in it again:

Cathode the Adventure Cat! Be sure to watch this entire heartwarming video.

This is one of the most reprehensible people I’ve ever heard of.  The thread contains more horrors.

Q: What are you studying? A: How much and how often do sheep pee?

Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 5, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s the Sabbath for cats: Saturday, June 5, 2021:  National Ketchup (or Catsup) Day. Remember when the Reagan administration counted ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches? It’s also National Pineapple Day, Sausage Roll Day, National Bubbly Day, honoring champagne and its relatives, National Gingerbread Day, National Veggie Burger Day, and National Black Bear Day,

Finally, it’s World Day Against Speciesism and World Environment Day.

As for wine, I finished the bottle of Austin Hope 2015 Paso Robles Cabernet I described yesterday, and it was even better than before. It remains the best California cab I’ve ever had, though a friend I told about it says that the price is at least $70 a bottle in California, and then only at auction. I have no more and it’s off the shelves, so I consider myself lucky.

News of the Day:

Facebook has cut down the indefinite ban it gave Donald Trump after the January Capitol siege. Now he can post again, but not for two years, which puts his reappearance after the midterm elections. He’s fulminating, of course, but does anyone share my feeling that even though the GOP is centered on him, he’s becoming increasingly marginal?

Did you know that seven states still legally ban atheists from holding public office? A piece in The Conversation gives details. Such bans are clearly unconstitutional and never, as far as I know, enforced, but someone should institute a court case. The problem is that unless you’ve been banned from holding office because you don’t believe in God, you have no standing to bring a lawsuit. But, like blasphemy laws and statues of Jefferson Davis, they are invidious anachronisms that need to be expunged.

The government-produced report on UFOs is now out, and the results are more or less as expected. As NBC News reports:

A highly anticipated government report sheds little light on the mystery, finding no evidence of extraterrestrial activity but not ruling it out either, according to two U.S. officials.

The report also does not rule out the possibility that the flying objects seen by U.S. military planes are highly advanced aircraft developed by other nations, the officials said. Further deepening the mystery, the report says the objects also do not appear to be evidence of secret U.S. technology but it doesn’t definitively rule that out either.

In other words, we don’t know much more than we did before

Sadly, the Secretary of the Atheists Society in Kenya has resigned, and for an odd reason. Here’s the announcement as sent to me by Barry (click to enlarge):

Poor AOC! Her abuela’s (grandmother’s) home in Puerto Rico was damaged by the recent hurricane, and she blames Trump for not giving enough aid to the U.S. territory. Apparently AOC, who can’t be that poor, can’t afford to help her granny, so Matt Walsh set up a GoFundMe campaign that has raised over $55,000! Even Ben Shapiro kicked in, donating the amount that AOC spends monthly on her Tesla lease. See below.

It will be amusing (and somewhat nice, if ironic) if AOC’s grandma’s home was saved by the conservatives she despises. Will AOC have a comment? (h/t: Luana).

California has passed a new mask mandate that make keep workers masked in the workplace into 2022. It all depends on the vaccination status of your coworkers:

The new rules require employees, even those who have been vaccinated, to continue wearing masks indoors if they are around other workers who have not received the COVID-19 vaccine. If everyone is vaccinated, the masks can come off. The mandate drew ire from employers worried about having to police their workers’ vaccination status and from employees sick of wearing masks — even as other workers applauded the rules or said they don’t go far enough to protect their safety.

It seems to me that they should be able to create laws making vaccination mandatory if you’re going to a workplace with people, barring any conditions you have that militate against vaccination. Those who are voluntarily unvaccinated should not force everyone to wear masks, especially since the risk of being an asymptomatic carrier, if you’re vaccinated, is miniscule.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 596,483, an increase of 414 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,728,471, an increase of about 10,700 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 5 includes:

A first edition of this fabled abolitionist book will run you about $15,000:

Here’s a lovely poster advertising the train that rain from Paris to Istanbul:

  • 1893 – The trial of Lizzie Borden for the murder of her father and step-mother begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Lizzie was acquitted by this jury:

  • 1916 – Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court; he is the first American Jew to hold such a position.
  • 1916 – World War I: The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire breaks out.
  • 1944 – World War II: More than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000 tons of bombs on German gun batteries on the Normandy coast in preparation for D-Day.

D-Day, as you may recall, is tomorrow. I don’t think the bombing made the Germans realize that the invasion was imminent.

  • 1956 – Elvis Presley introduces his new single, “Hound Dog“, on The Milton Berle Show, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements.

Here’s that performance. I doubt that the hip movements would be considered salacious today.

  • 1967 – The Six-Day War begins: Israel launches surprise strikes against Egyptian air-fields in response to the mobilisation of Egyptian forces on the Israeli border.
  • 1968 – Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.

  • 1975 – The United Kingdom holds its first country-wide referendum on membership of the European Economic Community (EEC).
  • 1984 – Operation Blue Star: Under orders from India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, the Indian Army begins an invasion of the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikh religion.

This of course eventually led to Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards.

We still don’t know who he was:

  • 1995 – The Bose–Einstein condensate is first created.

Notables born on this day include:

Garrett was famous for killing the outlaw Billy the Kid in 1881. Here’s Garrett:

  • 1883 – John Maynard Keynes, English economist, philosopher, and academic (d. 1946)
  • 1932 – Christy Brown, Irish painter and author (d. 1981)

Brown, who had cerebral palsy, wrote his autobiography, My Left Foot, made into a well known movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Here’s a photo of Brown and one of his paintings (made with his left foot):

  • 1934 – Bill Moyers, American journalist, 13th White House Press Secretary

Those who snuffed it on June 5 include:

  • 1900 – Stephen Crane, American poet, novelist, and short story writer (b. 1871)

Here’s Crane, who died at only 28 of tuberculosis:

  • 1910 – O. Henry, American short story writer (b. 1862)

His real name was William Sydney Porter, and he died at 47 from too much booze and diabetes (what works we would have had all the boozing authors laid off the sauce!). Here he is as a young man in Texas:

  • 2002 – Dee Dee Ramone, American singer-songwriter and bass player (b. 1951)
  • 2012 – Ray Bradbury, American science fiction writer and screenwriter (b. 1920)
  • 2018 – Kate Spade, American fashion designer (b. 1962)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Paulina wants a word with Hili. Malgozata explains Hili’s “relative” response: “If Paulina is asking because she wants to give Hili a treat, Hili has plenty of time. If Paulina is asking because she has a chore for Hili to do, Hili doesn’t have a moment to spare.”

Paulina: Do you have a moment?
Hili: It depends on what for, everything is relative.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Paulina: Masz chwilkę czasu?
Hili: Zależy na co, wszystko jest względne.

And here’s Szaron (photo by Paulina):

From Bruce, a meme for New Age children:

From Nicole:

From Jesus of the Day:

Speaking of AOC, here’s some performative lip service from her, though she wants the state of Israel to be abolished:

From Ginger K.: the scientific method:

Also from Ginger K., a persistent kitten. How can you not love her?

Tweets from Matthew. He keeps sending me tranquility videos, so either he’s anxious or, more likely, knows that I am:

A phascogale! What is it? See here; they’re also called “wambengers” or “mousesacks”!

Okay, why did this guy do it in the first place?

Matthew has plenty of experience with three plumpish cats:

A someone old and snarky tweet:

 

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

June 4, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday! Which seat can you take on this June 4, 2021? It’s National Cheese Day, which reminds me of this famous skit.  Poor cheeseless Cleese!

It’s also National Doughnut Day (now you’re talking!), National Cognac Day, International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression, National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and two great holidays in one:  Hug an Atheist Day and Hug Your Cat Day.

Wine of the Day: Lord knows what possessed me when I laid out two double sawbucks and a fiver for this wine, but I sure don’t regret it. It’s one of the finest Cabernets I’ve ever had, and, after a week or so of eating no meat, as well as eating very little in general, I defrosted a big T-bone steak and then craved something big and gutsy to wash it down.

This was just the ticket. It was HUGE: dark purple, jammy and plummy, smooth as a duck’s bottom, and even a tad sweet. I probably drank this puppy a few years too early, as it appears to have ages to go. I suspect it will be much better on the second day, but we’ll see. At any rate, after a lot of duck farming and its attendant tsouris, I deserved a treat. This is a very special wine, and if I were constrained to drink only one California cabernet for the rest of my life, this would be the one.

News of the Day:

Famed criminal attorney F. Lee Bailey, whose clients included O. J. Simpson, Patty Hearst, Sam Sheppard, Capt. Ernest Medina, and the Boston Strangler, has died at 87. Read the New York Times obituary about this colorful man. Here’s one bit:

He was a riveting courtroom performer, a stocky badger-like man with a cleft chin, intimidating blue eyes and a widow’s peak that refused to recede with the rest of his hairline. He had the ventriloquist’s trick of directing questions at the witness box but throwing his points at the jury box. He had an actor’s voice, by turns bullying, cajoling, sarcastic or sympathetic, searching for seams of doubt. Under his reductions, a prosecutor’s “fact” could be whittled down to a probability, then to a mere possibility or just a silly idea.

(From the NYT): Mr. Bailey in 1975 during the trial of the heiress Patricia Hearst. He ultimately failed to keep her out of prison for her involvement in a bank robbery. Credit: Associated Press

Do read the NYT’s story of Tomoaki Kato, an accomplished surgeon in New York who contracted Covid-19 and came close to death many times. Nobody thought he would make it, but he did, and is now back doing his good work. Read about what he learned from his experience.

According to yahoo!finance and other sources, Google’s head of “diversity strategy”, Kamau Bobb, is a rabid anti-Semite, once posting on Twitter that Jews “have an insatiable appetite for war and killing.” And that’s only part of his idiocy. Google, who fired James Damore, will of course keep Bobb on, just moving him off the diversity team.   (h/t Ben)

The Biden administration is taking flak for its failure to have yet put the portrait of Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, a pledge it made a while back. (Tubman was of course a black abolitionist who rescued many from slavery.) This failure to follow through is mysterious for a “can do” administration. As the Washington Post reports,

Despite the growing national push to honor the contributions of women and people of color — and Biden’s personal promise to do so — Tubman is still not set to appear on the $20 by the end of Biden’s first term, or even a hypothetical second term. If the current timeline holds, it will have taken a full 16 years to realize the suggestion of a 9-year-old girl whose 2014 letter to then-President Barack Obama publicly launched the process.

That strikes some as an embarrassment.

“If we can put a helicopter on Mars, we ought to be able to design a $20 bill in less than 20 years,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said in an interview. “It’s all about commitment.”

Tubman:

A big cat kerfuffle in Scranton was reported by WPTV in Philadelphia. A tailless cat was reported as a bobcat in a Scranton high school, causing evacuation of the school. It turned out to be a regular housecat, and was chipped. Kashi, who was missing for three months, will be returned to its staff.  (h/t: Paul)

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 595,935, an increase of 428 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,717,731, an increase of about 10,200 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 4 include:

Here’s St. Paul’s when it had a steeple:

  • 1783 – The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrate their montgolfière (hot air balloon).
  • 1896 – Henry Ford completes the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gives it a successful test run.

Here’s Henry Ford in his Quadricycle in 1896:

  • 1912 – Massachusetts becomes the first state of the United States to set a minimum wage.
  • 1913 – Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of King George V‘s horse at The Derby. She is trampled, never regains consciousness, and dies four days later.

Here’s the famous video of Davison being hit by the King’s horse, and after that a photo of her:

  • 1917 – The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall receive the first Pulitzer for biography (for Julia Ward Howe). Jean Jules Jusserand receives the first Pulitzer for history for his work With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope receives the first Pulitzer for journalism for his work for the New York World.
  • 1919 – Women’s rights: The U.S. Congress approves the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification.
  • 1939 – The Holocaust: The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps.

Here are some of the refugees, and many of these surely died in the camps. The note above doesn’t mention that the ship was also turned away from Canada.

  • 1975 – The Governor of California Jerry Brown signs the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act into law, the first law in the U.S. giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights.
  • 1986 – Jonathan Pollard pleads guilty to espionage for selling top secret United States military intelligence to Israel.

Sentenced to life in prison for passing documents to Israel, Pollard served 30 years before he was freed and eventually emigrated to Israel. Here’s a photo of him stealing classified documents. Pollard is the only American ever given a life sentence for passing classified information to a U.S. ally.

Here are some highlights of that flight:

Notables born on this day were few, and include:

No longer: Hughes is only the 12th heaviest human to be recorded. You can see the record holders here; the current #1 is Jon Brower Minnoch, who weighed 1,400 lb (635 kilograms or 100 stone). He died at 41. As one expects, most of the record holders died in their thirties or forties.

  • 1937 – Freddy Fender, American singer and guitarist (d. 2006)
  • 1944 – Michelle Phillips, American singer-songwriter and actress
  • 1975 – Russell Brand, English comedian and actor

Remember when Brand was married to Katy Perry? That was a marriage doomed to dissolution:

Those who ceased respiring on June 4 were also few, and include:

  • 1922 – W. H. R. Rivers, English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist, and psychiatrist (b. 1864)

Rivers is famous for treating cases of “battle fatigue” (now PTSD) at Craiglockhart (near Edinburgh) during WWI. One of his patients was Siegfried Sassoon. Read Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy for a fascinating look inside Rivers’s treatments and the lives of his patients. I can’t recommend this series highly enough; one volume won a Booker Prize.  Here’s Rivers:

  • 1968 – Dorothy Gish, American actress (b. 1898)
  • 2014 – Don Zimmer, American baseball player, coach, and manager (b. 1931)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej tries to discourage Hili from hunting:

Hili: Something is there.
A: Live and let live.
In Polish:
Hili: Tam coś jest.
Ja: Żyj i daj żyć.

A meme from Nicole (likely a conservative cat):

A tautological sign (unless you’re a zombie) from Barry:

From Jesus of the Day:

A tweet from Ginger K.:

Tweets from Matthew; I may have posted this one before, or perhaps the cat was in the left box:

I would absolutely love to have this duck bracelet? Isn’t it gorgeous? And it was worn by a Pharaoh!

Naval kitteh!

Matthew calls this “an oldie but a goldie”:

I don’t agree with Itzhak here, as you’re diluting the pure meat flavor with a bunch of junk. Note the confirmation bias: he “proves” he’s right by tasting his own steak!

This is perfect:

This is what’s known in the trade as a “groaner”:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 3, 2021 • 6:30 am

We’re past the apogee of the week, so it’s now Thursday, June 3, 2021, National Egg Day. Eggs are good for you! If you want something not so good for you, it’s also National Moonshine Day (in the U.S., “moonshine” is illegally distilled and usually vile whiskey. Further, it’s Chimborazo Day, celebrating the mountain in Ecuador that is actually the closest spot on Earth to the Moon, as well as World Clubfoot Day, Love Conquers All Day, National Itch Day, and World Bicycle Day. 

Here’s the lovely mountain Chimborazo (I’ve seen it), which, because it’s located on the “equatorial bulge”, is Earth’s closest spot to the Moon:

News of the Day:

NYT op-ed: “How Joe Manchin could make the Senate great again.” You know the answer: his vote could ditch the filibuster (of course, this is the NYT’s construal of “great”). But has author Ira Shapiro forgotten about Kyrsten Sinema, also vowing to defend the filibuster rule?

An agreement reached yesterday between Israeli political parties almost surely will lead to the ouster of Netanyahu. This involves a delicate coalition of eight parties, including an Arab one.

And this is amazing: Biden is offering FREE BEER to anyone who gets a coronavirus vaccination. This ticks me off because I got bupkes when I got my shot. Not even a drop of brewski! From HuffPost:

One of the more eye-catching perks dangled by the White House is free beer from brewing company Anheuser-Busch, which is asking of-age people to upload a photo of themselves at their “favorite place to grab a beer” to this website in order to snag a free drink when the U.S. hits that 70% threshold.

“That’s right. Get a shot and have a beer. Free beer for everyone 21 years or over to celebrate the independence from the virus,” Biden said. It’s not yet clear how Anheuser-Busch plans to distribute the drinks.

Well, those of you who haven’t yet been vaccinated, you get your reward for dallying, while those of us who got a shot as early as possible go thirsty. Is that fair?

According to the Washington Post, there’s been an unusual use of Florida’s “stand your ground” law—one involving animal cruelty.

By the time an animal-control officer found the green iguana in September, blood was flowing out of its mouth and nostrils. Its head appeared to be injured. It was breathing, but unconscious, according to an arrest report accusing a man of torturing the creature.

The iguana died while the officer was driving it back to the animal-control office in Florida’s Palm Beach County, the arrest report says. PJ Nilaja Patterson, 43, was charged with animal cruelty for allegedly kicking, throwing and stepping on the animal until it was near death.

He later employed an unusual argument in his defense: The iguana started it.

Patterson, who stands 6-foot-3, argued that the three-foot iguana had “viciously attacked” him and that he was immune from prosecution under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which allows a person to use force against someone who poses an imminent threat. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Dana Gillen on Friday rejected Patterson’s argument, the South Florida Sun Sentinel first reported.

While it’s legal to “humanely” kill iguanas in Florida because they’re invasive (I don’t like that law), you can’t beat them to a pulp like this guy did. Patterson faces five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. Animal cruelty is never punished as severely as it should be.

Big tomato purée in the UK! The Guardian reports that a crash between two trucks in England, one of which was carrying olive oil and tomatoes, left 23 miles of British highway “looking like a scene from a ‘horror film’ after a lorry crash spilled tomato puree across the tarmac on Tuesday. (h/t Jez). Here’s a tweet:

According to the site Elder of Ziyon, because the Palestinian Authority criminalizes gay behavior—Israel, which is friendly to gays, is said by critics to do so merely as a form of performative “pinkwashing”—the PA will not permit LGBTQ groups to meet in the West Bank. Ergo, Haneed Sader, the head of AlQaws, the main organization promoting gay rights in the West Bank, has decided to live in Haifa while criticizing Israel for “pinkwashing.” It’s ironic that she can’t do any gay activism in Palestine. Why does the Progressive Left overlook this stuff? You already know.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 595,321, an increase of 397 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,707,585, an increase of about 13,800 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 3 includes:

His romance with Heloise is one of the saddest love stories of all time. Here’s a depiction:

(From Wikipedia): Jean-Baptiste Goyet, Héloïse et Abailard, oil on copper, c. 1829.
  • 1539 – Hernando de Soto claims Florida for Spain.
  • 1839 – In Humen, China, Lin Tse-hsü destroys 1.2 million kilograms of opium confiscated from British merchants, providing Britain with a casus belli to open hostilities, resulting in the First Opium War.
  • 1885 – In the last military engagement fought on Canadian soil, the Cree leader, Big Bear, escapes the North-West Mounted Police.

Big Bear, released from prison, died in 1888. Here’s a photo from 1885:

  • 1889 – The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States is completed, running 14 miles (23 km) between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Oregon.
  • 1937 – The Duke of Windsor marries Wallis Simpson.

Simpson was a divorcée, and royal rules said that the Duke couldn’t marry her. He gave up the throne to do so. Here they are about a year before King Edward VIII (already King in this photo) abdicated in favor of George VI. I don’t regard this as a great love story because I think Edward was a doofus:

It was a heroic climb as recounted in the mountaineering book Annapurna, but frostbite cost Lachenal all his toes and Herzog lost every one of his fingers and toes.  Here’s Herzog on the summit and on his way back to France sans digits:

 

  • 1965 – The launch of Gemini 4, the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Ed White, a crew member, performs the first American spacewalk.
  • 1989 – The government of China sends troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square after seven weeks of occupation.
  • 2013 – The trial of United States Army private Chelsea Manning for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks begins in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Manning, now a trans woman, has had a tough life since she was released from prison:

  • 2017 – London Bridge attack: Eight people are murdered and dozens of civilians are wounded by Islamist terrorists. Three of the attackers are shot dead by the police.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1726 – James Hutton, Scottish geologist and physician (d. 1797)
  • 1808 – Jefferson Davis, American colonel and politician, President of the Confederate States of America (d. 1889)
  • 1877 – Raoul Dufy, French painter and illustrator (d. 1953)

Here’s a nice Dufy Woodcut, “Cat on a Table with Flowers”, made for poem Le chat, from Le Bestiaire ou Cortege d’Orphee by Apollinaire:

Cat on a table with a vase of flowers, woodcuts by Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) for the poem Le chat, from Le Bestiaire ou Cortege d’Orphee by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918).
  • 1879 – Alla Nazimova, Ukrainian-American actress, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1945)
  • 1879 – Raymond Pearl, American biologist and botanist (d. 1940)
  • 1906 – Josephine Baker, French actress, singer, and dancer; French Resistance operative (d. 1975)

As I’ve said before, Baker had a pet cheetah named Chiquita. Here’s a photo from Lisa’s History Room with the caption “American entertainer Josephine Baker (1906-1936) often performed onstage in Paris nightclubs with pet cheetah Chiquita. Chiquita wore a diamond collar. Sometimes, during a performance, Chiquita would decide to jump off the stage and into the orchestra pit, causing quite a ruckus. ca. 1931. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum.”

  • 1924 – Torsten Wiesel, Swedish neurophysiologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
  • 1926 – Allen Ginsberg, American poet (d. 1997)
  • 1936 – Larry McMurtry, American novelist and screenwriter (d. 2021)

Writer of the book that became the screenplay (which he also co-wrote) for what I consider the best American movie of the last century, “The Last Picture Show”. Once again, a scene from the movie: Sam the Lion’s soliloquy for his lost love:

McMurtry also wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the movie “Brokeback Mountain.”

Those who ran down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ Choir Invisible on June 3 include:

  • 1657 – William Harvey, English physician and academic (b. 1578)
  • 1924 – Franz Kafka, Czech-Austrian lawyer and author (b. 1883)

Here’s Kafka at 23. He died of tuberculosis at age 40:

  • 2001 – Anthony Quinn, Mexican-American actor and producer (b. 1915)
  • 2011 – Jack Kevorkian, American pathologist, author, and activist (b. 1928)
  • 2016 – Muhammad Ali, American boxer (b. 1942)

Here’s some scenes from Ali’s life:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is kvetching about the lack of yard work:

Hili: Poison these dandelions.
A: Why?
Hili: They make it difficult to catch mice.
In Polish:
Hili: Wytruj te mlecze.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Utrudniają mi łapanie myszy.

And here’s a tongue-y photo of Kulka taken by Paulina:

A meme from Nicole:

From Bruce:

From Jesus of the Day (looks like fun to me!):

From Titania. This could be called “pitching to your local audience”, or, as I see it, “hypocrisy”. The catering of the “progressive” Left to homophobic Arab states (or rather, their ignoring that homophobia) is disgusting:

From Barry, the scariest bird EVER! Sound way up!

Tweets from Matthew. He says “DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! (apparently the guy knows the animal, but still . . .

Forget getting boxes or bags for your cat; just dig them a hole:

Frogs had teeth, but lost them repeatedly over evolutionary time. I guess their diet doesn’t require choppers, whose development requires unneeded metabolic energy.

Simultaneous polyamory in the Hymenoptera. I had no idea that this occurred in any animal:

 

Jays can be fooled by sleight of hand, but not exactly in the same way as humans. From the paper’s abstract:

While we know that humans are often deceived by magic effects, little is known concerning how nonhuman animals perceive these intricate techniques of deception. Here, we tested the susceptibility to be misled by three different magic effects on a sample of six Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius). We demonstrate that, similar to humans, Eurasian jays are susceptible to magic effects that utilize fast movements. However, unlike humans, Eurasian jays do not appear to be misled by magic effects that rely on the observer’s intrinsic expectations in human object manipulation. Magic effects can provide an insightful methodology to investigate perception and attentional shortcomings in human and nonhuman animals and offer unique opportunities to highlight cognitive constraints in diverse animal minds.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 2, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s not really a hump day, as Monday was a holiday, but it’s a semi-hump day: Wednesday, June 2, 2021: National Rocky Road Day, celebrating the chocolate ice cream flavor made with  marshmallows and nuts. It’s also National Rotisserie Chicken Day, Global Running Day, American Indian Citizenship Day (see below), and International Sex Workers Day.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot for animations) celebrates the life of American gay rights activist Frank Kameny (1925-2011), involved in much early activism and who was also the first openly gay person to run for Congress. Nothing particular in his life happened on June 2, but this is part of the celebration of Gay Pride Month.

Kameny at a Gay Pride parade in 2010; note the flower lei as in the photo above:

News of the Day:

At long last, the Vatican, acting under the aegis of Pope Frances, decided to “to explicitly criminalize the sexual abuse of adults by priests who abuse their authority and to say that laypeople who hold church office also can be sanctioned for similar sex crimes.” This adds adults to the list of people who can be victim’s of Catholic power-mongering.  My question is why it took the Vatican 14 years of study to realize that power relationships, like the kind Catholicism is built on, can breed sexual abuse.

More good news from Uncle Joe: President Biden has suspended the leases to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that were issued in the waning days of the Trump administration. These were an affront to all conservationists. The NYT report holds out some slight possibility that the leases might still go forward, but I doubt it:

The decision could ultimately end any plans to drill in one of the largest tracts of untouched wilderness in the United States, delicate tundra in Alaska that is home to migrating waterfowl, caribou and polar bears. Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to allow oil and gas drilling there for more than four decades, and issuing the leases was a signature achievement of the Trump White House.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday published a secretarial order formally suspending the leases until the agency has completed an environmental analysis of their impact and a legal review of the Trump administration’s decision to grant them.

Here’s an article by David Harris from the Times of Israel showing how the name of Hamas has been gradually dropped from the Western press’s coverage of the current fighting as a way to obscure the terrorism on the Palestinian side. One bit that struck me:

By the way, just to be clear, months before the Dolphinarium attack, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, joined by US President Bill Clinton, had made a strenuous effort to persuade Arafat to accept a far-reaching, two-state deal.

Arafat did not agree to the proposal on the table, nor did he make a counter offer. In fact, he instead chose to unleash a second intifada, which eventually killed over 1,000 Israelis (in U.S. population terms, about 30,000 people, or ten times the number of victims on 9/11) in pizzerias, buses, Passover Seders, cafés — and, yes, discotheques.

Clinton wrote about Arafat’s rejection in his autobiography, My Life. Here’s an excerpt: “Arafat: ‘You are a great man.’ Clinton: ‘I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.’”

This is just one of several “two state solutions” proposed by governments, leaders, and the United Nations themselves. The Palestinians have rejected all of them, some quite generous. Israel has rejected none. People deliberately leave that out of the history of the region.

Reader “smipowell” sent me a clipping from the Dallas Morning News; click on the screenshot to see how ducknappings are destroying our civilization:

People are removing ducks from the canals of a Dallas suburb, ducks that the locals love, feed, and even give names to. The residents are up in arms, as well they should be, offering rewards for the apprehension of the ducknapping miscreants. One miscreant wrote in saying that they’d taken the ducks to a farm because they were “domestically bred and the creek was no place for them.” But if they’re living well on a Dallas canal with good food and care (and no cold winters), there’s no reason to remove them. (And what would  happen to them on a farm?) One of the paper’s three lessons from this incident: “don’t take things that don’t belong to you.” This jibes with one of the mottos of the Bangor, Maine Police Department’s Famous “Duck of Justice”: “Keep your hands to yourself” and “Leave other people’s things alone.”

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 594,722, an increase of 356 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,576,847, an increase of about 11,000 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 2 includes:

Barnum with one of his diminutive attractions, Commodore Nutt:

  • 1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applies for a patent for his wireless telegraph.
  • 1910 – Charles Rolls, a co-founder of Rolls-Royce Limited, becomes the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel by plane.

Here’s one of the first Rolls-Royce cars, even then extolled as the finest car available. This is labeled as “A 1905 model Rolls Royce, as featured in the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. This car, registration AX148, was built in the original Manchester factory, and is the oldest such vehicle on public display.”

Here’s the elaborate coronation ceremony, with the fabled crown appearing at 2:20:

Here’s a short video of that fracas:

  • 1967 – Luis Monge is executed in Colorado’s gas chamber, in the last pre-Furman execution in the United States.
  • 1997 – In Denver, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died. He was executed four years later.
  • 2012 – Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the killing of demonstrators during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Mubarak died in a military hospital in 2020:

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1740 – Marquis de Sade, French philosopher and politician (d. 1814)
  • 1840 – Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet (d. 1928)
  • 1937 – Sally Kellerman, American actress
  • 1944 – Marvin Hamlisch, American composer and conductor (d. 2012)
  • 1953 – Cornel West, American philosopher, author, and academic

Those who resigned from life on June 2 include:

  • 1941 – Lou Gehrig, American baseball player (b. 1903)

Here’s Gehrig with other major league players in 1928. Surely you recognize both him and the guy on the right, but do you recognize the others? Gehrig, of course, die of ALS; he was only 37.

  • 1942 – Bunny Berigan, American singer and trumpet player (b. 1908)

Here’s Berigan’s most famous song, “I Can’t Get Started” (1937; written by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke).  I love the references to contemporary people and events, and his trumpet solos were superb. He died at only 33 from too much booze.

  • 1961 – George S. Kaufman, American director, producer, and playwright (b. 1889)
  • 1962 – Vita Sackville-West, English author and poet (b. 1892)

Vita Sackville-West at 32. I’ve always thought she looked quite striking, and very British:

  • 1961 – George S. Kaufman, American director, producer, and playwright (b. 1889)
  • 2008 – Bo Diddley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1928)

Meanwhle in Dobrzyn, Kulka is dogging (catting?) Hili:

Hili: Somebody is following me.
Kulka: Don’t pay attention to me
In Polish:
Hili: Ktoś za mną idzie.
Kulka: Nie zwracaj na mnie uwagi.
And Paulina took four photos of Kulka and Szaron romping about together:

From Bruce, a truly diabolical idea:

From Nicole:

From Karl:

From Simon, who asserts that the video is funny even without the academic comment:

From Barry: a woman saves her dogs from a bear by pushing it off a fence:

From Ginger K.:

Tweets from Matthew. Wally the Lost Walrus has now made his way down to Cornwall!

Shapeshifting bunneh!

A very soothing and meditative video (sound up, like it says):

But what is Quibi?

Sadly, I’ve never seen one of these Honorary Cats® in the wild:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 1, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s JUNE! Tuesday, June 1, 2021, to be exact, and It’s National Hazelnut Cake Day, but also the entire month is dedicated to these foodstuffs:

National Candy Month
National Dairy Month
National Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Month
National Iced Tea Month
National Papaya Month

It’s also National Olive Day, World Milk Day, Dinosaur Day, National Go Barefoot Day, International Children’s Day, Say Something Nice Day (here’s mine: “Nice shirt!” ), National Nail Polish Day, and Heimlich Maneuver Day (do you know it? It’s pretty much outmoded, though, as the Red Cross recommends a new procedure involving alternately striking the victim between the shoulder blades and then compressing the abdomen). Finally, it’s the one-month anniversary of Dorothy’s ducklings jumping into Botany Pond. In two more weeks they should be doing some rudimentary flying.

Wine of the Day: I discovered that, as summer approaches, I am woefully short of white wines. I found the bottle below in my disorganized pile of wine boxes, and decided it was just the ticket to have with chicken tortillas, made with shredded pullet, slice green peppers, hot sauce, and a bit of hoisin sauce. This south Australian Riesling must have been inexpensive, though I have no record of what I paid for it. I suspect it was around $12-15.

It’s a light, low-alcohol (12%) Riesling, a good quaffing wine that would go, I think, with spicy Mexican or Chinese food. It’s turned a golden straw color after 6 years but shows no sign of being over the hill. The fragrance is floral and fruity, with overtones of lemon, though the flavor lacks the guts of a good German Riesling (this one is pretty dry, like a German Kabinett). It was a decent buy, but I’d spring for the extra $5 to get a good German Kabinett.

News of the Day:

Texas was poised to pass a restrictive new voting-rights bill (promoted by the GOP, of course), which included the ability of some judges to overturn election results without evidence of fraud. Enter the canny Democrats, who stalled the passage by simply walking out of the legislature, creating a situation where there was no quorum to vote. But Texas governor Greg Abbott, who wants to sign the bill, will likely call for a special session of the legislature, which, forced to convene, will pass the bill.

As the Taliban slowly reclaims Afghanistan after U.S. troops began withdrawing, there is no sign that they’ve tempered their brutality. As the Wall Street Journal reports:

Yet accounts from Kamaluddin and others living under Taliban rule, as well as insurgents themselves, suggest that the group’s governance is as ruthless as ever and, with decades of experience, also more adept.

The Taliban still ban music, force men to grow beards, limit girls’ education and forbid women from leaving home without a male relative or burqa. Residents of areas they control say beatings and executions of those accused of crimes—with the bodies of the offenders put on display as warnings—are still commonplace. In one instance, men accused of kidnapping were publicly hanged, shot and left for all to see, their clothes bloodied.

You can’t have a smartphone, either, because you could use it to play music, which is godless and un-Islamic. Such is the nature of theocracy. That sounds like an apartheid regime to me.

You’ve probably heard that the Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka, ranked #2 in the world, has withdrawn from the French Open and is taking some time away from tennis. This was after she was fined $15,000 for refusing to give interviews after her first win at the Open, saying that it was detrimental to her “mental health.” And indeed, she’s been despondent in public interviews when she lost, and reported that she suffers from depression and anxiety. What I don’t understand is why someone should be required to give interviews or face a big fine (she could also have been suspended had she persisted). If it’s terribly stressful for her, let her be! She’s there to play tennis, not answer reporters’ questions.

Her announcement is saddening but I wish her luck:

I should have figured out that dogs might be able to detect the smell of coronavirus, which, after all, should be more odiferous than cancers, which some dogs can also detect. The New York Times reports that dogs can detect the infected with remarkable accuracy:

. . . three Labradors, operating out of a university clinic in Bangkok, are part of a global corps of dogs being trained to sniff out Covid-19 in people. Preliminary studies, conducted in multiple countries, suggest that their detection rate may surpass that of the rapid antigen testing often used in airports and other public places.

“For dogs, the smell is obvious, just like grilled meat for us,” said Dr. Kaywalee Chatdarong, deputy dean of research and innovation for the faculty of veterinary science at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

The hope is that dogs can be deployed in crowded public spaces, like stadiums or transportation hubs, to identify people carrying the virus. Their skills are being developed in Thailand, the United States, France, Britain, Chile, Australia, Belgium and Germany, among other countries. They have patrolled airports in Finland, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, and private companies have used them at American sporting events.

These tests are less sensitive that tests that amplify viral nucleic acids, but are useful for rapid screening. I would imagine that if one wants to go, say, on an Antarctic cruise, a dog sniff combined with a vaccination record should be sufficient to pronounce you “clean”.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 594,201, an increase of 392 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,565,891, an increase of about 8,400 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on June 1 includes:

This appears to be a copy of the document, which says Brother John Cor, is given ‘8 bolls of malt, wherewith to make aqua vitae for the King’.

She was beheaded three years later.

  • 1779 – The court-martial for malfeasance of Benedict Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, begins.
  • 1812 – War of 1812: U.S. President James Madison asks the Congress to declare war on the United Kingdom.
  • 1857 – Charles Baudelaire‘s Les Fleurs du mal is published.

Here’s a first edition with the author’s notes (I couldn’t find a first edition for sale), followed by a picture of Baudelaire, who died at 46 of opium and poverty:

Here’s Brandeis in about 1900:

  • 1950 – The Chinchaga fire ignites. By September, it would become the largest single fire on record in North America.

The first occurred in Alberta and British Columbia and, according to Wikipedia, burned between “1,400,000 hectares (3,500,000 acres) and 1,700,000 hectares (4,200,000 acres).” It’s still the largest fire in recorded North American history.

  • 1962 – Adolf Eichmann is hanged in Israel.
  • 2001 – Nepalese royal massacre: Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal shoots and kills several members of his family including his father and mother.
  • 2004 – Oklahoma City bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols is sentenced to 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of a parole, breaking a Guinness World Record.

Nichols is serving his sentence in ADX Florence in Colorado, the toughest prison in the U.S.

Here’s that final landing:

Notables born on this day include:

Here’s Young in 1870.

  • 1926 – Andy Griffith, American actor, singer, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2012)
  • 1934 – Pat Boone, American singer-songwriter and actor.
  • 1937 – Morgan Freeman, American actor and producer
  • 1947 – Ronnie Wood, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer
  • 1950 – Charlene, American singer-songwriter.

Charlene is the singer of what I consider the worst pop song ever recorded. Voilà: “I’ve Never Been to Me” (released 1977 and 1982).  Listen to those lyrics, which include, “I’ve been undressed by kings and I’ve seen some things that a woman’s not supposed to see.”

Those who pegged out on June 1, include:

She was acquitted and died, right in the town where she was accused of murdering her father and stepmother: Fall River, Massachusetts. Here’s a photo:

Here’s Hitler and his sister Paula. Do you see a resemblance?

  • 1962 – Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (b. 1906)
  • 1968 – Helen Keller, American author and activist (b. 1880)
  • 1971 – Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian and academic (b. 1892)
  • 2008 – Yves Saint Laurent, French fashion designer, founded Saint Laurent Paris (b. 1936)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wanted to post against the multicolored lilacs:

A: Why did you stop?
Hili: I was searching for the right background.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tu zatrzymałaś?
Hili: W poszukiwaniu właściwego tła.

A cartoon from Jean:

A meme from Nicole:

. . . and another cat meme, this time from Bruce.

A tweet from Barry. I’ve never seen a video quite like this one. How lovely!

From Ginger K. There’s a reason this cat hasn’t been adopted (see the thread), but it’s not a good enough reason. What a great old curmudgeon! I hope somebody takes him!

Tweets from Matthew. Here’s Bubbas, a carrier pigeon of a cat!

Spot the Amur leopard. It’s one of the rarest cats on earth (it’s a subspecies of the leopard): only about 20 remain in the wild.

Translation:”Wonderful! A rare image of a mother of #Leopardo of the Amur and her cubs just caught by the cameras of our fellow WWF Russia! Only 100 remain in the wild, 30 more than 20 years ago but it is still critically endangered.”

Beautiful female birds:

A capybara riding a fish:

I may have just posted this, but you can’t see it often enough. The head stabilization of this bird (and many other birds) is remarkable; it’s almost as if the bird’s head had been nailed to something.

These kind of joke phrases used to be known as “Tom Swifties,” after the adverb that frequently accompanied Tom’s statements:

Monday: Hili dialogue

May 31, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s the last day of May: Monday, May 31, 2020: National Macaroon Day (celebrating the American variety packed with coconut, not those pricey, fancy-schmancy French macarons). It’s also National Meditation Day, World Parrot Day, World No Tobacco Day and Memorial Day.

For Memorial Day, in memory of military forces killed defending America, Google has a special doodle in somber colors (click on the screenshot):

Your host is feeling low today; tell some jokes in the comments!

News of the Day:

It looks like Bibi is toast: a coalition of Israeli opposition parties have struck a deal that will oust Netanyahu and replace him with Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s former defense minister. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, is 71 and has been in power for 12 years.

In the meantime, Texas, along with other states, has passed restrictive new laws that make it not only harder to vote, but easier for judges to overturn election results. This can only be a Republican ploy to disenfranchise minority voters and show some support for Trump, despite the fact that there is no evidence that the 2020 elections were stolen anywhere. The new Texas laws, which the governor may have signed by the time you read this, even allows a judge to overturn election results when there is no evidence of fraud.

Some specifics:

The bill includes new restrictions on absentee voting; grants broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; escalates punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials; and bans both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, which were used for the first time during the 2020 election in Harris County, home to Houston and a growing number of the state’s Democratic voters.

The bill in Texas, a major state with a booming population, represents the apex of the national Republican push to install tall new barriers to voting after President Donald J. Trump’s loss last year to Joseph R. Biden Jr., with expansive restrictions already becoming law in Iowa, Georgia and Florida in 2021. Fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the election, Republicans have passed the bills almost entirely along partisan lines, brushing off the protestations of Democrats, civil rights groups, voting rights groups, major corporations and faith leaders.

Singer B. J. Thomas, famous for his rendition of the Bacharach/David song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”, heard in the 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, has died at 78. Remember this with Paul Newman and Katharine Ross on the bicycle?

Remember the Ever Given, the container ship stuck in the Suez Canal in March, providing us with a lot of drama? The Egyptians have now blamed pilot error on the accident, and have impounded the ship, asking for $550 million to cover costs, including lost revenues and the cost of loosening the ship. The owners, on the other hand, claim that the Canal authority is to blame, allowing the ship to enter during a sandstorm and not providing at least two tugboats.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 594,051, an increase of 446 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,557,413,, an increase of about 7,900 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 31 includes:

  • 455 – Emperor Petronius Maximus is stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome.
  • 1669 – Citing poor eyesight as a reason, Samuel Pepys records the last event in his diary.

Here’s that last entry:

Up very betimes, and so continued all the morning with W. Hewer, upon examining and stating my accounts, in order to the fitting myself to go abroad beyond sea, which the ill condition of my eyes, and my neglect for a year or two, hath kept me behindhand in, and so as to render it very difficult now, and troublesome to my mind to do it; but I this day made a satisfactory entrance therein. Dined at home, and in the afternoon by water to White Hall, calling by the way at Michell’s, where I have not been many a day till just the other day, and now I met her mother there and knew her husband to be out of town. And here je did baiser elle, but had not opportunity para hazer some with her as I would have offered if je had had it. And thence had another meeting with the Duke of York, at White Hall, on yesterday’s work, and made a good advance: and so, being called by my wife, we to the Park, Mary Batelier, and a Dutch gentleman, a friend of hers, being with us. Thence to “The World’s End,” a drinking-house by the Park; and there merry, and so home late.

And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear: and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be any thing, which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb. are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in short-hand with my own hand.

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!

  • 1859 – The clock tower at the Houses of Parliament, which houses Big Ben, starts keeping time.
  • 1889 – Johnstown Flood: Over 2,200 people die after a dam fails and sends a 60-foot (18-meter) wall of water over the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Here’s a view of some of the damage:

  • 1911 – The RMS Titanic is launched in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
  • 1971 – In accordance with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1968, observation of Memorial Day occurs on the last Monday in May for the first time, rather than on the traditional Memorial Day of May 30.
  • 2005 – Vanity Fair reveals that Mark Felt was “Deep Throat”.
  • 2008 – Usain Bolt breaks the world record in the 100m sprint, with a wind-legal (+1.7 m/s) 9.72 seconds

The next year Bolt set another record, shown in the digital clock below. Here’s a video of that feat, and the 9.58 still stands.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1819 – Walt Whitman, American poet, essayist, and journalist (d. 1892)
  • 1930 – Clint Eastwood, American actor, director, musician, and producer
  • 1938 – Peter Yarrow, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer

Yarrow was pardoned by, of all people, Jimmy Carter in 1981; Yarrow’s crime was sexual misconduct with a 14 year old girl. He served but three months in prison.

  • 1943 – Joe Namath, American football player, sportscaster, and actor

Here’s the great upset that was Super Bowl III in 1969; I was watching the game live. The underdog New York Jets, with Namath at QB, beat the Baltimore Colts, helmed by Johnny Unitas, by a score of 16-7. Here’s a short video of the highlights.

Remember this salacious ad for Calvin Klein Jeans by Shields. She was only 15 at the time, and the slogan caused a furor: “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

Those who were planted on May 31 include:

Strayhorn was responsible for many of Duke Ellington’s most famous songs and arrangements, but Duke often withheld credits from Strayhorn. Billy didn’t mind too much, as he was gay and wanted to keep a low profile, but he deserves more praise for what he did. Strayhorn died of esophageal cancer, and Duke of lung cancer, for in those days jazz musicians drank and smoke like gangbusters. Here’s Billy:

  • 1976 – Jacques Monod, French biologist and geneticist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)
  • 1983 – Jack Dempsey, American boxer and lieutenant (b. 1895)
  • 1996 – Timothy Leary, American psychologist and author (b. 1920)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Paulina engage in badinage. As you see, she’s been eating well!

Paulina: We have another day of the week.
Hili: I knew that it would come.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Paulina: Mamy kolejny dzień tygodnia.
Hili: Wiedziałam, że tak będzie.

Here’s a very good animated plot of the migration of modern humans since they went “out of Africa” over 100,000 years ago and spread across the globe. (h/t: Isabel).

From Nicole:

A meme from Bruce, which he calls either “think outside the box” or “find your own way”:

From Titania: a distinction without a difference:

Tweets sent by David. I have no words for this degree of stupidity.

These tweets apparently came from the owner of, hatWRKS, a hat store in Nashville, Tennessee, and Stetson, bless its heart, just decided to stop selling hats there:

A nice tweet from Simon: “A different angle on a familiar skill.” Very cool!

From reader Barry. Did you know that bunnies were this malleable?

Two more from Barry. An encounter of the Alces kind:

A tweet from Ginger K.:WooCat!

From reader Jeremy and his wife Lyn: the new sport of cat curling.