Category: Hili Dialogue

Friday: Hili dialogue (and Mietek monologue)

April 10, 2020 • 7:00 am

Welcome to Friday, April 10, 2020; it’s National Cinnamon Roll Day, and boy, could I use one! It’s also American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Day (it was founded on April 10, 1866), National Farm Animals Day, Global Work from Home Day (make that a month or two), Siblings Day, Golfer’s Day (who’s the one golfer being celebrated?) and, of course, Good Friday, when Jesus was supposedly crucified some time between A.D. 30 and 36.  April 10 is normally the 100th day of the year, but it’s the 101st in 2020 because it’s a leap year.

Today’s Google Doodle continues the two-week series praising coronovirus helpers. Today’s Doodle appears to celebrate those who grow our food (click on screenshot):

News of the Day: Do I need to say it’s still dreadful? As of this writing, the worldwide death toll from the pandemic is 96,791, and in the U.S. it’s 16,676.  Last night the news named Illinois as one of the growing pandemic “hot spots”.  The media and the Outrage Brigade continues to leverage the pandemic to bolster identity politics: every group is claiming the exacerbation or uncovering of oppression by the pandemic. See today’s New York Times for some choice examples.  (And yes, I do think Trump’s repeatedly calling coronavirus “the Chinese virus” is a deliberate example of bias and xenophobia.) But can’t people put their agenda aside just for a couple of months?

Today I will walk four miles through dicey parts of Chicago today to pick up my car at the garage (brakes got fixed), as, on medical advice, I dare not risk taking an Uber. Well, it’s exercise.

Matthew says he wrote “a cranky letter” to the Guardian; here it is. I love that old curmudgeon!

Stuff that happened on April 10 includes:

  • 1837 – Halley’s Comet makes its closest approach to Earth at a distance equal to 0.0342 AU (5.1 million kilometres/3.2 million miles).
  • 1710 – The Statute of Anne, the first law regulating copyright, comes into force in Great Britain.
  • 1815 – The Mount Tambora volcano begins a three-month-long eruption, lasting until July 15. The eruption ultimately kills 71,000 people and affects Earth’s climate for the next two years.
  • 1858 – After the original Big Ben, a 14.5 tonnes (32,000 lb) bell for the Palace of Westminster, had cracked during testing, it is recast into the current 13.76 tonnes (30,300 lb) bell by Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
  • 1865 – American Civil War: A day after his surrender to Union forces, Confederate General Robert E. Lee addresses his troops for the last time.
  • 1912 – RMS Titanic sets sail from Southampton, England on her maiden and only voyage.

Here’s a photo of its departure on April 10, 1912. Little did those aboard, or those watching the ship, know that its voyage would end at the bottom of the North Atlantic:

Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution, is shown in the photo below. Yes, many did wear sombreros; Zapata is the one seated in the middle with the big hat. But look at the diversity of headgear! Wikipedia caption: “Zapata in his characteristic large sombrero and his staff in all manner of hats”

And here’s his corpse after he was killed 101 years ago today (also from Wikipedia):

  • 1925 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is first published in New York City, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
  • 1963 – One hundred twenty-nine American sailors die when the submarine USS Thresher sinks at sea.
  • 1970 – Paul McCartney announces that he is leaving The Beatles for personal and professional reasons.

It’s a sad day for that, but I suppose the Beatles had reached their end.

  • 1998 – The Good Friday Agreement is signed in Northern Ireland.
  • 2019 – Scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope project announce the first ever image of a black hole, located in the centre of the M87 galaxy.

Here’s the famous picture: remember it? Caption: “Visible are the crescent-shaped emission ring and central shadow, which are gravitationally magnified views of the black hole’s photon ring and the photon capture zone of its event horizon. The crescent shape arises from the black hole’s rotation and relativistic beaming; the shadow is about 2.6 times the diameter of the event horizon.”

This media was produced by European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1829 – William Booth, English minister, founded The Salvation Army (d. 1912)
  • 1847 – Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian-American journalist, publisher, and politician, founded Pulitzer, Inc. (d. 1911)
  • 1917 – Robert Burns Woodward, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1979)
  • 1932 – Omar Sharif, Egyptian actor and screenwriter (d. 2015)

Two facts about Sharif: he was a world class contract bridge player who sometimes contributed to a bridge column in the Chicago Tribune. Also, he smoked 100 cigarettes a day! He did quit, but died of a heart attack 5 years ago. Oh, and do you remember that, besides playing Ali in Lawrence of Arabia, he was also the protagonist of Doctor Zhivago?  Here he reunites with his great love Lara, played by Julie Christie. I really should watch this movie again:

 

  • 1941 – Paul Theroux, American novelist, short story writer, and travel writer
  • 1952 – Steven Seagal, American actor, producer, and martial artist

Those who joined the Choir Invisible on April 10 include:

  • 1909 – Algernon Charles Swinburne, English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic (b. 1837)
  • 1919 – Emiliano Zapata, Mexican general (b. 1879)
  • 1931 – Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-American poet, painter, and philosopher (b. 1883)
  • 1955 – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French priest, theologian, and philosopher (b. 1881)
  • 1966 – Evelyn Waugh, English soldier, novelist, journalist and critic (b. 1903)
  • 1975 – Walker Evans, American photographer (b. 1903)

Evans photographed people impoverished by the Depression and their circumstances, working for the government’s Farm Security Administration and Fortune Magazine. The photo below, one of his most famous, is from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with the writing by James Agee.  It’s a poor but proud family of sharecroppers in the South (caption underneath):

Bud Fields and His Family, Hale County, Alabama, photograph by Walker Evans, c. 1936–37; from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Evans and James Agee. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a first world problem:

Hili: To choose priorities is the most important thing.
A: And what is your priority?
Hili: First, I will take a nap.
In Polish:
Hili: Najważniejszy jest wybór priorytetów.
Ja: A jaki jest twój priorytet?
Hili: Najpierw się prześpię.

And Leon and Mitek are both in the car heading for a walk. Mietek is still awed by the world:

Mietek: The world is kind of strange.

In Polish: Jakiś dziwny jest ten świat.

Two bogroll-related memes from Merilee:

Better than roses!

From reader John:

The latest from Titania. And yes, her characterization of the article is pretty accurate:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. The first is what cat staff do during quarantine. But look at that amazing standing jump!

https://twitter.com/planetpng/status/1246599725756952577

This one is pure Trump:

Tweets from Matthew. He says this dystopian photo of London is genuine:

Anxiety-provoking rescue of mallard and offspring, but it apparently all turns out o.k. Sound up on this one.

Now this overabundance of offspring, the vast bulk of which will die right after birth, is a bit of a mystery. Do you have a solution?

A lovely “V” of migrating geese. Sound up, please:

And SPOT THE CAT!  I looked for a while and couldn’t find the damn cat, but many people claim that it’s easy.

https://twitter.com/LumpyandFriends/status/1248170081542168576

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 9, 2020 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, April 9, 2020, and National Chinese Almond Cookie Day—pure cultural appropriation given that the cookie is native to China. It’s also National Winston Churchill Day, but he was neither born nor died on April 9. This date is celebrated because it was on April 9, 1963, that President John F. Kennedy made Churchill an honorary citizen of the U.S. (Churchill was not at the ceremony, but was still alive: he died in 1965.) For those of you in quarantine, be aware that it’s National Gin and Tonic Day.

Further, it’s the Christian holiday of Maundy Thursday. What is “maundy”? Well, it refers to the myth that on the Thursday before Good Friday, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet:

There are two possible sources of the word “maundy.” The main one says it is from the Latin word “mandatum,” which means “commandment.” The word was used in a phrase that Jesus spoke while he washed his disciples’ feet. [Note that Jesus didn’t speak Latin!] On Maundy Thursday, mandatum ceremonies take place in the Catholic Church, as part of Mass or separate from it. During them, a bishop usually washes the feet of twelve people from the community, just as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Other denominations besides the Catholic Church also participate in the washing of the feet.

The second theory on the name “maundy” says that it derives from “maundsor baskets” or “maundy purses.” The king of England would traditionally give these out to the poor before attending mass on the day. They were named as such because the Latin word “mendicare” means to beg. Some dispute this interpretation as a reasoning for the name of the day.

This evening is also the start of Passover, which will end on April 16 and thus overlap with Easter.

Today’s Google Doodle continues the two-week thank you to coronavirus helpers. Today’s Doodle thanks those who work in sanitation; click on the screenshot to see the links

News of the Day: Dreadful, as usual, but people are beginning to see glimmers of hope. As a pessimist, I want more evidence. In the meantime, the death toll from the coronavirus in the U.S. has risen to 14,802 in the U.S. and 88,538 throughout the world. New unemployment figures will be released today, and they will show millions more Americans out of work; this will only grow since just this week Florida and Texas, with 15% of the nation’s payroll, decided to close nonessential businesses. Troubles as numerous as poppy seeds. . .

Stuff that happened on April 9 includes:

  • 1585 – The expedition organised by Sir Walter Raleigh departs England for Roanoke Island (now in North Carolina) to establish the Roanoke Colony.
  • 1784 – The Treaty of Paris, ratified by the United States Congress on January 14, 1784, is ratified by King George III of the Kingdom of Great Britain, ending the American Revolutionary War. Copies of the ratified documents are exchanged on May 12, 1784.
  • 1860 – On his phonautograph machine, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice.

From HistoryofInformation.com:

“The recording was a ten-second snippet of a singer, probably a daughter of the inventor performing the French folk song ‘Au Clair de la Lune’. This phonautograph recording is now the earliest known recording of a human voice and the earliest known recording of music in existence, predating, by twenty-eight years, the longest surviving Edison phonographic recording of a Handel chorus, made in 1888” (Wikipedia article on Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, accessed 04-18-2009).

And I present you that recording as a gift!

This was a scandal to all right-thinking people.

Anderson was refused by the DAR because they were all white and didn’t want a black person integrating Constitution Hall (note the irony of that name). Read more about this infamous event here.

Upon hearing what the DAR did, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization and arranged for the Lincoln Memorial concert. Here’s a six-minute PBS report (with scenes) on that concert, its antecedents, and its aftermath, an antecedent to Martin Luther King’s famous speech at the site.

  • 1945 – Execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, anti-Nazi dissident and spy, by the Nazi regime.

If ever I could have a theologian as a hero, it was Bonhoeffer, who opposed and public defied Hitler, and was hanged for it—only two weeks before the Allies liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp where he was held.  Here’s an 8½-minute documentary about Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler:

  • 1947 – The Journey of Reconciliation, the first interracial Freedom Ride begins through the upper South in violation of Jim Crow laws. The riders wanted enforcement of the United States Supreme Court’s 1946 Irene Morgan decision that banned racial segregation in interstate travel.
  • 1965 – Astrodome opens. First indoor baseball game is played.
  • 1992 – A U.S. Federal Court finds former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega guilty of drug and racketeering charges. He is sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1821 – Charles Baudelaire, French poet and critic (d. 1867)
  • 1872 – Léon Blum, French lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 1950)
  • 1898 – Paul Robeson, American singer, actor, and activist (d. 1976)
  • 1925 – Art Kane, American photographer (d. 1995)

Kane specialized in photos of fashion and rock musicians. Here’s one of an uncooperative Bob Dylan, whom he cornered on a Los Angeles rooftop:

Source: Snap Galleries
  • 1926 – Hugh Hefner, American publisher, founded Playboy Enterprises (d. 2017)
  • 1928 – Tom Lehrer, American musician, singer, and mathematician.

Here’s a tweet found by Matthew about Lehrer’s birthday:

  • 1932 – Jim Fowler, American zoologist and television host
  • 1965 – Paulina Porizkova, Czech-born Swedish-American model and actress
  • 1990 – Kristen Stewart, American actress
  • 2000 – Jackie Evancho, American singer

Those who decamped from life on April 9 include:

  • 1553 – François Rabelais, French monk and scholar (b. 1494)
  • 1626 – Francis Bacon, English jurist and politician, Attorney General for England and Wales (b. 1561)
  • 1926 – Zip the Pinhead, American freak show performer (b. 1857)
  • 1945 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German pastor and theologian (b. 1906)
  • 1961 – Zog I of Albania (b. 1895)
  • 1976 – Phil Ochs, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1940)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, as Malgorzata explains, “Hili is anxious about the pandemic. There may be shortage of cat food!”

Hili: Flowers do not worry about anything.
A: And you?
Hili: I’m enjoying the spring but there are reasons for anxiety.
In Polish:
Hili: Kwiaty niczym się nie przejmują.
Ja: A ty?
Hili: Cieszę się wiosną, ale są powody do niepokoju.

Via Muffy, a cartoon by Pat Bagley in The Salt Lake Tribune. Title: “Playing Doctor”:

From Cats in Art:

And a social-distancing cat from reader Lawrence:

From Titania. Give me a break: the virus discriminates? No, there are presumably racial differences, based on culture and oppression, that influence susceptibility to infection. I didn’t even realize that people would use the pandemic to leverage identity politics—and at a time when we should be pulling together as humans. If you want to read Hirsch’s article, it’s here.

From Barry. This is certainly dubbed, but it’s still funny. And it’s not a badger!

From Muffy. Capybaras are so phlegmatic, even letting themselves be groomed by mallards:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie via Ann German. First, Twitter needs to fix it’s autocorrect.

https://twitter.com/digitalRNdoc/status/1247633502469861378

What ever happened to Neil Diamond? Well, he’s in lockdown with the rest of us, but still making music. Here, “Sweet Caroline” gets some new lyrics:

Three tweets from Matthew. Spot the frog!

https://twitter.com/LumpyandFriends/status/1247811869659652100?s=20

A Queen Meme: Going where no Queen has gone before. There are other versions of her clothes at the link.

This truly is RAD! What are the chances?

https://twitter.com/HillaryMonahan/status/1247608099852124162

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 8, 2020 • 7:00 am

It’s Hump Day: Wednesday, April 8, 2020, and National Empanada Day, a day of cultural appropriation. It’s also Holy Wednesday, leading up to Easter, International Romani Day, honoring Romani culture,  Zoo Lovers Day (nobody will be going to the zoo today), Dog Farting Awareness Day (true!), and Draw A Picture of a Bird Day.

Here’s mine; join me if you wish, email it to me, and if I get more than five drawings, I’ll post them.

News of the Day: Bad, as usual. There are few signs of the pandemic slowing in the U.S.: the death toll in the U.S. as of this writing is more than 12,000, doubling in five days, and over 400,000 people are infected. There are nearly 83,000 deaths over the world.  For no good reason, Trump fired the Pentagon’s inspector general, in charge of overseeing the trillions that the government has allotted to fighting the pandemic.

And, sadly, John Prine died yesterday of Covid-19 infection.

Today’s Google Doodle honors first responders. Clicking on it goes to links thanking coronavirus “helpers”:

Stuff that happened on April 8 includes:

This, perhaps the most famous of all Greek sculptures, resides in the Louvre, and was probably created between 130-100 BC. It’s now thought to have been sculpted by Alexandros of Antioch rather than Praxiteles:

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This is one guess about how it originally looked:

By Unknown author – Paul Carus: The Venus of Milo: An Archaeological Study of the Goddess of Womanhood. The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago/London, 1916., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=375078

A photo exists of the poor woman (below), who died at only 55.  Wikipedia discusses the basis of her condition (she was apparently diagnosed from her behavior, not from brain sections):

She died on 8 April 1906. More than a century later, her case was re-examined with modern medical technologies, where a genetic cause was found for her disease by scientists from Gießen and Sydney. The results were published in the journal The Lancet Neurology. According to this paper, a mutation in the PSEN1 gene was found, which alters the function of gamma secretase, and is a known cause of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. However, the results could not be replicated in a more recent paper published in 2014 where “Auguste D’s DNA revealed no indication of a nonsynonymous hetero- or homozygous mutation in the exons of APP, PSEN1, and PSEN2 genes comprising the already known familial AD mutations.”

  • 1911 – Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.
  • 1913 – The 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution, requiring direct election of Senators, becomes law.
  • 1942 – World War II: Siege of Leningrad: Soviet forces open a much-needed railway link to Leningrad.
  • 1943 – Otto and Elise Hampel are executed in Berlin for their anti-Nazi activities.
  • 1974 – At Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, Hank Aaron hits his 715th career home run to surpass Babe Ruth’s 39-year-old record.
  • 1975 – Frank Robinson manages the Cleveland Indians in his first game as major league baseball’s first African American manager.
  • 1987 – Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis resigns amid controversy over racially charged remarks he had made while on Nightline.

These are the words that got Campanis in trouble, and led to his resignation. How could he have been so dumb to give voice to his racism? Here he suggests that black people didn’t have the leadership abilities to be baseball managers or football quarterback—and couldn’t be good swimmers because they didn’t have the “buoyancy”! Since then, of course, there have been many black managers and coaches, as well as quarterbacks. To his credit, Koppel went after Campanis strongly.

  • 1992 – Retired tennis great Arthur Ashe announces that he has AIDS, acquired from blood transfusions during one of his two heart surgeries.
  • 2013 – The Islamic State of Iraq enters the Syrian Civil War and begins by declaring a merger with the Al-Nusra Front under the name Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1869 – Harvey Cushing, American surgeon and academic (d. 1939)
  • 1892 – Mary Pickford, Canadian-American actress, producer, and screenwriter, co-founded United Artists (d. 1979)
  • 1896 – Yip Harburg, American composer (d. 1981)

Born Isidore Hochberg on New York’s lower East Side, and changing his name because of anti-Semitism, Harberg wrote many famous songs. They include “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” and perhaps the most renowned movie song of all (he wrote all the songs for this movie). Do watch this: even if the song has become a cliché, it’s beautiful. (Note that Toto was a GOOD DOG during the song.)

It’s curious to me that so many composers of great Broadway music were Jewish (Rodgers, Hammerstein, Hart, Harburg, Sondheim, Lerner, Loewe—the list goes on). I have no theory to explain this.

  • 1902 – Andrew Irvine, English mountaineer and explorer (d. 1924)
  • 1912 – Sonja Henie, Norwegian-American figure skater and actress (d. 1969)
  • 1929 – Jacques Brel, Belgian singer-songwriter and actor (d. 1978)
  • 1946 – Catfish Hunter, American baseball player (d. 1999)
  • 1955 – Barbara Kingsolver, American novelist, essayist and poet
  • 1960 – Hugh Dominic “Dom” Stiles, librarian and polymath (see post later today)
  • 1963 – Julian Lennon, English singer-songwriter

Those who croaked on April 8 include:

  • 1973 – Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter and sculptor (b. 1881)
  • 1996 – Ben Johnson, American actor and stuntman (b. 1918)
  • 1997 – Laura Nyro, American singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1947)
  • 2013 – Annette Funicello, American actress and singer (b. 1942)

Ben Johnson was an integral character in what I consider the best American movie of our time (and perhaps all time): “The Last Picture Show” (1971). Here, playing Sam the Lion, he gives one of the best soliloquies of all movies, recounting his life and a lost love to Sonny, played by Timothy Bottoms. (Johnson won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in this film.) Roger Ebert’s 4-star review of the movie begins by describing this scene:

The best scene in “The Last Picture Show” takes place outside town at the “tank,” an unlovely pond that briefly breaks the monotony of the flat Texas prairie. Sam the Lion has taken Sonny and the retarded boy Billy fishing there, even though, as Sonny observes, there ain’t nothing in the tank but turtles. That’s all right with Sam: He doesn’t like fish, doesn’t like to clean them, doesn’t like to smell them. He goes fishing for the scenery.”Try one?” he says, offering Sonny the makings of a hand-rolled cigarette. And then he begins an wistful monologue, about a time 20 years ago when he brought a girl out to the tank and they swam in it and rode their horses across it and were in love on its banks. The girl had life and fire, but she was already married, and Sam even then was no longer young. As he tells the story, we realize we are listening to the sustaining myth of Sam’s life, the vision of beauty that keeps him going in the dying town of Anarene, Texas.

The scene has a direct inspiration, I believe, for the writer-director, Peter Bogdanovich. I’m sure he was thinking of the monologue in “Citizen Kane” (1941) where old Mr. Bernstein remembers a girl with a parasol who he saw once, 50 years ago, and still cherishes in his memory as a beacon of what could have been.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is digging, apparently to no purpose.

Hili: Who knows what is hidden in the ground?
A: Try to find it.
Hili: That’s exactly what I’m doing.
In Polish:
Hili: Kto wie, co się kryje w ziemi?
Ja: Spróbuj to zbadać.
Hili: Właśnie to robię.

Out in the garden in his future home near Dobrzyn, kitten Mietek speaks with a query:

Mietek: What is buzzing here?

In Polish: Co tu tak brzęczy?

The other day I showed a “socially distanced baptism”, involving a priest squirting a baby with a squirtgun from a substantial distance. I asked then, “But what do you do about circumcisions?” Reader Avi then sent me the solution in this photo, which he said was being passed around Orthodox Jewish (online) circles last week:

Two virus memes from Bruce:

This is certainly true in Chicago!

From Titania:

From Gethyn. I retweeted it with the comment, “Maybe we should just let animals run the world for a while.” (But of course we’re animals.)

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. She says that this is an answer to the facemasks-made-of-bras videos on the Internet:

And of this one she says: “I watched it over and over again – they’re sooooo cute!”

Tweets from Matthew. This first one is ineffably cool: a fox steals a cellphone. Be sure to watch the video:

A dramatic death in freshwater. This happens millions of times a minute, but we never see it:

Matthew and I are both suffering from disturbed sleep. Being phlegmatic, he can’t find a definite cause, while I know mine is anxiety! But we both applaud the sunrise, which helps dissolve worries and fears.

Matthew says of McMillan: “He is a poet my age from Barnsley.”

A lovely little puffin riding the wind, a rare treat for this hard-flapping little bird:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 7, 2020 • 6:30 am

It’s Tuesday, April 7, 2020, and we’re into another “work” week. I wonder how many people can work from home efficiently? From what I see on social media, not many—but that’s understandable. Another month of lockdown and everyone will be nuts, using their pets as props in tweets and videos.

It’s National Coffee Cake Day and National Beer Day, marking the day in 1933 that legislation allowing the sale of beer took effect in the U.S. The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, mandating Prohibition, took place the following December. As for the law that allowed beer sales, the Cullen–Harrison Act, Wikipedia says this:

Upon signing the legislation, Roosevelt made his famous remark, “I think this would be a good time for a beer.”  The law went into effect on April 7 of that year in states that had enacted their own law allowing such sales. The beer could contain up to 3.2% alcohol by weight (or 4.05% by volume) compared to the 0.5% limit of the Volstead Act, because 3.2% was considered too low to produce intoxication.

Here’s a group of happy people having their first legal beer on April 7, 1933 (notice that they’re all having beers; hard liquor came later).

Source

It’s also International Beaver Day, celebrating the rodent, World Health Day, World Health Organization Day (different holidays), Metric System Day, National No Housework Day, and, for believers, Holy Tuesday.

Today’s Google Doodle is another in a two-week series thanking the “coronavirus helpers”. Clicking on it goes to links about the helpers. Today’s says this: “To all doctors, nurses, and medical workers, thank you.”

News of the Day: Dreadful: it’s almost more than I can do to watch the evening news each night. The death toll in the U.S. has passed 10,000, while Trump continues to advocate the use of hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus, a drug not tested for that disease. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, 55 and infected with coronovirus, has been moved to intensive care in London. And if you really want to get depressed, read this story about what’s happening to Italy’s social fabric.

In about an hour, at 6:45 a.m., I’m going to the grocery store. We’re told not to go for two weeks, but I am out of food and don’t want to starve. Wish me luck!

For some reason I find this video immensely cheering (h/t: Simon):

Stuff that happened on April 7 includes:

Note that Metz is now in France. That Hun could conquer! Here’s his empire, including “subject tribes”:

Based on Map 10 Empires and Barbarians. The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. Peter Heather. Oxford University Press, 2010. Map template adapted from user Andrei Nicu

Cebu is in the Philippines, where Magellan was killed on 20 days later.

  • 1724 – Premiere performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion, BWV 245, at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig.
  • 1827 – John Walker, an English chemist, sells the first friction match that he had invented the previous year.
  • 1829 – Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, commences translation of the Book of Mormon, with Oliver Cowdery as his scribe.
  • 1927 – The first long-distance public television broadcast (from Washington, D.C., to New York City, displaying the image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover).
  • 1933 – Prohibition in the United States is repealed for beer of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight, eight months before the ratification of the XXI amendment. (Now celebrated as National Beer Day in the United States.)
  • 1943 – The Holocaust in Ukraine: In Terebovlia, Germans order 1,100 Jews to undress and march through the city to the nearby village of Plebanivka, where they are shot and buried in ditches.

The Wikipedia article says that there were 3,000 murders in that town between April and July, with only 50 or 60 Jews surviving.

  • 1948 – The World Health Organization is established by the United Nations.
  • 1949 – The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific opened on Broadway; it would run for 1,925 performances and win ten Tony Awards.
  • 1955 – Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom amid indications of failing health.
  • 1969 – The Internet’s symbolic birth date: Publication of RFC 1.
  • 1994 – Rwandan genocide: Massacres of Tutsis begin in Kigali, Rwanda.
  • 1995 – First Chechen War: Russian paramilitary troops begin a massacre of civilians in Samashki, Chechnya.

Here are some musical highlights of the 1958 movie of “South Pacific”.  They don’t make ’em like this any more!

When I took Old English and Beowulf in college, I wrote a parody of one of the songs above, which started like this:

There is nothing like a Dane—
Nothing in the world;
Not a kinsman or a thane
That is anything like a Dane.

And have you heard this song-themed knock-knock joke?

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Sam and Janet.
Sam and Janet who?
Sam and Janet Evening (line sung to tune of “Some Enchanted Evening”)

I’ll be here all year, folks!

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1770 – William Wordsworth, English poet (d. 1850)
  • 1897 – Walter Winchell, American journalist and radio host (d. 1972)
  • 1915 – Billie Holiday, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 1959)
  • 1920 – Ravi Shankar, Indian-American sitar player and composer (d. 2012)
  • 1931 – Daniel Ellsberg, American activist and author
  • 1939 – Francis Ford Coppola, American director, producer, and screenwriter
  • 1945 – Joël Robuchon, French chef and author (d. 2018)
  • 1960 – Hugh Dominic “Dom” Stiles, librarian and polymath (see post later today)
  • 1964 – Russell Crowe, New Zealand-Australian actor

Those who became corpses on April 7 include:

  • 1614 – El Greco, Greek-Spanish painter and sculptor (b. 1541)
  • 1891 – P. T. Barnum, American businessman and politician, co-founded The Barnum & Bailey Circus (b. 1810)
  • 1947 – Henry Ford, American engineer and businessman, founded the Ford Motor Company (b. 1863)
  • 1972 – Joe Gallo, American gangster (b. 1929)
  • 2012 – Mike Wallace, American television news journalist (b. 1918)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is trying to eat Hili’s leftovers:

Hili: Don’t even think about it.
Szaron: I just wanted to clean it.
In Polish:

Hili: Nawet o tym nie myśl.
Szaron: Ja tylko chciałem pozmywać.

From Bad Cat Clothing, which calls this a “fun quarantine project”. Actually, I think it’s a bit mean.

From Jesus of the Day:

A sad and quarantined cat from the B. Kliban Appreciation Society:

From Luana. You’ll never see Slate publish anything like this now, with an extracted quote below. Such is the tenor of the Woke Era: some truths are too horrible to reveal

From reader Barry. This odious contraption is obviously a product of quarantine:

From reader Simon: a tweet with a funny caption (he says, “Well, it made me smile!”

A tweet from Heather Hastie via Ann German:

 

Tweets from Matthew. Siphonophores are colonial animals in the phylum Cnidaria and the order Hydrozoa; one of them is the Portuguese Man o’ War.  This one is fricking HUGE! As Matthew describes it, “Its a long long long tube that is spiraling around. Siphonophores are colony organisms so they do your head in if you think about them too much.”

Yes, this cat surfs! Sound up.

Can you spot the mouse? Click on the picture to enlarge.

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

April 6, 2020 • 6:45 am

First, can you spot the cat in this cartoon? Read no further until you see it!

From Catbird & Co. Ragdolls

Well, it’s Monday, April 6, 2020: time to go back to work, except nobody is going to work. It’s  International Carbonara Day and New Beer’s Eve, the day before Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Further food holidays include Fresh Tomato Day and National Caramel Popcorn Day, a treat best obtained from Garrett Popcorn Shops in Chicago, National Twinkie Day, and Sweet Potato Day. On the non-food side, it’s Plan Your Epitaph Day (given the circumstances, we’d best plan that soon), National Tartan Day, and National Siamese Cat Day. George Beadle, Nobel-Prize winning geneticist and later President of the University of Chicago, had eight Siamese cats (h/t: Matthew):

Here’s one of the best epitaphs around: that of Mel Blanc, who voiced characters for many cartoons, like that of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Bugs Bunny. What a wag!

News of the day: Awful. Deaths continue to mount (as of this writing, 69,527 worldwide and 9,643 in the U.S.). Boris Johnson has been hospitalized with coronavirus (no celebrating here, please, we don’t rejoice when anyone gets ill or dies), and Trump continues to promote the unproven—and possibly dangerous-to-patients—antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine.  Here are the results of yesterday’s poll, with those readers voting (once again, a sample smaller than I’d like) coming down on the side of Trump’s defeat in November:

And a tiger in a New York Zoo tested positive for Covid-19; it had respiratory illness, but is expected to recover. It apparently caught the virus from an infected keeper. (h/t: Paul)

Today’s Google Doodle is a shout out to the coronavirus helpers during this pandemic (note the flattened curve); clicking on it goes to a list of thank-you sites:

Finally, Robin Ince and several experts did a Q&A on Covid-19 that Matthew watched and thought was useful. I haven’t seen it, but the YouTube video is linked below.

Stuff that happened on April 6 includes:

  • 1320 – The Scots reaffirm their independence by signing the Declaration of Arbroath.
  • 1327 – The poet Petrarch first sees his idealized love, Laura, in the church of Saint Clare in Avignon.
  • 1808 – John Jacob Astor incorporates the American Fur Company, that would eventually make him America’s first millionaire.
  • 1830 – Church of Christ, the original church of the Latter Day Saint movement, is organized by Joseph Smith and others at either Fayette or Manchester, New York.
  • 1860 – The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, later renamed Community of Christ, is organized by Joseph Smith III and others at Amboy, Illinois.
  • 1893 – Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is dedicated by Wilford Woodruff.
  • 1895 – Oscar Wilde is arrested in the Cadogan Hotel, London, after losing a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry.
  • 1896 – In Athens, the opening of the first modern Olympic Games is celebrated, 1,500 years after the original games are banned by Roman emperor Theodosius I.
  • 1930 – At the end of the Salt March, Gandhi raises a lump of mud and salt and declares, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”

And a tweet (h/t Matthew) recounting events on this day in 1944. Klaus Barbie, who worked for U.S. intelligence for a while, fled to Peru and Bolivia, was extradited to France in 1983, indicted in 1984, convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1987, and died in prison of cancer four years later:

More stuff that happened on this day.

  • 1968 – Pierre Elliott Trudeau wins the Liberal Leadership Election, and becomes Prime Minister of Canada soon after.
  • 1973 – The American League of Major League Baseball begins using the designated hitter.
  • 1974 – The Swedish pop band ABBA wins the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Waterloo”, launching their international career.
  • 1992 – The Bosnian War begins.
  • 1994 – The Rwandan genocide begins when the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira is shot down.
  • 1998 – Nuclear weapons testing: Pakistan tests medium-range missiles capable of reaching India.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1892 – Lowell Thomas, American journalist and author (d. 1981)
  • 1927 – Gerry Mulligan, American saxophonist, clarinet player, and composer (d. 1996)
  • 1931 – Ram Dass, American author and educator (d. 2019)
  • 1937 – Merle Haggard, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2016)
  • 1952 – Marilu Henner, Greek-Polish American actress and author

Marilu Henner, whom you might remember from the t.v. show “Taxi”, is one of only ten people in the world who has a perfect memory. She is able to remember everything that happened to her in her life, and is perfect on remember dates and days of the week. I don’t know how all that stuff is stored in her neurons, but watch her remarkable facilities in the first part of this segment from the Aussie version of “60 Minutes”.

  • 1969 – Spencer Wells, American geneticist and anthropologist

Those who turned toes up on April 6 include:

  • 1199 – Richard I, king of England (b. 1157)
  • 1520 – Raphael, Italian painter and architect (b. 1483)
  • 1528 – Albrecht Dürer, German painter, engraver, and mathematician (b. 1471)
  • 1935 – Edwin Arlington Robinson, American poet and playwright (b. 1869)
  • 1971 – Igor Stravinsky, Russian-American pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1882)
  • 1998 – Tammy Wynette, American singer-songwriter (b. 1942)
  • 2005 – Rainier III, Prince of Monaco (b. 1923)
  • 2014 – Mickey Rooney, American soldier, actor, and dancer (b. 1920)
  • 2015 – Ray Charles, American singer-songwriter and conductor (b. 1918)
  • 2016 – Merle Haggard, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1937)
  • 2017 – Don Rickles, American actor and comedian (b. 1926)

I could not find any cats drawn or painted by Dürer, but here’s a nice tabby from the Dutch engraver Cornelius Visscher (1629-1658):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is taking it easy:

A: What are you watching?
Hili: I’m observing how time goes by.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Patrzę jak czas przemija.

Posted by Ali Rizvi: a virtual Last Supper.

From reader Bruce:

Posted by Mary. That’s our draconian but effective mayor, Lori Lightfoot:

From the Queen: nevertheless, victimhood persists!

A tweet sent by reader Andrée. I have no explanation for this weird phenomenon, but perhaps it has something to do with the duck regularly being fed, and the fish cottoning on to that:

A tweet sent by reader Barry. This is clearly fake, but it’s damn funny. But what about circumcision? Long scissors?

Two tweets from Heather Hastie via Ann German. First, a cat on the catwalk. (This is one chill moggy!)

More waffling on the pandemic from the Trump administration:

Three tweets found by Matthew. First, a great photo of a jumping spider nomming a fly:

People are quite inventive and humane in how they find new ways to interact while “distanced,” but I call this a loss of good wine:

Look how these ducklings use their claws to climb high obstacles. I only hope that Honey and Dorothy’s ducklings can do this. One route to the pond from Honey’s nest involves climbing stairs, and I hope I don’t have to help the ducklings climb them.

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

April 5, 2020 • 6:30 am

Formally, today is the beginning of a new week: Sunday, April 5, 2020. But “work week” has lost most of its meaning. For the faithful, it’s Palm Sunday. It’s National Deep Dish Pizza Day (a specialty of Chicago), National Caramel Day and National Raisin & Spice Bar Day.  Finally, it’s Geologists Day and a very weird holiday, First Contact Day, a fictional day from Star Trek:

On April 5, 2063, the first contact between humans and aliens took place, when the Vulcan ship T’Plana-Hath landed in Bozeman, Montana.

I think you’re supposed to greet people today by making Spock’s “V sign”.

News of the Day: It ain’t any better than yesterday. Trump continues to gibber wildly, in his latest press conference both suggesting that the pandemic is about to hit its worst weeks in the U.S. to the moronic suggestion that Americans may be able to assemble in church on Easter. Does he know when Easter is? (Notice how close everybody stands to each other during his pressers.) And he’s recommending that we all take hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for the virus. Over the world, about 65,000 people have died of the virus, with about 8500 of them in the U.S.

In Italy, they’re weighing a plan that will let people go back to work only if they have the Covid-19 antibodies, i.e., if they’ve been affected. Jebus! To see some horrific pictures of what’s going on in Italy, see here.  An op-ed in today’s New York Times recommends you stop using toilet paper. As if someone’s going to install a bidet in your home these days!

When I went to put my recycling in the bins this morning, I was greeted with this Sign of the Times. (Someone’s eating a lot of palm oil!)

Stuff that happened on April 5 includes:

Here’s the famous scene of the Battle of the Ice from the Movie “Alexander Nevsky“, directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1938).

  • 1614 – In Virginia, Native American Pocahontas marries English colonist John Rolfe.
  • 1722 – The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen discovers Easter Island.
  • 1792 – United States President George Washington exercises his authority to veto a bill, the first time this power is used in the United States.
  • 1900 – Archaeologists in Knossos, Crete, discover a large cache of clay tablets with hieroglyphic writing in a script they call Linear B.

This is the earliest known form of Greek, Mycenaean Greek, and was used at Knossos, confirming that a form of Greek was spoken in the Minoan civilizations. Here’s a specimen with the caption from Wikipedia.

A sample of Linear B script, the earliest Greek writing, 1450 BC, and an adaptation of the earlier Minoan Linear A script. This piece contains information on the distribution of bovine, pig and deer hides to shoe and saddle-makers. It is a script made up of 90 syllabic signs, ideograms and numbers, a form earlier than that used for the Homeric poems. These clay tablets were fortuitously preserved when they were baked in the Mycenaean palace of Pylos fire 250 years later. (From Wikipedia). Creative Commons license to Sharon Mollerus.
  • 1904 – The first international rugby league match is played between England and an Other Nationalities team (Welsh and Scottish players) in Central Park, Wigan, England.
  • 1922 – The American Birth Control League, forerunner of Planned Parenthood, is incorporated.
  • 1945 – Cold War: Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito signs an agreement with the Soviet Union to allow “temporary entry of Soviet troops into Yugoslav territory”.
  • 1951 – Cold War: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are sentenced to death for spying for the Soviet Union.
  • 1956 – Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro declares himself at war with Cuban President Fulgencio Batista.
  • 1969 – Vietnam War: Massive antiwar demonstrations occur in many U.S. cities.
  • 1999 – Two Libyans suspected of bringing down Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 are handed over for eventual trial in the Netherlands.

270 people died in that bombing, 11 of them struck on the ground by the falling plane. Only one suspect was convicted, and was released in 2009 on “compassionate ground,” having been diagnosed with terminal metastatic prostate cancer and deemed likely to die within three months. He lived as a free man in Libya for 2 years and 9 months before dying.  Here’s the guy, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi :

Manoocher Deghati/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1588 – Thomas Hobbes, English philosopher (d. 1679)
  • 1649 – Elihu Yale, American-English merchant and philanthropist (d. 1721)
  • 1732 – Jean-Honoré Fragonard, French painter and etcher (d. 1806)
  • 1827 – Joseph Lister, English surgeon and academic (d. 1912)
  • 1856 – Booker T. Washington, African-American educator, essayist and historian (d. 1915)
  • 1900 – Spencer Tracy, American actor (d. 1967)
  • 1902 – Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Russian-American rabbi (d. 1994)

Schneerson, head of the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidic Jews in New York, was deemed by his followers to be the promised Messiah, and that he would never die. But of course he did. That didn’t dissuade the Lubavitchers, as the sect goes on.  Here’s the faux Messiah:

By Fridrich Vishinsky – Scanned File, CC0,
  • 1908 – Bette Davis, American actress (d. 1989)
  • 1916 – Gregory Peck, American actor, political activist, and producer (d. 2003)
  • 1925 – Janet Rowley, American human geneticist (d. 2013)
  • 1937 – Colin Powell, American general and politician, 65th United States Secretary of State
  • 1973 – Pharrell Williams, American visionary, aspiring cyclist, and failed footballer

Check out Williams’s description. He must have had a hand in writing it!

It was curtains for these folks on April 5:

  • 1964 – Douglas MacArthur, American general (b. 1880)
  • 1970 – Alfred Sturtevant, American geneticist and academic (b. 1891)

Sturtevant, a fiercely smart geneticist, was in my academic lineage as a student of Thomas Hunt Morgan, my academic great-grandfather. Here’s “Sturt” as a young hot dog and an older man still pushing flies:

  • 1975 – Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese general and politician, 1st President of the Republic of China (b. 1887)
  • 1982 – Abe Fortas, American lawyer and jurist (b. 1910)
  • 1994 – Kurt Cobain, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1967)
  • 1997 – Allen Ginsberg, American poet (b. 1926)
  • 2005 – Saul Bellow, Canadian-American novelist, essayist and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1915)
  • 2006 – Gene Pitney, American singer-songwriter (b. 1941)
  • 2014 – Peter Matthiessen, American novelist, short story writer, editor, co-founded The Paris Review (b. 1927)
  • 2019 – Sydney Brenner, South African biologist (b. 1927)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron, on the top step, is still a bit scared of Hili (“she”), for the cats are rarely so close to each other:

Szaron: Does she know I’m sitting here?
A: Why do you ask me?
In Polish:
Szaron: Czy ona wie, że ja tu siedzę?
Ja: Dlaczego mnie o to pytasz?

From reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe, re the NRA suing New York State for closing gun shops during the pandemic.

From reader Bruce:

Posted by Diana MacPherson: a virtual spider for quarantine time:

From The Mind Awakened via reader Divy; captioned “perfect social distancing”:

 

From the Queen. There are a lot of posts on Facebook and other social media that are the equivalent to the first sentence of the one below, except that they’re serious. (That’s probably why Titania wrote this.)

I was so outraged by this (and I assume it’s true) that I retweeted it:

A tweet from Heather Hastie with a witticism:

Tweets from Matthew. Here’s a “sprite“, an electrical discharge above thunderstorm clouds. I didn’t know they existed until I saw this.

Here’s the first video taken of a sprite:

And some more: look for the red flashes:

And dig these crazy fish. They can climb trees!

https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1246049772701650944

Turn sound up: essential to hear this poor, poor kitty, especially the second meow.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 4, 2020 • 7:00 am

It’s Saturday, April 4, 2020, and it’s both National Cordon Bleu Day (celebrating the dish of thinly pounded chicken filled with ham and cheese, then breaded and fried [I’ve never had one]) and International Carrot Day. Re the carrots, it’s also Vitamin C Day.  Further, it’s Hug a Newsperson Day (right sentiment, wrong year), National Rat Day, and National DIY (do it yourself) Day. Now’s a good day to make that reusable face mask out of an old tee shirt that I highlighted yesterday.

News of the Day: Very bad, as usual. As the pandemic spreads around the world, the death toll in the U.S. has passed 7,000. The CDC recommends that we all wear cloth masks in public, which I’ll do whenever I’m not taking a solitary walk but going “in public”, like to a gas station or a store.  Trump, however, says he won’t take the CDC’s advice. (I notice that during his press conference he also avoids “social distancing”.)  Nine U.S. states still haven’t ordered stay-at-home regulations, including Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota; Wyoming, Utah, South Carolina, and Oklahoma have such orders in only parts of their state. As I recall, all of these states have Republican governors. Anthony Fauci says he can’t comprehend the holdouts, and he’s right.

I also predict that there will be no major league baseball played in the U.S. this year (the season’s now postponed), though some optimists think otherwise. They are almost certainly wrong, as is everyone who thinks this pandemic will be over soon and it will be business as usual by fall. I hope I’m wrong in this prediction, but I don’t think I will be.

Lots of stuff happened on April 4, including:

  • 1147 – Moscow is mentioned for the first time in the historical record, when it is named as a meeting place for two princes.
  • 1581 – Francis Drake is knighted for completing a circumnavigation of the world.
  • 1796 – Georges Cuvier delivers the first paleontological lecture.

Cuvier is known as the Father of Paleontology, and Wikipedia says this about the lecture:

On 4 April 1796 he began to lecture at the École Centrale du Pantheon and, at the opening of the National Institute in April, he read his first paleontological paper, which subsequently was published in 1800 under the title Mémoires sur les espèces d’éléphants vivants et fossiles. In this paper, he analyzed skeletal remains of Indian and African elephants, as well as mammoth fossils, and a fossil skeleton known at that time as the ‘Ohio animal’.

Harrison was in office for exactly one month, taking up the Presidency on March 4.

  • 1949 – Cold War: Twelve nations sign the North Atlantic Treaty creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
  • 1958 – The CND peace symbol is displayed in public for the first time in London.

You must learn where the sign came from:

The symbol is a super-imposition of the semaphore signals for the letters “N” and “D”, taken to stand for “nuclear disarmament”. This observation was made as early as 5 April 1958 in the Manchester Guardian. In addition to this primary genesis, Holtom additionally cited as inspiration Goya’s Peasant Before the Firing Squad.

Here’s that painting, also called “The Third of May 1808”:

If you can name the top five you’re an expert! Here they are:

Source
  • 1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
  • 1969 – Dr. Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart.
  • 1973 – The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City are officially dedicated.
  • 1975 – Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
  • 1979 – Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan is executed.
  • 1983 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Challenger makes its maiden voyage into space.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1802 – Dorothea Dix, American nurse and activist (d. 1887)
  • 1895 – Arthur Murray, American dancer and educator (d. 1991)
  • 1928 – Maya Angelou, American memoirist and poet (d. 2014)
  • 1948 – Berry Oakley, American bass player (d. 1972)
  • 1965 – Robert Downey Jr., American actor, producer, and screenwriter
  • 1979 – Heath Ledger, Australian actor (d. 2008)
  • 2012 – Grumpy Cat, American internet celebrity cat (d. 2019)

I never liked Grumpy Cat (real name “Tardar Sauce”) because his “grumpiness” was a developmental defect, probably based on a mutation (she lived only 7 years). But here she is, one last time:

This is the first cat I’ve seen commemorated on Wikipedia’s birthday lists.

Those who experienced mortality on April 4 include:

  • 1617 – John Napier, Scottish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer (b. 1550)
  • 1929 – Karl Benz, German engineer and businessman, founded Mercedes-Benz (b. 1844)
  • 1958 – Johnny Stompanato, American soldier and bodyguard (b. 1925)
  • 1968 – Martin Luther King Jr., American minister and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1929)
  • 1983 – Gloria Swanson, American actress (b. 1899)
  • 2013 – Roger Ebert, American journalist, critic, and screenwriter (b. 1942)

Meanwihile in Dobrzyn, today’s Hili dialogue needs an explanation, which Malgorzata has supplied:

There are problems in Polish agriculture that may lead to food shortages. And we have this huge garden with plenty of good soil on which only grass grows. So we found a gardener to dig a vegetable garden in one part of our yard. He will plant for us diverse vegetables, and beans are among them. Hili is full of enthusiasm and thinks that we should discard all flowers and just plant beans.

The dialogue:

Hili: Everything is growing amazingly.
A: Now the spring is real.
Hili: Maybe, instead of flowers we should plant beans?
In Polish:
Hili: Niesłychanie to wszystko rośnie.
Ja: Wiosna w pełni.
Hili: A może zamiast kwiatków zasadzić fasolę?

Also in Dobrzyn, Szaron is baffled by the blinds (note that he’s got the cord in his mouth:

Szaron: How do they do it?

In Polish: Szaron: Jak oni to robią?

And let’s not forget about Kitten Mietek, was photographed (with a caption) by staff Elzbieta. Like his stepbrother Leon, Mietek has taken to the leash!

Caption: Mietek gets to know the world.
In Polish: Mietek poznaje świat.

From Jim:

From Graham (I may have posted this a while back, but can’t recall):

And a gif from Twisted Sifter. Is this Proof of Ceiling Cat?

From The Queen’s continuing series on the pandemic:

https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1246054097385598981

I retweeted this tweet I got from Matthew and added some explanation and a link. The second tweet, with a video (sound on!), is the heartwarming one. Fricking Navy!

Tweets from Matthew. Have a look at this uber-weird tree!:

A fun-loving croc:

No comment:

In the word of nature (sans H. sapiens), life goes on. . .

Matthew explains this cartoon from the Times Literary Supplement, “The picture contains images that are synonyms/images/phrases for sex. So – screw, roll in the hay, netflix and chill, sowing wild oats etc etc”. How many can you spot?

Nature is getting ever closer to humans as the humans retreat into their houses.  Here’s an example: