Category: Hili Dialogue

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 26, 2021 • 6:30 am

It is a humpish sort of day, suitable for camels or Quasimodo: it’s May 26 2021: National Blueberry Cheesecake Day (make mine either plain or cherry, though). But it’s also National Cherry Dessert Day, Paper Airplane Day, Sally Ride Day (honoring her birthday on this day in 1951), World Redhead Day, and, in Australia, National Sorry Day, a day of apology for the mistreatment of indigenous people.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) is an animated swing-dancing game celebrating the famed Savoy Ballroom, in which you can test your rhythm, individually or in a two-person game, for four swing songs. I haven’t played the game, so no guarantees.

This video explains the video, the Savoy Ballroom, and the game:

News of the Day:

According to the Washington Post, Manhattan’s district attorney has convened a grand jury to evaluate the  possibility of criminal charges against Donald Trump and his business associates.

The panel was convened recently and will sit three days a week for six months. It is likely to hear several matters — not just the Trump case ­— during the duration of its term, which is longer than a traditional New York state grand-jury assignment, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Generally, special grand juries such as this one are convened to participate in long-term matters rather than to hear evidence of crimes charged routinely.

The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance believes he has found evidence of a crime — if not by Trump then by someone potentially close to him or by his company.

Is anybody betting that the Orange Man will be wearing an orange onesie in jail? Remember, there is no Presidential pardon for state charges, even if Biden had the unlikely inclination to intervene.

More about grand juries from the AP: Madison Smith, a Kansas woman who accused a man of raping her convened her own grand jury when local prosecutors declined to bring rape charges. It turns out that, at least in Kansas, citizens can impanel a grand jury if they present a petition signed by hundreds of citizens. Smith was persistent and succeeded:

The process of seeking a grand jury wasn’t easy. Smith had to stand in a parking lot telling her story over and over again to strangers to collect hundreds of signatures, and then do it again when the first petition was rejected on a technicality.

The accused had already pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and was given two years’ probation. I believe that, at least in Kansas (a few other states have such procedures), this is the first time the citizen-impaneling procedure has been used in a case of sexual assault.

Down in Texas, the state legislature just approved a bill that allows anyone over 21 to buy and carry a handgun in pubic places without a permit and without training. The governor says he’ll sign the bill.

From the BBC, an article titled, “Miss, what’s a duck?” reveals the deep and sad ignorance of British children who get little exposure to nature. Here’s part of the sad report:

When school teacher Kim Leathley took her class on a trip to the local aquarium, she was asked an unusual question.

“Miss? What’s that?” said a nine-year-old boy, pointing towards the waves, as they walked along Blackpool promenade.

It turned out he’d never seen the sea before.

A surprise, given the school is in the middle of Blackpool and only a few streets from the seafront.

Other teachers have had similar experiences over the years on school trips outside the city, she explains. A 10-year-old once asked what a duck was, while a pupil – spotting cows in the field – said: “Look at those horses.”

Speaking of ducks (and we should), a California man was arrested for firing his gun to protect his pet duck. According to the BBC, the man fired into the air as a dog leapt his fence went after his duck. The duck survived, but with a broken leg. In my view, that man should get a medal, not a charge of reckless endangerment!  (h/t: Matthew)

Over at the Atlantic, Matti Friedman has an article about how Americans’ attempts to see commonalities between themselves and Israel has distorted our view of what’s happening. Read “Israel’s Problems are not like America’s.”

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 590,628, an increase of about 700 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,500,840, an increase of about 12,650 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 26 includes:

  • 1293 – An earthquake strikes Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan, killing about 23,000.
  • 1857 – Dred Scott is emancipated by the Blow family, his original owners.

Scott had lost a Supreme Court case, 7-2, which said that African-Americans had no right to citizenship in the U.S. Sadly, after he was freed, he died about 15 months later of tuberculosis. A photo:

Here are the final resting places in St. Petersburg of the Tsar and his family, shot by the Bolsheviks. I took this in 2011. Nicholas’s resting place is to the left in the center.

A first edition, first printing of this puppy will run you around $40,000 U.S.:

  • 1923 – The first 24 Hours of Le Mans was held and has since been run annually in June.
  • 1927 – The last Ford Model T rolls off the assembly line after a production run of 15,007,003 vehicles.

Here are some model Ts on Ford’s famous assembly line:

It was successful. Here are some British troops lined up on the Dunkirk beaches, awaiting evacuation:

Here’s Abbey Road Two Studio, where most of the tracks of Sgt. Pepper (54 years old today) were recorded:

  • 1998 – The Supreme Court of the United States rules in New Jersey v. New York that Ellis Island, the historic gateway for millions of immigrants, is mainly in the state of New Jersey, not New York.
  • 1998 – The first “National Sorry Day” was held in Australia, and reconciliation events were held nationally, and attended by over a million people.

Notables born on this day include:

Lange was most famous for her images of the Great Depression in the U.S. Here are two of them. First, a family moves with its belongings:

A family in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, are forced to leave their home during the Great Depression, June 1938. Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images

“Migrant mother” (1936), perhaps her most famous image:

  • 1907 – John Wayne, American actor, director, and producer (d. 1979)
  • 1920 – Peggy Lee, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2002)

Here’s Lee singing “Why Don’t You Do Right” with the Benny Goodman Orchestra in 1943. I love this video! Her singing is lovely and understated, and Goodman plays some sweet licorice stick.

  • 1926 – Miles Davis, American trumpet player, composer, and bandleader (d. 1991)
  • 1928 – Jack Kevorkian, American pathologist, author, and assisted suicide activist (d. 2011)
  • 1940 – Levon Helm, American singer-songwriter, drummer, producer, and actor (d. 2012)
  • 1948 – Stevie Nicks, American singer-songwriter

Here’s the best Stevie Nicks video ever, recorded spontaneously as she was being made up for a Rolling Stone shoot. Voilà: “Wild Heart.” This may be the best spontaneous rock song ever, and is infinitely better than the recorded version. You won’t regret listening to this.

  • 1949 – Jeremy Corbyn, British journalist and politician
  • 1951 – Sally Ride, American physicist and astronaut, founded Sally Ride Science (d. 2012)

Those who went belly up on May 26 include:

Here’s one of Riis’s photos. Wikipedia caption: “Bandit’s Roost (1888) by Jacob Riis, from How the Other Half Lives. This image is Bandit’s Roost at 59½ Mulberry Street, considered the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of New York City.” Would you walk down this street? Talk about “Gangs of New York”!

  • 1943 – Edsel Ford, American businessman (b. 1893)
  • 1976 – Martin Heidegger, German philosopher and academic (b. 1889)
  • 2008 – Sydney Pollack, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1934)
  • 2010 – Art Linkletter, Canadian-American radio and television host (b. 1912)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili doesn’t understand the prevalence of annoying insects (has she considered evolution?):

Hili: I can find no justification.
Paulina: What for?
Hili: Neither for mosquitos nor for any flies.
(Picture: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Nie znajduję żadnego usprawiedliwienia.
Paulina: Dla kogo?
Hili: Ani dla komarów, ani dla innych muszek.
(Zdjęcie: Paulina R.)

Little Kulka is intense, as usual:

A meme from Bruce:

From Nicole, a plaint that I’ve sometimes had:

A bad joke from Jesus of the Day:

From Titania. Shoot me NOW!

Tweets from Matthew. The first is a science experiment: “How ducklings’ feet sound on different floors.” Awesome!

If they start opening beers we’re all doomed:

I don’t think these ducks are particularly spoiled, do you?

A nice optical illusion, and no, it does not expand! Click on it to enlarge the picture.

ARRESTED!???? This guy deserves a medal!

This really is excellent even if it is the New Woke Times. Excellent graphics:

There are more pictures in this thread of quail walking alongside a gopher snake. Matthew’s take: “I reckon they are ensuring it leaves. Safety in numbers and intimidating to snake.”

 

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Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 25, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on the cruelest of all weekdays: Tuesday, and May 25, 2021, to boot. It’s also National Wine Day and Geek Pride Day. as well as International Missing Children’s Day and  National Missing Children’s Day (United States), as well as National Tap Dance Day and, in honor of Douglas Adams, Towel Day.  

And it’s another Three Bun Day, as I saw three Eastern Cottontails on my walk to work. They don’t live very long, but nor are they aware of their mortality.

Wine of the Day: This bottle from Domaine Hippolyte Reverdy may be the first Sancerre I’ve had (it’s a French appellation with most whites made from sauvignon blanc). It’s not a wine I look for, and can’t remember buying this one, though I have $30 written on the bottle, so that’s what I paid. Was it worth it? I don’t think so. It’s a decent specimen of sauvignon blanc, redolent of citrus and apple, but one can do better: equally good sauvignon blancs are available for $20 or less. You win some, you lose some. . .

Drunk with fettucine alfredo; a slight touch of sweetness would have improved the pairing.

News of the Day:

In an op-ed at the NYT, mercifully free of politics, Salman Rusdie’s thesis is “The stories we love make us who we are.” An exponent of magical realism, at least in his best book, Midnight’s Children, Rushdie says this:

This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.

In his paean to “wonder tales,” one of Rushdie’s favorite novels is also in my pantheon of the greats:

When, as a college student, I first read Günter Grass’s great novel “The Tin Drum,” I was unable to finish it. It languished on a shelf for fully 10 years before I gave it a second chance, whereupon it became one of my favorite novels of all time: one of the books I would say that I love. It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.

Well, you can take issue with his thesis, but not with the claim that The Tin Drum is one of the best novels of our time.

A fossil fruit, 52 million years old, has been discovered , a tomatillo found in South America.  (h/t Nicole) It shows this:

Delicate fossil remains of tomatillos found in Patagonia, Argentina, show that this branch of the economically important family that also includes potatoes, peppers, tobacco, petunias and tomatoes existed 52 million years ago, long before the dates previously ascribed to these species, according to an international team of scientists.

(From GeeologyIn.com: The new fossil groundcherry Physalis infinemundi from Laguna del Hunco in Patagonia, Argentina, 52 million years old. This specimen displays the characteristic papery, lobed husk and details of the venation. Credit: Ignacio Escapa, Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio

According to the Guardian, the body of a missing Catalonian man was found inside the leg of a large dinosaur statue. What a way to go, too: a police spokesperson explained the tragedy this way:  “It looks as though he was trying to retrieve a mobile phone, which he’d dropped. It looks like he entered the statue head first and couldn’t get out.” (h/t: Matthew Cobb)

And another strange story, this time from the BBC: Criminal trapped by a photo of Stilton cheese!  Carl Stewart, 39, posted this photo on an encrypted messaging service, which was decryptic by the police:

His finger and palm prints from the photos were sufficient to get him indicted for conspiracy to supply heroin, cocaine, ketamine and MDMA, as well as for transferring criminal property.  He’s now in jail for over 13 years because he broadcast his love of Stilton cheese! (h/t: Jez)

From the Times of Israel, Blake Ezra has a good piece about the distortions of the media (and by others, including celebrities) about the recent battles in the Middle East: “I’m fed up.” Ricky Gervais’s comment about Hollywood celebrities in the piece is appropriate.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 589,926, an increase of 410 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,488,194, an increase of about 9,600 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 25 includes:

Can you imagine the relief of those people who no longer had to eat annelids?

Wilde moved to France the day he was released from prison and never came back to Britain. Here’s his tomb in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, photographed by me three years ago. A plexiglas barrier surrounds Jacob Epstein’s superb tomb, as people would cover the sculpture with lipstick by kissing it (you can see some kiss marks in the photo):

Here I am honoring Scopes at his gravesite in Paducah, Kentucky. The Discovery Institute excoriated me for publishing this picture, saying that I was honoring a man who taught eugenics and racism. But he didn’t: he taught human evolution for one day as a substitute teacher (the other stuff was in the textbook he used for that day, but didn’t teach):

  • 1935 – Jesse Owens of Ohio State University breaks three world records and ties a fourth at the Big Ten Conference Track and Field Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
  • 1955 – First ascent of Mount Kangchenjunga: On the British Kangchenjunga expedition led by Charles Evans, Joe Brown and George Band reach the summit of the third-highest mountain in the world (8,586 meters); Norman Hardie and Tony Streather join them the following day.

I went to Darjeeling in India largely to see Kanchenjunga from Tiger Hill, the prime viewing spot. For four days the mountain was invisible, socked in by clouds, and then, the day before we left, I climbed Tiger Hill with my camera and tripod an got a morning view of Kanchenjunga that looked like this:

Here’s Kennedy’s pronouncement exactly sixty years ago today:

  • 1977 – Star Wars (retroactively titled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) is released in theaters.
  • 1978 – The first of a series of bombings orchestrated by the Unabomber detonates at Northwestern University resulting in minor injuries.
  • 1986 – The Hands Across America event takes place.

Remember this? Well, a continuous chain of linked human hands wasn’t achieved, though 6.5 million people participated, but it was sort of successful. From Wikipedia:

In order to allow the maximum number of people to participate, the path linked major cities and meandered back and forth within the cities. Just as there were sections where the “line” was six to ten people deep, there were also undoubtedly many breaks in the chain. However, enough people participated that if an average of all the participants had been taken and spread evenly along the route standing four feet (1.2 m) apart, an unbroken chain across the 48 contiguous states would have been able to be formed.

Here’s Weihenmayer on the summit:

  • 2011 – Oprah Winfrey airs her last show, ending her 25-year run of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
  • 2012 – The SpaceX Dragon becomes the first commercial spacecraft to successfully rendezvous and berth with the International Space Station
  • 2018 – Ireland votes to repeal the Eighth Amendment of their constitution that prohibits abortion in all but a few cases, choosing to replace it with the Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland.
  • 2020 – George Floyd, a black man, is murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest when he is restrained in a prone position face-down on the ground for more than nine minutes, provoking protests across the United States and around the world

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1803 – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and philosopher (d. 1882)
  • 1878 – Bill Robinson, American actor and dancer (d. 1949)

Robinson, a superb tap dancer, was invariably relegated to the “subservient black man” roles. Here he is doing a dance on a staircase:

  • 1889 – Igor Sikorsky, Russian-American aircraft designer, founded Sikorsky Aircraft (d. 1972)
  • 1929 – Beverly Sills, American soprano and actress (d. 2007)
  • 1944 – Frank Oz, English-born American puppeteer, filmmaker, and actor
  • 1969 – Anne Heche, American actress

Those who exited this life on May 25 were few, and include:

  • 1954 – Robert Capa, Hungarian photographer and journalist (b. 1913)

Capa was the only photographer to land with U.S. troops on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Here’s one of the eleven photos he took of the landing:

  • 2003 – Sloan Wilson, American author and poet (b. 1920)

Author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Wilson was the father of biologist David Sloan Wilson.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there is some joy this day, at least from Paulina:

Paulina: At last some good news from the world.
Hili: You must be joking again.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Paulina: Nareszcie jakieś dobre wiadomości ze świata.
Hili: Chyba znowu żartujesz.

And Szaron’s hiding in the space where firewood is stored:

A meme from Nicole:

I posted this several years ago on Facebook:

From Bruce, a grilled chicken:

One of many odious tweets by a working BBC journalist. People are demanding she be fired, but I won’t join that mob.

From Barry; nice try, but no cigar. . .

Tweets from Matthew. Learn this trick, for some day it may save your life:

One excerpt:

While the familiar munching and slurping of the dinner table are innocuous enough to most, those with misophonia – literally a hatred of sound – can find them profoundly irritating, to the point that they become disgusted, anxious, angry and even violent.

Does anyone here have misphonia?

I didn’t know there was a Duck of the Day site. Fortunately, Matthew is following it:

Below: the average distance traveled by swifts was 570 km per day, but they often went much farther: the record was 830 km per day (roughly 500 miles) over nine days!

Now THIS is a gorgeous beetle:

A failed prediction from Mechanix Illustrated:

Monday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

May 24, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Monday, May 24, 2021: National Escargot Day. It is a Three Bun Day, which means that I saw three cottontail rabbits on my way to work. This augurs a good day: 12 rabbits’ feet!

It’s also Asparagus Day, Brother’s Day (only one brother being celebrated?), and, in Canada, Victoria Day and its related holiday in Quebec, National Patriots’ Day (Journée nationale des patriotes). And Bob Dylan turns 80 today! (See below.)

News of the Day:

“Defund the police” was always a dubious slogan, unless qualified with strict specifications on where the money would go to compensate for reduced policing or to add extra social value. And, sure enough, this headline has appeared in The New Woke Times (click on screenshot):

The cause, of course, is a rise in violent crime. A quote:

. . . more cops is what Los Angeles is getting.

A year after streets echoed with calls to “defund” law enforcement and city leaders embraced the message by agreeing to take $150 million away from the Los Angeles Police Department, or about 8 percent of the department’s budget, the city last week agreed to increase the police budget to allow the department to hire about 250 officers. The increase essentially restores the cuts that followed the protests.

The BBC reports that John Kelly, an ultamarathoner, just set a record in the grueling Pennine Way race, a 260-mile route that “runs down the spine of Britain from the Scottish Borders’ Kirk Yetholm to Edale in Derbyshire’s Peak District.”They add that a fit hiker would take over two weeks to hike the route, but Kelly did it in just 58 hours and four minutes. And he had only two 10-minute naps along the way!

Speaking of ultramarathons, the NYT reports a mass death: 21 runners in a Chinese ultramarathon, including one of their best athletes, died when cold weather and freezing rain inundated a 62-mile mountain race. Many of the runners were clad only in short and tee-shirts.

The Associated Press has collected some depressing and hair-raising stories about how the pandemic has affected the lives of Indians, while the medical system breaks down. Here’s just one of several stories:

The Amrohi Family, Gurgaon

At the Amrohi apartment, the former ambassador’s family was calling his medical school classmates for help. One eventually arranged a bed at a nearby hospital.

It was April 26. The brutal north Indian summer was coming on. Temperatures that day reached nearly 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).

His wife, Yamini, and their adult son Anupam put him into the family’s compact SUV.

They arrived about 7:30 p.m. and parked in front of the main doors, thinking Ashok would be rushed inside. They were wrong. Admission paperwork had to be completed first, and the staff was swamped.

So they waited.

Anupam stood in line while Yamini stayed in the car with Ashok, who was breathing bottled oxygen. She blasted the air-conditioning, trying to keep him cool.

An hour passed. Two hours. Someone came to swab Ashok for a coronavirus test. It came back positive. His breathing had grown difficult.

“I went thrice to the hospital reception for help. I begged, pleaded and shouted at the officials,” she said. “But nobody budged.”

At one point, their daughter called from London, where she lives with her family. With everyone on a video call, their four-year-old grandson asked to talk to Ashok.

“I love you, Poppy,” he said.

Ashok pulled off his oxygen mask: “Hello. Poppy loves you too.”

Three hours.

Four hours.

Anupam returned regularly to the car to check on his father.

“It’s almost done,” he would tell him each time. “Everything is going to be alright. Please stay with us!”

Five hours.

A little after midnight, Ashok grew agitated, pulling off the oxygen mask and gasping. His chest heaved. Then he went still.

“In a second he was no more,” Yamini said. “He was dead in my arms.”

Yamini went to the reception desk: “You are murderers,” she told them.

The story continues later in the article.

And a BBC report describes a deadly “black fungus” disease that strikes some people in India who have recovered from Covid, mostly males with underlying conditions like diabetes. It is a fulminating infection caused by a common soil fungus and must be treated with long-term doses of antifungal agents.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 589,517, an increase of 563 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,478,596, an increase of about 9,000 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 24 includes:

  • 1487 – The ten-year-old Lambert Simnel is crowned in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland, with the name of Edward VI in a bid to threaten King Henry VII’s reign.
  • 1607 – One hundred English settlers disembark in Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America.
  • 1626 – Peter Minuit buys Manhattan.

Yes, the island was a bargain: it went for 60 guilders, a trifling amount now worth about $1,143. The sellers were Lenape Native Americans.

  • 1683 – The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, opens as the world’s first university museum.
  • 1813 – South American independence leader Simón Bolívar enters Mérida, leading the invasion of Venezuela, and is proclaimed El Libertador (“The Liberator”).
  • 1844 – Samuel Morse sends the message “What hath God wrought” (a biblical quotation, Numbers 23:23) from a committee room in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland, to inaugurate a commercial telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C.

Morse in 1840; the man knew his Bible:

  • 1883 – The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City is opened to traffic after 14 years of construction.
  • 1930 – Amy Johnson lands in Darwin, Northern Territory, becoming the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia (she left on May 5 for the 11,000 mile flight).

Here’s Johnson  in her Gypsy Moth plane in 1930. The flight took her six days. Sadly, she died after running out of fuel over the Thames Estuary in 1941 and, parachuting safely into the water, died of extreme cold.

  • 1935 – The first night game in Major League Baseball history is played in Cincinnati, Ohio, with the Cincinnati Reds beating the Philadelphia Phillies 2–1 at Crosley Field.
  • 1940 – Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.

Here’s Sikorsky in his first helicopter:

A second attempt succeeded in August of that same year. If you’re in Mexico City, do visit Trotsky’s house, or rather fortress, which he built to stave off attacks. He knew Stalin was going to go after him. In 2012 I visited it (Frida Kahlo’s house is just a few blocks away); here’s the desk where Trotsky was sitting when an assassin put an ice axe into his head. It’s said to be just as he left it.

  • 1956 – The first Eurovision Song Contest is held in Lugano, Switzerland.
  • 1976 – The Judgment of Paris takes place in France, launching California as a worldwide force in the production of quality wine.
  • 1991 – Israel conducts Operation Solomon, evacuating Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
  • 1999 – The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands indicts Slobodan Milošević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo.
  • 2019 – Under pressure over her handling of Brexit, British Prime Minister Theresa May announces her resignation as Leader of the Conservative Party, effective as of June 7.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1819 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (d. 1901)
  • 1938 – Tommy Chong, Canadian-American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
  • 1941 – Bob Dylan, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, artist, writer, and producer; Nobel Prize laureate

Dylan is 80 today! How could time have passed so quickly? Here’s a photo I have in my office of Dylan with a certain young lady (his significant other at the time) who went on to achieve her own renown:

 

  • 1960 – Kristin Scott Thomas, English actress

Those who lost their lives on May 24 include:

  • 1543 – Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish mathematician and astronomer (b. 1473)
  • 1879 – William Lloyd Garrison, American journalist and activist (b. 1805)
  • 1974 – Duke Ellington, American pianist and composer (b. 1899)

I’ve almost finished reading my biography of Duke. Here’s one of my favorites from the Blanton-Webster version of his band (1939-1940): “Cotton Tail.” I put it up in honor of the three bunnies I saw this morning. And yes, this one swings! The sax solo made Ben Webster famous. (And this will wake you up, so keep the sound down if folks are sleeping!).

  • 1996 – Joseph Mitchell, American journalist and author (b. 1908)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Paulina have a chat.

Hili: How does the writing of your masters theses go?
Paulina: It’s going well but sometimes I need a break.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Jak ci idzie pisanie pracy magisterskiej?
Paulina: Dobrze, ale czasem muszę odpocząć.

And Mietek has a moment of rapture:

Mietek: The wind in my hair.

In Polish: Wiatr we włosach

From Science Humor:

From Bruce:

From Meriliee. I do this, too, sticking one foot out from under the covers at night:

I made a tweet!

From reader Ken, who comments, “This man was at one time the National Security Advisor of the United States of America.”

 

Tweets from Matthew:

I think this cat’s just harassed:

This is a gynandromorph (half male, half female) ant of the ant species Pheidole noda, with sexual traits split straight down the middle. I suspect that the side with the wing is male, because only males or females who are destined to be queens have wings. Look at the difference between the male and female morphology!

Fun history and art fact (lovely paintings, too):

Everybody says this photo is wrong, but they can’t quite say why. Are the measurements wrong? Are they using different scales? You tell me! The guy certainly looks more than a foot and eight inches taller than the woman.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 23, 2021 • 5:30 am

It’s formally the beginning of the week, but Sunday, (e.g., today: May 23, 2021) is actually perceived as the tail end of the week. It’s National Taffy Day (I don’t like the stuff), as well as World Turtle Day, Lucky Penny Day, and World Crohn’s and Colitis Day. More on some readers’ turtles soon.

If you’re interested in Darwin, or how the woke are trying to bring him to heel and indict him for, among other things, inciting genocide, read the piece I wrote yesterday about an attempt to smear Darwin.

Wine of the Day: Port is usually reserved for the colder months, but I had this bottle hanging around and stood it up vertically a week ago to allow the sediment to fall. (There was a heavy sediment in this one; I lost about a glass through decanting.) And if you want a vintage-style port without paying $75 and holding it for 15 years, this is the one for you (I think I paid about $25 for this bottle). It was an absolutely spectacular wine, heavy with alcohol (18.5%) and deeply rich with flavor, with tons of ripe cherry fruit and no “heat”. It is a dark garnet color and slides down the throat like velvet. It is, literally, a lip-smacking wine. LBV Port is, of course, sweet, as it should be.

Port is still an underrated wine in the U.S., though the Brits know its worth. There are many types, with vintage at the top (and the best), but there are also many bargains like tawnies and these LBV styles. If you want a nice evening tipple with your book, see if you can get hold of this one. (For genuine vintage ports, Graham’s, also with a sweet profile, is my favorite.)

I expect this bottle, put under vacuum, will last me a week.

News of the Day:

It’s mercifully quiet this weekend so far; the cease-fire in Israel and Gaza is still holding. So, after the first piece, there’s some news without gravitas.

According to the Washington Post, Black Lives Matter has officially allied itself with Palestine:

Black Lives Matter, which has grown into a potent political force amid a national reckoning on race, has responded forcefully to the violence in the Mideast to extend its reach into foreign policy, pressing the Democratic Party to adopt a dramatically different approach to the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whatever the aftermath of the violence in the region, it has starkly changed the Israeli-Palestinian debate in the United States, shifting it for many liberals from a tangled dispute over ancient, often-confusing claims to the far more familiar turf of police brutality and racial conflict.

“We understand that the liberation of Black people in the United States is tied to the liberation of Black people all over the world, and tied to the liberation of oppressed people all over the world,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter. “Being in solidarity with the Palestinian people is something that’s been part of our work as Black Lives Matter for almost as long as we’ve been an organization.”

There were no words about the oppression of women, Jews, gays, apostates and nonbelievers by the Palestinians, as those forms of oppression don’t matter. What a shame that the erstwhile alliance between African-Americans and Jews, important in the Civil Rights marches and activities of the Sixties, is a thing of the past.

Ok, now to the persiflage:

First, a number of candy companies are hopping mad because purveyors of “edibles” containing cannabis are making products resembling commercial candies. Take a look, for instance of real Skittles (above) and the dope-containing Skittles (below):

Or real Starburst Fruit Chews versus the kind that can get you baked:

This being America, lawsuits are underway.

America’s great gymnast Simone Biles landed a “Yurchenko double pike” in training and it’s amazing. If she lands it in competition in the Olympics, it will be a first. Have a look:

Another view:

More COVID news. The Guardian reports that well known Dutch scientist Elizabeth Bik is subject to a lawsuit by another “scientist” who published a shoddy study purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for the virus. She pointed out the paper’s errors online, and now the guy who published the paper, Dr Didier Raoult, has sued her for “harassment”:

The legal complaint alleges harassment over Bik exposing data errors on PubPeer, and extortion because she has a Patreon account where people can donate to her work. She has responded to Raoult’s calls on Twitter to declare who is funding her by sharing links to her Patreon.

This suit unconscionable. The Guardian adds:

The case, filed with the French state prosecutor by controversial infectious diseases physician Dr Didier Raoult, has prompted hundreds of scientists from across the world to publish an open letter calling for science whistleblowers to be protected.

You can sign a petition against the persecution of Bik’s rightful criticisms here.

he case, filed with the French state prosecutor by controversial infectious diseases physician Dr Didier Raoult, has prompted hundreds of scientists from across the world to publish an open letter calling for science whistleblowers to be protected

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 589,328, an increase of 578 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,469.436, an increase of about 10,500 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 23 includes:

  • 1430 – Joan of Arc is captured by the Burgundians while leading an army to raise the Siege of Compiègne.
  • 1533 – The marriage of King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon is declared null and void.
  • 1618 – The Second Defenestration of Prague precipitates the Thirty Years’ War.

Two men were defenestrated, but both survived the 70-foot (21-meter) drop out the window, most likely because they landed on a dung heap. Here’s a woodcut of that famous incident:

  • 1701 – After being convicted of piracy and of murdering William Moore, Captain William Kidd is hanged in London.

The rope broke on the first try, but they gave him no mercy and hanged him again. He was then gibbeted (see below):

  • 1844 – Declaration of the Báb the evening before the 23rd: A merchant of Shiraz announces that he is a Prophet and founds a religious movement that would later be brutally crushed by the Persian government. He is considered to be a forerunner of the Baháʼí Faith; Baháʼís celebrate the day as a holy day.
  • 1992 – Italy’s most prominent anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three body guards are killed by the Corleonesi clan with a half-ton bomb near Capaci, Sicily. His friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino will be assassinated less than two months later, making 1992 a turning point in the history of Italian Mafia prosecutions.

The explosion site: this is what happens when you go after the Mafia. Falcone was a brave man:

  • 1998 – The Good Friday Agreement is accepted in a referendum in Northern Ireland with roughly 75% voting yes.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1707 – Carl Linnaeus, Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist (d. 1778)

Here’s Linnaeus’s country house in Sweden, which I photographed upon visiting Uppsala in 2006:

  • 1891 – Pär Lagerkvist, Swedish novelist, playwright, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1974)
  • 1974 – Jewel, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, actress, and poet

Those who found Eternal Rest on May 23 include:

  • 1701 – William Kidd, Scottish pirate (b. 1645)
  • 1906 – Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian director, playwright, and poet (b. 1828)
  • 1934 – Bonnie Parker, American criminal (b. 1910)
  • 1934 – Clyde Barrow, American criminal (b. 1909)

Bonnie and Clyde, before and after:

  • 1937 – John D. Rockefeller, American businessman and philanthropist, founded the Standard Oil Company and Rockefeller University (b. 1839)
  • 1945 – Heinrich Himmler, German commander and politician, Reich Minister of the Interior (b. 1900)

When captured by the allies, SS head Himmler bit into a cyanide capsule and died within 15 minutes. The aftermath (sorry for so much death today!):

Here’s Nash; he and his wife were killed in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Little Kulka is taunting Hili.

Hili: Do not provoke me.
Kulka: And what would you do to me if I did?
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Nie prowokuj.
Kulka: A co mi zrobisz?
(Zdjęcie: Paulina R.)

From Divy:

Cat linguistics via Brian Leiter:

From somewhere on Facebook:

A tweet from reader Ken, who adds this about the first tweet: “Among the multitude of things this woman doesn’t know diddly-squat about is the difference between gold stars and yellow badges. She appears to be getting her talking points directly from QAnon conspiracists.”

The second tweet is equally insane:

From Barry. You go, rat!

Tweets from Matthew. The first one sends you to the mother lode of optical illusions (143 of them!). Unfortunately, I don’t know what the one in the tweet represents. There is a Darwin Illusion (here), and I’ve put another one below.

Poor mismatched kitty!

Two tweets showing some unknown animal. Matthew first commented, “I have no fricking idea what this weirdo is except that it’s some kind of arthropod. There’s a linked vid in the next tweet which doesn’t help. But then he realized, as I guessed, that it was a soft-shelled turtle. It’s thus appropriate for Turtle Day. Look how fast it is!

I think this is that errant walrus in Wales that the Egg Man is trying to drive away:

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 22, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Cat Sabbath: May 22, 2021: National Vanilla Pudding Day. (That reminds me of Bill Cosby, who used to advertise Jell-O puddings but is now in jail.) It’s also Italian Beef Day (a sandwich best consumed in Chicago), United States National Maritime Day, Harvey Milk Day in California (see below), International Day for Biological Diversity, World Goth Day, and Canadian Immigrants Day.  

News of the Day:

Jerrold Nadler, a senior Jewish congressman and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, maintains in a NYT editorial that “Democrats have not changed their position on Israel.”  An excerpt

But the vast majority of Democrats are thoughtful and considerate, and recognize nuance in a conflict shaded by centuries of complexity, suffering and pain, and this has always been the case. We know that the only solution is one where both Jewish and Palestinian people have the right to self-determination and security. We support the humanity of both parties in the conflict as well as small-d democratic values. And we stand resolutely against attacks on Israel’s right to exist. Really, this moment reflects a coming out of the silent majority of American Jews whose values are both liberal and supportive of Israel, as a recent Pew study indicates.

As the most senior Jewish member in the House of Representatives, a longtime Congressional Progressive Caucus leader and the House member who represents the largest and most diverse Jewish population, I’m more familiar with this issue than most. The Democratic Party, of course, welcomes robust debate. However, the conversations I have had with a wide range of members of my party, including many of the 25 Jewish Democrats in the House as well as a number of progressives, reflect a reality that the headlines do not: On Israel, there exists a broad, mainstream consensus around a number of core principles.

Would that he were right, but I don’t quite buy it. Israel’s right to exist?  Did he also talk to members of the Squad? Bernie Sanders? One of my biggest sources of stress these past few weeks is watch the Democratic Left, almost predictably, move the needly slowly away from Israel’s right to exist toward Hamas, which denies that right. I still don’t quite understand it.

Speaking of which, have a look at Peter Savodnik’s new analysis (on Bari Weiss’s Substack site) of why America has suddenly become so much more anti-Semitic (click on screenshot):

An excerpt:

Over the past two decades, this obsession with identity has intensified and spread. Progressives are now incapable of talking about anything important without mentioning human beings’ immutable traits.

Any politics of identity was bad for the Jew. On the right, the identiarians said that the Jew lacked whiteness — it was a new version of the old Nazi claim about our impurity. On the left, the Jew was said to have too much.

In 2021, we are well-aware of the white-nationalist inanities. We have memorized the horrific footage from Charlottesville. We remember every Jew murdered in Pittsburgh and in Poway.

But their chants of “Jews Will Not Replace Us” are now being joined by the identitarians of the left, who wield vastly more capital and power, in government, in the media, in the universities, in Hollywood, and in Silicon Valley. (It’s curious that Rep. Rashida Tlaib has accused Israel of “forced population replacement.”) Together, they form a bleating chorus of grievances. Somehow their roster of The Hurt never includes the Jew.

How can you not want to read the answer to Michelle Goldberg’s title question in her new NYT op-ed (click on screenshot)?

And, surprisingly, her answer is “yes”, based not only on Hitchens’s work but mainly on a “compelling new podcast,” “The Turning: The Sisters Who Left,” about those who left Mother Teresa’s order.  An excerpt:

What makes “The Turning” unique is its focus on the internal life of the Missionaries of Charity. The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly — a practice called “the discipline” — and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years.

Joe Biden handed out the first Medal of Honor of his administration to a 94-year old Korean war vet who got out of his wheelchair and discarded his walker to stand up and receive America’s highest military award. I’m not a big fan of war, but somehow the story of Col. Ralph Puckett, Jr. tugged a bit at my heart. Here’s a photo (click on it to go to the story):

The Wall Street Journal has a mouthwatering article on some of Italy’s best white wines, which are not too expensive (the examples given range from $19-$30). The tasting notes make me want to explore this genre, about which I know almost nothing.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 588,846, an increase of about 700 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,458,946, an increase of about 12,900 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on May 22 include:

Fourteenth. As Wikipedia notes, the first certain appearance of the comet was in 240 BC from a Chinese record.

  • 1455 – Start of the Wars of the Roses: At the First Battle of St Albans, Richard, Duke of York, defeats and captures King Henry VI of England.
  • 1804 – The Lewis and Clark Expedition officially begins as the Corps of Discovery departs from St. Charles, Missouri.
  • 1807 – A grand jury indicts former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr on a charge of treason.
  • 1826 – HMS Beagle departs on its first voyage.

This is not the voyage that carried Charles Darwin, which was the second (and last) voyage of the ship. Here’s a view of the ship, which was much smaller than you think:

 

And here’s that patent:

  • 1960 – The Great Chilean earthquake, measuring 9.5 on the moment magnitude scale, hits southern Chile, becoming the most powerful earthquake ever recorded.
  • 1964 – Lyndon B. Johnson launches the Great Society.
  • 1987 – First ever Rugby World Cup kicks off with New Zealand playing Italy at Eden Park in Auckland, New Zealand.
  • 1998 – A U.S. federal judge rules that U.S. Secret Service agents can be compelled to testify before a grand jury concerning the Lewinsky scandal involving President Bill Clinton.
  • 2002 – Civil rights movement: A jury in Birmingham, Alabama, convicts former Ku Klux Klan member Bobby Frank Cherry of the 1963 murder of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Here’s the white supremacist and Klansman (Klansperson?) Cherry, who died in a prison hospital in 2004:

  • 2010 – Inter Milan beat Bayern Munich 2–0 in the Uefa Champions League final in Madrid, Spain to become the first, and so far only, Italian team to win the historic treble (Serie A, Coppa Italia, Champions League).
  • 2017 – Twenty-two people are killed at an Ariana Grande concert in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

Notables born on this day include:

I couldn’t have told you what Wagner looked like, so I looked him up. Here’s a photo:

Here’s a fine Cassatt: “Sara holding a cat” (ca. 1908):

Matthiessen remains the only person to have won a National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction. Here’s a brief remembrance:

  • 1930 – Harvey Milk, American lieutenant and politician (d. 1978)
  • 1942 – Ted Kaczynski, American academic and mathematician turned anarchist and serial murderer (Unabomber)

Those who croaked on May 22 include:

  • 1802 – Martha Washington, First, First Lady of the United States (b. 1731)
  • 1885 – Victor Hugo, French novelist, poet, and playwright (b. 1802)
  • 1967 – Langston Hughes, American poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright (b. 1902)

Hughes was one of the black writers I read when I decided to read early 20th-century black literature and nonfiction as the pandemic started. Here’s his portrait by Gordon Parks:

  • 1997 – Alfred Hershey, American biochemist and geneticist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1908)
  • 2010 – Martin Gardner, American mathematician, cryptographer, and author (b. 1914)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Paulina is stalking all cats with her camera:

Hili: I thought that Paulina was hunting for Kulka.
Szaron: For her every cat is tempting.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Myślałam, że Paulina poluje na Kulkę.
Szaron: Każdy kot ją kusi.

And Leon and Mitek have an exchange:

Leon: Oatmeal for breakfast? Are we converting to vegetarianism?

In Polish: Owies na śniadanie? Przechodzimy na wegetarianizm?

From Woody; a most excellent meme:

From Jean:

From SMBC via Ginger K:

From Titania. I’m not sure exactly what this Lego kit is, or what it’s supposed to demonstrate:

From Simon, who I hope doesn’t carry cats in his maw! Poor kitty!

Tweets from Matthew. If I posted this before, well, here it is again.

And a second and related tweet:

Sadly, this was yesterday, and we won’t be alive to see its recurrence:

The discovery of drinkable cow excrement (the first one is clocks):

Darwin was often depressed and lugubrious, as he was 153 years ago yesterday.

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 21, 2021 • 6:30 am

Bottom o’ the week to you: it’s Friday, May 21, 2021: National Strawberries and Cream Days. But it’s only one day, not “days”! It’s also International Tea Day, Endangered Species Day (the photo shows a dinosaur skeleton!), National Bike to Work Day, National Waiters and Waitresses Day, National Pizza Party Day,  Saint Helena Day (celebrating the discovery of Saint Helena in 1502), and World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.

Posting will be light today as I have a dentist’s appointment AND we have a horrible situation in the duck pond with drake attacks and a shunned duckling. Please bear with me—and have pity on me.

News of the day:

There’s finally been a cease-fire in the fight between Gaza and Israel. It began at 7 pm yesterday Eastern US time (2 a.m. Israeli time). The peace was apparently brokered by Egypt, Qatar, and the U.N., with pressure from the U.S. But the old grievances remain, and now there’s internecine hatred between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. One errant Hamas rocket, and the fighting starts all over gain (also true for Israeli airstrikes, but I have more trust in Israeli restraint. But let’s just hope that, for the nonce, the fighting stops. One thing is for sure: it will resume again. I worry that all the aid to Palestine that will start flowing from the West will be used, as it has been before, to buy rockets.

Here’s HuffPost’s invidious headline, blaming the lack of a cease fire on Israel, when in fact both sides had to agree, and the cease-fire was brokered. This HuffPost rag is beneath contempt.

Over at the Washington Post, columnist Joe Waldman says that Biden isn’t really more radical than he has been: perhaps just a few ticks to the left:

Even now, Biden would argue that he’s basically sticking to this approach. The key difference is that as president he has the ability to push further on those same ideals. You can even make the case that he is not pushing much further than before but his movements are more visible because he can set the agenda.

After all, the truth is that the current agenda he’s setting isn’t all that radical. It’s a few steps to the left of where Obama was, and more ambitious than what Biden advocated for as a senator, but nothing in it expresses any different values from the ones Democrats have long held. He doesn’t want to seize the means of production and throw every billionaire into a reeducation camp; he just wants to beef up union protections and bump up the top tax rate by a few points.

The GOP claim that Biden is a secret leftist tells us only that Republicans, too, have the same basic ideals they’ve long had. They’ll surely be passionately opposed to the administration’s new plan to invigorate IRS enforcement, for instance, which could bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue.

The BBC reports on “the unluckiest swan” that has now become lucky. It’s a swan in Cambridgeshire that was watched by Rob Adamson, a lovely guy who saw that its nest was about to be flooded. (The pair’s nesting attempts had failed for ten years.) He built a predator-proof floating platform, put the nest and its eggs on it and, mirabile dictu, all eight eggs hatched! A few photos are below (h/t Jez; photos by Rob Adamson and Jones boatyard).

The floating nest platform,

Adamson had previously hand-reared an abandoned cygnet named Sid:

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 588,153, an increase of about 650 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,446,039, an increase of about 13,100 over yesterday’s total.:

Stuff that happened on May 21 includes:

  • 1703 – Daniel Defoe is imprisoned on charges of seditious libel.
  • 1856 – Lawrence, Kansas is captured and burned by pro-slavery forces.

Darwin kvetched on this day (h/t Matthew)

The scandal of the decade, and at the U of C! Here are Leopold and Loeb’s mug shots (Leopold is at the top). Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936, while Leopold was released in 1958 and died in Puerto Rico in 1971.

You can still see Lindbergh’s plane, “The Spirit of St. Louis”, at the National Air and Space Museum in northern Virginia. I highly recommend a visit:

  • 1936 – Sada Abe is arrested after wandering the streets of Tokyo for days with her dead lover’s severed genitals in her handbag. Her story soon becomes one of Japan’s most notorious scandals.

You can see this portrayed in the movie “In the Realm of the Senses.” Here’s a portrait of Abe:

Here’s a re-creation of that incident; the Wikipedia caption is this: “A re-creation of the Slotin incident. The inside hemisphere with the thumb-hole next to the demonstrator’s hand is beryllium (replacing the uranium tamper of the same size in a Fat Man bomb). There is an external larger metal sphere of aluminium under it (replacing the pusher sphere in this bomb’s design). The plutonium “demon core” was inside the spheres at the time of the accident and is not visible, but its dimensions are comparable with the two small half-spheres shown resting nearby.”

Here’s the damage below. Toth was in a psychiatric hospital for two years and then was deported to Australia, where he died in 2012:

Here’s Johnny Carson’s final farewell in his very last show (sans guests):

  • 2011 – Radio broadcaster Harold Camping predicted that the world would end on this date.
  • 2017 – Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus performed their final show at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1799 – Mary Anning, English paleontologist (d. 1847)

Here’s Anning and her dog Tray, painted five years before her death:

A wonderful painting, “Cat“, by Rousseau:

  • 1904 – Fats Waller, American singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 1943)
  • 1936 – Günter Blobel, Polish-American biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2018)
  • 1951 – Al Franken, American actor, screenwriter, and politician

Those who were no more on May 21 include:

Once again I urge you to read the best cat poem ever, “For I will consider my cat Jeoffry“, by Smart, written while he was incarcerated for lunacy. It’s part of a longer poem, “Jubilate Agno.”

Addams in 1914; you can still visit her social-work “settlement house”, Hull House, in Chicago:

  • 1935 – Hugo de Vries, Dutch botanist and geneticist (b. 1848)
  • 1991 – Rajiv Gandhi, Indian politician, 6th Prime Minister of India (b. 1944)
  • 2000 – John Gielgud, English actor (b. 1904)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili knows that Paulina often buys cat treats for Hili.

Paulina: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About your yesterday’s shopping.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Paulina: O czym myślisz?
Hili: O twoich wczorajszych zakupach.

Here’s little Kulka up in a tree:

From Bruce:

A meme from Jesus of the Day:

And another from the same source:

From Simon: I haven’t read this paper yet, but here you go!

Seriously? Flying a Nazi flag at the border of Israel? Don’t forget the mayhem caused by putting a cartoon of Muhammad on the cover of Charlie Hebdo!

One more gem from London:

From Ziya Tong; no translation needed!

Tweets from Matthew: a NYT obituary of the accomplished and much-beloved biologist Dave Wake of Berkeley.  See Greg’s obituary of Wake here.

I concur completely!

I’ve been to Wales only once, to see Dylan Thomas’s roost in Laugharne. I need to get there more often, especially to see stuff like this:

Has anybody read the “Duck Tales” bandit?

Yesterday was World Bee Day—a UN holiday! If you’re not a fan of bees, you should bee:

Thursday: Hili dialogue and Mietek monologue

May 20, 2021 • 6:30 am

The weekend is fast approahing: it’s Thursday, May 20, 2021: National Quiche Lorraine Day. It’s also Hummus Day, Pick Strawberries Day, Flower Day, International Red Sneakers Day (?), National Apértif Day (make mine a green Chartreuse), National Rescue Dog Day, as well as Josephine Baker Day (an honor from the NAACP), World Bee Day, and World Metrology Day (note that it’s not “Meteorology”; today’s holiday has to do with weights and measures, not weather, as you can see below).

Perhaps you didn’t know that Baker had a pet cheetah named Chiquita that she walked on a leash. See?:

News of the Day:

Four thousand five hundred and twenty-nine. That was yesterday’s death toll from Covid in India, the highest death toll for any single day in any single country during the pandemic. That’s about one person every twenty seconds, and that is surely an underestimate of the toll.

Lock Him Up Department: The office of New York’s attorney general announced that it’s launched a criminal probe into the Trump organization’s business practices, expanding what was previously a civil investigation. This is separate from the Manhattan D.A.’s own criminal probe, which has been going on for four years. Trump, of course, has decried the investigations as “witch hunts,” but will we someday see the Orange Man in an orange jumpsuit? An excerpt:

[Attorney General Letitia James’s]disclosure of a widening investigation is not necessarily an indication that she is planning to bring criminal charges. In New York, if that were to happen, the state attorney general can do so through a county district attorney, like Vance, or with a referral from Gov. Andrew Cuomo or a state agency.

James’ civil investigation and Vance’s criminal probe had overlapped in some areas, including examining whether Trump or his businesses manipulated the value of assets — inflating them in some cases and minimizing them in others — to gain favorable loan terms and tax benefits.

Vance’s investigation also included a look at hush-money payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf and the propriety of tax write-offs the Trump Organization claimed on millions of dollars in consulting fees it paid, including money that went to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.

Here’s the NYT’s “live” section on the Israel/Palestine crisis. Is something missing here?

Here’s an Atlantic science article you’ll want to read. Where did your butthole come from (in an evolutionary sense)? Click on the screenshot to read (h/t Paul):

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 587,499, an increase of about 700 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,432,963, an increase of about 13,000 over yesterday’s total.:

Stuff that happened on May 20 include:

  • 325 – The First Council of Nicaea is formally opened, starting the first ecumenical council of the Christian Church.
  • 1498 – Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama discovers the sea route to India when he arrives at Kozhikode (previously known as Calicut), India.
  • 1570 – Cartographer Abraham Ortelius issues Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas.

Here’s the map from that atlas. Not too bad for 1570, eh? South America is a bit pudgy, but otherwise it’s passable:

  • 1609 – Shakespeare’s sonnets are first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe.
  • 1873 – Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets. The style hasn’t changed much in 150 years!

Here’s that patent:

How long is a meter? Wikipedia says this:

The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth’s circumference is approximately 40000 km. In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length.

  • 1883 – Krakatoa begins to erupt; the volcano explodes three months later, killing more than 36,000 people.
  • 1891 – History of cinema: The first public display of Thomas Edison’s prototype kinetoscope.
  • 1932 – Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland to begin the world’s first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean by a female pilot, landing in Ireland the next day.

Here’s a video of Earhart leaving Newfoundland in her Lockheed Vega:

Here are suitcases I photographed eight years ago in Auschwitz; they were taken from arrivals, who were promptly gassed. Note the carefully written addresses and Star of David. I recommend everyone visit Auschwitz at least once in their lives. You will never be the same afterwards.

Here’s a YouTube video of the explosion. God lord!

Both Wilson and Penzias received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

  • 1980 – In a referendum in Quebec, the population rejects, by 60% of the vote, a government proposal to move towards independence from Canada.

I wonder if the vote would be close to this today.

And here’s the Wikipedia history of how the kilogram was defined:

The kilogram was originally defined in 1795 as the mass of one litre of water. This definition was simple yet difficult to use in practice. However, even modern, superceding definitions of a kilogram are accurate to within 30 ppm of the mass of one litre of water. In 1799, the platinum Kilogramme des Archives replaced it as the standard of mass. In 1889, a cylinder of platinum-iridium, the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK) became the standard of the unit of mass for the metric system, and remained so until 2019. The kilogram was the last of the SI units to be defined by a physical artefact.

The kilogram is now defined in terms of the second and the metre, based on fixed fundamental constants of nature. This allows a properly-equipped metrology laboratory to calibrate a mass measurement instrument such as a Kibble balance as the primary standard to determine an exact kilogram mass, although the IPK and other precision kilogram masses remain in use as secondary standards for all ordinary purposes.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1806 – John Stuart Mill, English economist, civil servant, and philosopher (d. 1873)
  • 1908 – James Stewart, American actor (d. 1997)
  • 1944 – Joe Cocker, English singer-songwriter (d. 2014)

Here’s Cocker’s famous performance “With a Little Help from My Friends” at Woodstock in 1969. Remember when John Belushi imitated him when they were standing next to each other?

Imitation:

  • 1946 – Cher, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress

Cher is 75 today.

  • 1958 – Ron Reagan, American journalist and radio host

Here’s Ron Reagan’s famous ad for the Freedom from Religion Foundation:

Those whose neurons ceased firing on May 20 include:

  • 1506 – Christopher Columbus, Italian explorer, discovered the Americas (b. 1451)
  • 1896 – Clara Schumann, German pianist and composer (b. 1819)
  • 1989 – Gilda Radner, American actress and comedian (b. 1946)

Gilda was fantastic, and it’s terribly sad that she died so young. Here’s her skit of The Judy Miller Show from Saturday Night Live:

  • 2002 – Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist, biologist, and academic (b. 1941)
  • 2012 – Robin Gibb, Manx-English singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1949)
  • 2013 – Ray Manzarek, American singer-songwriter, keyboard player, and producer (b. 1939)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Paulina continues to stalk the kitties with her camera:

Hili: I was missing you.
Paulina: Really?
Hili: Yes, nobody took my pictures for 10 minutes.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Brakowało mi ciebie.
Paulina: Naprawdę?
Hili: Tak, od dziesięciu minut nikt mi nie robił zdjęć.

And we have a Mitek monologue, but the statement is cryptic:

Mietek: VIgilance is an attitude.

In Polish: Czujność to podstawa

A meme from Pyers, though I don’t know why physicists fall into the “playing with mice” category.

From Woody. Hisses, anyone? Yes, there are some cat lovers who would pay half a buck for a hiss!

From Nicole:

From Frank, an example of interspecies bonding. Grania would have loved this;

A tweet from Luana. Do we even have a chance against the Russkies?

From Ginger K., a lovely diagram of how the solar system moves about:

Tweets from Matthew, and this one is personal.  Drosophila workers used to get all their fly bottles as used milk bottles, often with dairy emblems on them. They’re no longer used, but I still keep some like this for sentimental reasons.

What a lovely honorary cat!

Yes, goslings are adorable, cute, and sweet, but they grow up into those big aggressive honkers!

One of the many craneflies that mimic wasps. The second tweet shows it flying around the base of a banana tree: