Category: Leon monologue

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

July 4, 2019 • 7:00 am

It’s Thursday, July 4, 2019: Independence Day in the U.S., and a national holiday (see below). Appropriately, it’s National Barbecue Day, so go whole hog and dig inunless you’re a vegetarian. If you’re Norwegian, today you’ll be celebrating the birthday of Queen Sonja, a day when the Norwegian State Flag is flown ubiquitously.

I’ll be celebrating today with snorkeling, as we’re now in the Kona area, home of four or five excellent snorkeling spots. So far I’ve snorkeled every day for the past two days.

A lot of stuff happened on July 4 besides the adoption of our Declaration of Independence. Here are some events:

  • 1776 – American Revolution: The United States Declaration of Independence is adopted by the Second Continental Congress. [This is why today is “Independence Day”].
  • 1802 – At West Point, New York, the United States Military Academy opens.
  • 1803 – The Louisiana Purchase is announced to the U.S. people.

And this is one of the most poignant and remarkable coincidences I know of:

  • 1826 – Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, dies the same day as John Adams, second president of the United States, on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the United States Declaration of Independence.

But wait—there’s lots more!

  • 1845 – Henry David Thoreau moves into a small cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau’s account of his two years there, Walden, will become a touchstone of the environmental movement.
  • 1855 – The first edition of Walt Whitman’s book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is published In Brooklyn.
  • 1862 – Lewis Carroll tells Alice Liddell a story that would grow into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequels.
  • 1910 – African-American boxer Jack Johnson knocks out white boxer Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight boxing match, sparking race riots across the United States.

If you haven’t seen Ken Burns’s biographical program on Johnson, by all means do. Here’s a summary of the fight, which took place in Reno in 110-degree heat (that’s 43°C)!

  • 1918 – Bolsheviks kill Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family (Julian calendar date).
  • 1939 – Lou Gehrig, recently diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, informs a crowd at Yankee Stadium that he considers himself “The luckiest man on the face of the earth”, then announces his retirement from major league baseball.

Here’s a video of that poignant moment with Shirley Povich recounting it (Gehrig’s ownwords are at the end). The great Iron Horse of the Yankees died on June 2, 1941.

  • 1946 – After 381 years of near-continuous colonial rule by various powers, the Philippines attains full independence from the United States.
  • 1947 – The “Indian Independence Bill” is presented before the British House of Commons, proposing the independence of the Provinces of British India into two sovereign countries: India and Pakistan.
  • 1951 – William Shockley announces the invention of the junction transistor.
  • 1960 – Due to the post-Independence Day admission of Hawaii as the 50th U.S. state on August 21, 1959, the 50-star flag of the United States debuts in Philadelphia, almost ten and a half months later (see Flag Acts (United States)).
  • 1976 – Israeli commandos raid Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing all but four of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by Palestinian terrorists.
  • 2012 – The discovery of particles consistent with the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider is announced at CERN.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1790 – George Everest, Welsh geographer and surveyor (d. 1866)
  • 1804 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1864)
  • 1816 – Hiram Walker, American businessman, founded Canadian club whiskey (d. 1899)
  • 1872 – Calvin Coolidge, American lawyer and politician, 30th President of the United States (d. 1933)
  • 1883 – Rube Goldberg, American sculptor, cartoonist, and engineer (d. 1970)

Rube Goldberg is America’s equivalent of W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944): both cartoonists envisioned elaborate and funny devices to accomplish mundane tasks. Here’s one of each:

Goldberg (a reminder to mail a letter):

As you walk past cobbler shop, hook (A) strikes suspended boot (B), causing it to kick football (C) through goal posts (D). Football drops into basket (E) and string (F) tilts sprinkling can (G), causing water to soak coat tails (H). As coat shrinks, cord (I) opens door (J) of cage, allowing bird (K) to walk out on perch (L) and grab worm (M), which is attached to string (N). This pulls down window shade (O), on which is written, “YOU SAP, MAIL THAT LETTER.”

Robinson (removing a wart):

  • 1905 – Lionel Trilling, American critic, essayist, short story writer, and educator (d. 1975)
  • 1918 – Eppie Lederer,  [“Ann Landers’] American journalist and radio host (d. 2002)
  • 1927 – Neil Simon, American playwright and screenwriter (d. 2018)
  • 1937 – Queen Sonja of Norway
  • 1951 – Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, American lawyer and politician, 6th Lieutenant Governor of Maryland
  • 1962 – Pam Shriver, American tennis player and sportscaster

Those who passed away on July 4 include:

  • 1826 – John Adams, American lawyer and politician, 2nd President of the United States (b. 1735)
  • 1826 – Thomas Jefferson, American architect, lawyer, and politician, 3rd President of the United States (b. 1743)
  • 2002 – Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., American general (b. 1912)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili becomes the Anti Pinker:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About the Enlightenment.
A: And?
Hili: I have a feeling that it is disappearing.
In Polish:
Ja: O czym myślisz?
Hili: O Oświeceniu.
Ja: To znaczy?
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że zanika.
And Leon is on guard:
Leon: I’m watching the surroundings. Not a mouse will slink by.
In Polish: Mam oko na okolicę, teraz żadna mysz się nie prześlizgnie.

A gif I made, just for fun, so I could watch the First Flights over and over:

Speaking of which, here’s a cartoon I’m sure I’ve posted before. My ducks are now contemplating this issue:

Also from Facebook, something surely Photoshopped but still nice. Bonus points if you know the song:

From Nilou. Designating the “Naughty Penguin of the Month” and “Good Penguin of the Month” and then describing their transgressions or accomplishments, is a work of marketing genius! Good job, National Aquarium of New Zealand! Here are a few of the winners and losers.

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. Heather loves hedgehogs (that sounds like a t.v. series), but why this one is displayed with strawberries mystifies me.

Okay, I don’t know about all of this aerodynamics, but it’s interesting to attach a camera to a helicopter blade:

Tweets from Matthew, who often finds capybara tweets. Well, the caption of this tweet is exaggerated (read Better Angels of Our Nature), but the cat is helpful:

A compliant mountain goat shares its enclosure:

I guess the ticks don’t drown when the crock immerses itself, but crikey, look at the size of those things!

And, for the Fourth of July, Matthew sent this tweet for a dish that sounds a bit, well, dicey. The “red” comes from bacon, and bacon is not red! Matthew’s email header for this tweet was “!!!!!!”

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

June 26, 2019 • 7:00 am

Greetings on Wednesday, June 26 2019, the first Hump Day of Summer.

It’s National Chocolate Pudding Day, a comestible once endorsed by Bill Cosby,  It’s also International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, World Refrigeration Day, and, in Hamelin, Germany, Ratcatcher’s Day.

A lot of stuff happened on June 26, including three advances in gay rights:

  • 1483 – Richard III becomes King of England.
  • 1541 – Francisco Pizarro is assassinated in Lima by the son of his former companion and later antagonist, Diego de Almagro the younger. Almagro is later caught and executed.
  • 1917 – World War I: The American Expeditionary Forces begin to arrive in France. They will first enter combat four months later.
  • 1948 – William Shockley files the original patent for the grown-junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
  • 1953 – Lavrentiy Beria, head of MVD, is arrested by Nikita Khrushchev and other members of the Politburo.
  • 1959 – Swedish boxer Ingemar Johansson becomes world champion of heavy weight boxing, by defeating American Floyd Patterson on technical knockout after two minutes and three seconds in the third round at Yankee Stadium.
  • 1974 – The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
  • 1977 – Elvis Presley held his final concert in Indianapolis, Indiana at Market Square Arena
  • 2000 – The Human Genome Project announces the completion of a “rough draft” sequence.
  • 2000 – Pope John Paul II reveals the third secret of Fátima.
  • 2003 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence v. Texas that gender-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional.
  • 2013 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
  • 2015 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1819 – Abner Doubleday, American general (d. 1893)
  • 1892 – Pearl S. Buck, American novelist, essayist, short story writer Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1973)
  • 1898 – Chesty Puller, US general (d. 1971)

I used to play poker with a Marine general who was friends with Chesty Puller, regarded as “the Marine’s Marine.” But I never learned how Puller got his nickname (his real name was Lewis Burwell Puller).  Apparently Puller didn’t, either. As one site notes,

Some say Puller got his famous nickname because of his big, thrust-out chest; the myth was that the original had been shot away and the new chest was a steel plate. Others state that “chesty” was an old Marine expression meaning cocky. The following letter shows that Puller himself was not sure of how he came by it. . .

Here’s Chesty, looking exactly as a Marine general should look:

More born on this day:

  • 1903 – Big Bill Broonzy, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1958)
  • 1904 – Peter Lorre, Slovak-American actor and singer (d. 1964)
  • 1974 – Derek Jeter, American baseball player
  • 1976 – Dave Rubin, American political commentator

Derek Jeter was a great hitter, with a lifetime average of .310, and he’s a sure Hall-of-Famer, but it was his defensive performance at shortstop that always thrilled me. I love those impossible throws from deep in the infield. Here’s a few of his stellar moments:

Those who died on June 26 include:

  • 1541 – Francisco Pizarro, Spanish explorer and politician, Governor of New Castile (b. c. 1471)
  • 1793 – Gilbert White, English ornithologist and ecologist (b. 1720)
  • 1957 – Malcolm Lowry, English novelist and poet (b. 1909)
  • 1993 – Roy Campanella, American baseball player and coach (b. 1921)
  • 2003 – Strom Thurmond, American general, lawyer, and politician, 103rd Governor of South Carolina (b. 1902)
  • 2012 – Nora Ephron, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1941)
  • 2014 – Howard Baker, American lawyer, politician, and diplomat, 12th White House Chief of Staff (b. 1925)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is stopping to smell the flowers.

Hili: They are starting to wither but they still smell.
A: Do you like this smell?
Hili: No, I prefer the fragrance of mice.
In Polish:
Hili: Zaczynają przekwitać, ale nadal pachną.
Ja: Lubisz ten zapach?
Hili: Nie, wolę zapach myszy.

Summer is passing and they still haven’t started putting up the new home of Leon and his staff near Dobrzyn. In the meantime,  the Dark Tabby is amusing himself in the already-completed garden of his incipient house.

Leon: Attention! Aliens are attacking!

In Polish: Uwaga,obcy atakują!

Two chuckles from Facebook:

A tweet from Nilou: a fuzzy condor chick goes for a popsicle:

Two more from the Lost Tweets of Grania. This kitten passes the mirror test:

Amazing nature. Notice how the parasites make the tentacles move, calling attention to them:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1114579669901123584

Three tweets from Heather Hastie. Heather has kindly offered to fill the kitten-tweet niche left behind by Grania:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1142565870029484037

What a useful kitten!

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1142598649437966336

A mighty cat!

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1142415588519763973

Tweets from Matthew. Translation of this one: “This is my little godchild Abraxas, whom I visited yesterday in the Wildtierhilfe (Wild animal rescue orgnization) Schäfer and was also allowed to hold.”

https://twitter.com/FrauFabelhaft/status/1139413141203251200

Ferrets aren’t claustrophobic and at one time, as I recall, were used to clean the tubes in nuclear reactors, running through them dragging a balled-up rag behind them:

Amazing but true! But WHY?

https://twitter.com/TerrifyingPixs/status/1142301193747628032

A nice trick; the explanation is in the thread:

 

Monday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 27, 2019 • 7:00 am

It’s Monday, May 27, 2019, and tomorrow I’ll be heading back home tomorrow to resume my work, now including Duck Duties. Posting will be light today as I finish my  R&R.

In the U.S. it’s Memorial Day, a national holiday honoring fallen members of the armed forces, but ducks don’t stop eating on holidays.

It’s also National Italian Beef Day, a sandwich for which Chicago is justifiably renowned. I get mine “hot and wet”, local jargon for “garnished with hot giardiniera (pickled vegetables) and dipped in the beef juice”. Here’s a classic Italian beef: hot and wet.

May 27 was a fairly busy day in history. In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg, which once again bears that name (it was Leningrad for a long time). On May 27, 1927, the last Ford Model T was made and the company began retooling its plants to produce the Model A. Here is the difference:’

On this day in 1933, Walt Disney released the cartoon Three Little Pigs, famous for its hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Here it is:

On this day in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge, linking San Francisco to Marin County, California, opened to pedestrian traffic. Vehicle traffic began crossing the next day. From Wikipedia:

The bridge-opening celebration began on May 27, 1937, and lasted for one week. The day before vehicle traffic was allowed, 200,000 people crossed either on foot or on roller skates. On opening day, Mayor Angelo Rossi and other officials rode the ferry to Marin, then crossed the bridge in a motorcade past three ceremonial “barriers”, the last a blockade of beauty queens who required Joseph Strauss to present the bridge to the Highway District before allowing him to pass.

On this day in 1940, the Nazis shot 99 British prisoners of war in the infamous Le Paradis massacre. Two Brits survived and lived  to testify against the SS commander who ordered the shooting, who was hanged in 1949. Exactly two years later, SS Commander Reinhard Heydrich was fatally wounded in an attack by Czech partisans. In reprisal, the Germans completely destroyed the villages of  Lidice and Ležáky, which were razed; all males over age 16 were killed and everyone else was sent to  concentration camps to die.

On this day in 1967, according to Wikipedia, “Australians vote in favor of a constitutional referendum granting the Australian government the power to make laws to benefit Indigenous Australians and to count them in the national census.” Finally, on this day three years ago, Barack Obama became the first U.S. President to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and meet some survivors of the bombing.

Notables born on this day include Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794), Julia Ward Howe (1819), Wild Bill Hickok (1837), Georges Rouault (1871), Dashiell Hammett (1894), Vincent Price (1911), Henry Kissinger (1923), and Ramsey Lewis (1935).

Those who croaked on May 27 include John Calvin (1564), Niccolò Paganini (1840), Robert Koch (1910, Nobel Laureate), Robert Ripley (1949), Jawaharlal Nehru (1964), and Gregg Allman (2017).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows unusual solicitude for Cyrus:

Hili: We have to wait for Cyrus.
Andrzej: He will catch up.
Hili: Yes, but his feelings will be hurt if he has to run after us.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy zaczekać na Cyrusa.
Ja: Dogoni nas.
Hili: Tak, ale może mu być przykro, że musi nas gonić.

And Leon and Elzbieta are out for a hike in the woods (Elzbieta is doing most of the hiking).

Leon: You see, mother, what an attractive walk I came up with for your day?
Leon: Widzisz matka,jaki atrakcyjny spacer wymyśliłem z okazji twego święta?!

Two Judeo-Christian memes from Facebook:

And a lovely Jesus clock:

A tweet from Nilou. Spoiler: they all make it up the stairs. (n.b.: it’s not “duck chicks” but “ducklings”.)

https://twitter.com/planetpng/status/1099482498847961094

From reader Paul we have an epic battle between rhinoceros beetles. Look at that final flip!

From Gethyn: a ship’s cat doing what a ship’s cat does:

From reader Barry we have some synchronized howling. I swear that at one point they’re howling in harmony!

Tweets from Grania. Well, ducks sometimes do stand on one foot, even without flamingos.

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1132320737790795781

This cat needs to brush up on its hunting:

A beautiful octopus and a superfluous apostrophe:

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1132340046269505536

Tweets from Matthew. It’s a good year for kakapos, though of course some chicks didn’t make it. But here’s the good news:

A lovely French building from the Dordogne. Why is it so high, though? Were there floods?

Bithorax is a “homeotic” developmental mutation in Drosophila that adds extra bits of the fly’s thorax to its body, sometimes producing an extra pair of wings, as you can see below.  E. B. Lewis was born on May 20, 1918, and won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for this work, which marks the founding of “evo devo”: the field concerned with how evolution molds development. Read more about his work here.

 

 

Friday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 24, 2019 • 6:30 am

Professor Ceiling Cat here, with thanks to Grania for taking over Hili yesterday. It’s Friday, May 24, 2019: the end of another work week. It’s National Escargot Day, (I’ve had snails once and didn’t like them), and National Brothers Day, so fête your brother (I’m one!).

Today’s big news is that British Prime Minister Theresa May has resigned, never able to overcome the Brexit debacle nor offer an acceptable plan for leaving. Who will succeed her? Will it be Boris Johnson, the UK’s answer to Donald Trump? Stay tuned.

I’m visiting Salem today with my hosts, so posting will be thin. On the other hand, I’ll get some good pictures, as well as fried clams at Woodman’s of Essex, the greatest clam shack in New England, founded in 1914. Their fried clams come with chips and onion rings:

There’s a lot of news from this day in history. On May 24, 1607, 100 English settlers landed at Jamestown, Virginia, which became the first permanent English colony in America. 19 years later to the day, Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the local Native Americans. It was a great bargain at the reported $23 in trade goods. As Wikipedia reports:

Minuit is credited with purchasing the island of Manhattan from the Native Americans in exchange for traded goods valued at 60 guilders. According to the writer Nathaniel Benchley, Minuit conducted the transaction with Seyseys, chief of the Canarsees, who were only too happy to accept valuable merchandise in exchange for an island that was mostly controlled by the Weckquaesgeeks.

The figure of 60 guilders comes from a letter by a representative of the Dutch States-General and member of the board of the Dutch West India Company, Pieter Janszoon Schagen, to the States-General in November 1626. In 1846, New York historian John Romeyn Brodhead converted the figure of Fl 60 (or 60 guilders) to US$23.The popular account rounds this off to $24. By 2006 sixty guilders in 1626 was worth approximately $1,000 in current dollars, according to the Institute for Social History of Amsterdam.

On this day in 1683, the world’s first university museum opened: the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In 1738, John Wesley was converted to “Methodism” from the Church of England. And in 1830, the poem  “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was published; the author was Sarah Josepha Hale.

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the telegraph message “What hath God Wrought” (Numbers 23;23): the first words sent over the first commercial single-wire telegraph line, which transmitted between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.  But of course God wrought nothing: Morse did.

On this day in 1883, the world’s most beautiful bridge, New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge, opened after 14 years of construction.  Here it is:

Source

On this day in 1935, the first night game in major league baseball was played, with the Cincinnati Reds, playing at home, beating the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1. On May 24, 1940, two things happened: Igor Sikorsky piloted the first successful flight of a single rotor helicopter, and the first (and unsuccessful) assassination attempt of Trotsky took place in Mexico City. The assassin, acting on orders of Stalin, escaped. But the second attempt succeeded: on August 20, Trotsky was whacked in the head with an ice axe and died the next day.

Here’s Sikorsky in his helicopter (although it was called “single rotor”, that was the main rotor; there was also a tail rotor):

Source: Connecticut Historical Society

On May 24, 1956, the first Eurovision Song Contest was held in Lugano, Switzerland. Does anybody remember who won? And exactly two decades later, the famous blind wine-tasting, the “the Judgment of Paris, took place in France, with California wines beating the best of France.

Finally, it was on this day 20 years ago the the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague indicted Slobodan Milošević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kosovo.

Notables born on this day include William Whewell (1794), Queen Victoria (1819), Jan Smuts (1870), Jane Byrne (1933),Tommy Chong (1938), Bob Dylan (1941), and Kristen Scott Thomas (1960).

I have to mention that yesterday, as his owner says, “Maru has become 12.” (The video is called “I am Maru 12.”)

In honor of the birthday of Maru, the world’s most famous Internet cat, here’s his owner’s celebratory video, showing highlights of the chubby Scottish fold’s last dozen years. And remember Maru’s motto, “When I see a box, I must enter.” (His second motto is “I do my best.”) Thanks to Grania for finding this:

Deaths on this day were thin on the ground; they include William Lloyd Garrison (1879), John Foster Dulles (1959), and Duke Ellington (1974).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili got a real treat (Cyrus got one too):

A: I bought a nice piece of beef. I can share it with you.
Hili: An excellent idea.
In Polish:
Ja: Kupiłem ładny kawałek wołowiny. Mogę się z tobą podzielić.
Hili: Znakomity pomysł.

In Leon’s future home nearby, he wait for the sun (like My Cat Jeoffry, he loves the sun and the sun loves him):

Leon: The sun should be there by now.
Leon: Teraz tam powinno być słońce.

From reader Barry; look at this video of a playful squirrel!

Nilou sends a pair of affectionate ducklings:

Tweets from Grania. Well, if they say this is a first, I’ll take their word for it:

And look at the ears on these serval kittens:

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1130652981643370496

More adventures of a badger family that hangs around its staff:

Someone actually embroidered all the frames of a cartoon, and it’s a cat cartoon!

Tweets from Matthew. Look at this hybridization between ducks. But I’m not sure that the hybrids are fertile. If they are, and that’s what this figure what it implies, then they aren’t complete biological species, but they are close. If this reflects past hybridization and they no longer exchange genes, they are now full biological species.

I think this counts as real tool use:

What is this monotreme eating?

I may post this series of botfly videos, but I’m jealous because I don’t even have a photo of the one that was in my head.

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 9, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, May 9, 2019, and National Shrimp Day. It’s also Victory Day, celebrating the end of the war in Europe, including the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany (see below). This holiday is celebrated in Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Nobody is reading the science posts and I am sad.

On this day in 1671, Thomas Blood tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. He failed and was caught, but, oddly, was not only pardoned but rewarded with land and money.

On May 9, 1926, according to Wikipedia, ” Admiral Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett claim to have flown over the North Pole (later discovery of Byrd’s diary appears to cast some doubt on the claim.)” It looks as if Byrd may have falsified his sextant data. If so, then the first to really succeed in this flight were Roald Amundsen, Umberto.Nobile, Oscar Wisting, and Lincoln Ellsworth, who flew over the Pole just a few days later: May 12, 1926.

 

On May 9, 1945, the final German Instrument of Surrender was signed at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst, ending World War II in Europe. On this day in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film Vertigo opened in San Francisco. Here’s the official trailer:

On May 9, 1960, the FDA announced that it was giving the first approval of an oral contraceptive: Searle’s Enovid birth-control pill. 14 years later, the House Committee on the Judiciary opened impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. Nixon resigned on August 9 before the proceedings finished (they became moot at that point), and was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Finally, on this day in 1979, according to Wikipedia, “Iranian Jewish businessman Habib Elghanian [was] executed by firing squad in Tehran, prompting the mass exodus of the once 100,000-strong Jewish community of Iran.” There are very few Jews left in Iran now.

Notables born on this day include John Brown (1800), Howard Carter (1874), Mike Wallace (1918), Richard Adams (1920), Sophie Scholl (1921), Manfred Eigen (1927, Nobel Laureate), Albert Finney and Glenda Jackson (both 1936), Richie Furay (1944), and Billy Joel (1949).

And Matthew notes the birthday of one of his scientific heroes, Heinrich Matthaei, who is 90 today. Matthaei, as the tweet notes, was the first to see that a nucleotide triplet coded for a particular amino acid (UUU = phenylalanine). Matthaei should have gotten the Nobel Prize for this work along with those who did win for deciphering the code, but was shut out. A travesty! You can read more about him in the article cited by Matthew, which is in fact Matthew’s piece in the Torygraph:

Those who died on May 9 include Friedrich Schiller (1805), Albert Abraham Michelson (1931, Nobel Laureate), Ulrike Meinhof (1976), James Jones (1977), Tenzing Norgay (1986), Russell Long (2003), Lena Horne (2010), and Vidal Sassoon (2012).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili gets fusses from a visitor:

Agata: Do you like to be petted?
Hili: Yes, but you may do it with greater intensity.
In Polish:
Agata: Lubisz jak cię głaszczą?
Hili: Tak, ale możesz to robić bardziej intensywnie.

And at his future home near Dobrzyn, the Dark Tabby makes a sage pronouncement:

Leon: The basis of every action is observation.

Leon: Podstawą każdego działania jest obserwacja.

From a cat’s diary, sent by reader Karl:

Another from Facebook:

A tweet contributed by reader Blue, and a pretty amazing display of strength and athleticism:

Reader Barry found this one, adding “Well, at least 57% of 22,531 people are idiots.”

A tweet from Matthew about Sir David’s birthday, which was yesterday:

More tweets from Matthew. Bad typo in this one!

But isn’t this what saints are for? To intercede for you?

This shows the profound gaps in the fossil record:

Tweets from Grania. I’m not sure whether this cat is normal:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/1125746034318172161

This is quite a sneeze!

Seriously, is this a question even worth asking?

Paranoia ad infinitum: As far as I know, there have been exactly zero hyena attacks by the Zionist carnivore:

 

Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

April 16, 2019 • 7:00 am

It’s Tuesday, the Cruelest Day: April 16, 2019, and National Eggs Benedict Day, a dish that Anthony Bourdain advised you never to order at brunch, since it’s likely to be cobbled together from leftovers from the week. It’s also World Voice Day, a rather bizarre commemoration of the phenomenon of the human voice. Finally, it’s Foursquare Day, since April is the fourth month and 16 is four squared.

On April 16, 1818, the U.S. Senate established a demilitarized border with Canada by ratifying the Rush–Bagot Treaty. In 1881, in Dodge City, Kansas, sheriff Bat Masterson fought his last gun battle (he wasn’t hurt and lived to a ripe old age).  Here’s a picture of Masterson and another famous sheriff; it’s from Wikipedia but definitely looks pasted together:

(From Wikipedia): Deputies Bat Masterson (standing) and Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, 1876. The scroll on Earp’s chest is a cloth pin-on badge.

On this day in 1912,  Harriet Quimby, the first woman to get a pilot’s license in the U.S., also became the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel. She died in 1912 after being thrown from a two-seater plane. Here’s Quimby’s photo, this time not altered:

On April 16, 1917,  Lenin returned to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) Russia from exile in Switzerland. He arrived at the Finland Station and gave a fiery speech calling for revolution. (You may have read Edmund Wilson’s famous history of socialism, To the Finland Station.) When I was in St. Petersburg a few years back, I made a special trip to the station to see the engine that pulled one of Lenin’s trains. Nobody spoke English, and the platform. where the car resides, was restricted, so I had to draw pictures of Lenin in a locomotive before they understood what I wanted to see.  Then they became very nice and let me see the engine. Here it is along with a plaque in both Finnish and Russian (translation please).

Wikipedia’s caption for its own picture (these one are mine) is “The engine that pulled the train on which Lenin arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917 was not preserved. So Engine #293, by which Lenin escaped to Finland and then returned to Russia later in the year, serves as the permanent exhibit, installed at a platform on the station.”

Exactly a year later, Gandhi organized an India-wide day of prayer and fasting in response to the April 13 killing of unarmed Sikh celebrants by General Dyer’s troops in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

On April 16, 1943, Albert Hoffman accidentally discovered that LSD was hallucinogenic while doing pharmaceutical research on the fungus ergot. Three days later he took the drug on purpose to verify its effects, and the rest is history. (I heard him lecture on this discovery when I was sitting in on Richard Schultes’s economic botany class at Harvard. He was a stiff, Swissy man who talked in a starched lab coat, not at all an acid head!)  Exactly two years later, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous  Letter from Birmingham Jail while locked up for protesting segregation. You can see the whole letter here.

On April 16, 1990, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, aka “Doctor Death”, helped in his first assisted suicide. After several more of these, he was jailed from 1999-2007.  Finally, on this day in 2007, 32 people were killed and 17 injured at Virginia Tech when Seung-Hui Cho, a mentally ill former student, went on a shooting rampage. He then shot himself in the head.

Notables born on this day include David Hume (1711), Ma Rainey (1886), Rudolf Hess (1894), Bernard Malamud (1914), I. M. Pei (1917), Fanny Blankers-Koen (1918), Carol Burnett (1933), Bobby Rydell (1942), and Melania Trump (1970). Remember this Rydell hit, “Swingin’ School”? OY!

Those who bought the farm on April 26 include John Wilkes Booth (1865), Arnold Sommerfeld (1951), Gypsy Rose Lee (1970), Count Basie (1984), Lucille Ball (1989), and Jayne Meadows (2015).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains Hili’s disgust: “Andrzej’s shoes really need cleaning – not of mud but of everyday dirt. They are simply dirty shoes which haven’t seen shoe polish for ages.”

Hili: I’m afraid you have to clean your shoes.
A: It’s none of your business.
In Polish:
Hili: Obawiam się, że musisz buty wyczyścić.
Ja: Nie twój interes.

And in his future home nearby, Leon asks about the exams that all Polish secondary-school students are taking:

Leon: Tell me about it. Was it difficult?

Opowiadajcie,jak było? Trudne?

A tweet from reader Barry, showing a cat getting a massage while hearing music. (Video; sound on.)

https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/1117421211443695617

A tweet from reader Nilou, who thinks these baby ravens are adorable:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. She said this about the first one: “How’s this for cute?” Be sure to watch the video:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1117281503283515392

I didn’t know, either. . .

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1117444746463440896

Matthew shows the variation in the vernacular words for a fish across the UK. Things get a little hairy in northwest England. (You may have to download and enlarge the picture.)

A science “hoax” perpetrated by a good science Twitter site, @justsaysinmice:

The conflagration at Notre Dame was horrible, but it appears that a large part of the main cathedral has been saved. I got an email today from a childhood playmate I had about 60 years ago and had lost track of until very recently. He told me this:

I just happened to see your recent comment about the Notre Dame fire:
  “I’m just unspeakably sad. Yes, it was a religious structure, but that doesn’t detract from its historical significance, its beauty, and the emotional effect it has on many (including me).”
That comment sparked my memory of a conversation I had with your father many years ago.  He told me that when you were very young they took you on your first tour of Paris.  He said nothing much impressed you and you seemed pretty bored by the whole excursion.  Then you went into Notre Dame and he said you stopped in your tracks and appeared absolutely mesmerized and in awe of the place. He said he had never seen you react quite so intensely at any other place you ever visited when at that age.  I have no idea how that emerged from a deep burial in my memory bank but there it is.

Tweets from Grania. This one is inexcusable as the study reports results in MICE. And it was tweeted by Discover Magazine!

A man and his best friend, a muscovy duck.

A snow leopard pounces, but no living creatures were hurt in the making of this video.

https://twitter.com/meowlibrary/status/1116910777728815104

 

Monday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

April 15, 2019 • 6:30 am

The work week has begun anew as we wend our way slowly toward extinction. It’s Monday, April 15, 2019, and if you’re an American, your tax form is due today.  It’s National Ham Day, from which Jews and Muslims are excluded. It’s also these days, too:

In honor of World Art Day, here is some lovely art; I needn’t tell you the painter:

On this day in 1755, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was published in London. On April 15, 1783, long after the fighting had ended, a preliminary peace treaty for ending the American RevolutionaryWar was ratified, at least according to Wikipedia, though I can find that date nowhere else. The error-ridden site says this: “Preliminary peace articles were signed in Paris on 30 November, while preliminaries between Britain, Spain, France, and the Netherlands continued until September 1783. The United States Congress of the Confederation ratified the Treaty of Paris on January 14, 1784. Copies were sent back to Europe for ratification by the other parties involved, the first reaching France in March 1784. British ratification occurred on April 9, 1784, and the ratified versions were exchanged in Paris on May 12, 1784. The war formally concluded on September 3, 1783.” Where’s April 15?

On this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln died after he was shot the previous evening in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. Vice-President Andrew Johnson became President.  On April 15, 1912, at 2:20 a.m., the RMS Titanic slipped beneath the sea after having struck an iceberg shortly before midnight.  On April 15, 1920, two security guards were murdered during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts: the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti were subsequently convicted and executed.

Again I find doubtful information in Wikipedia, which states that on this day in 1923, “Insulin becomes generally available for use by people with diabetes.” But I can find that date nowhere else. It is a fact, though, that on April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany was liberated by British and Canadian troops. Here are some of the happy women who survived and were liberated:

It was on April 15, 1947 that Jackie Robinson debuted at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first black man to play major league baseball.  Further, and again this is dubious, Wikipedia says that on this day in 1955, “McDonald’s restaurant dates its founding to the opening of a franchised restaurant by Ray Kroc, in Des Plaines, Illinois.”  Well, maybe the chain does, but look at this, also from Wikipedia:

The oldest operating McDonald’s restaurant is the third one built, opened in 1953. It is located at 10207 Lakewood Blvd. at Florence Ave. in Downey, California (at 33.9471°N 118.1182°W).

If you’re nearby, go visit it! (Downey, of course, was where the Carpenters were from.) But if this is the case, and the Golden Arches were already in place in 1953, then the franchise’s founding date is bogus. 

And according to Wikipedia’s article on McDonald’s No. 1 Store Museum (see below), we see where the date comes from: “Ray Kroc’s involvement with the firm.” Who cares??? What a Kroc!

The McDonald’s #1 Store Museum is housed in a replica of the former McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, opened by Ray Kroc in April 1955. The company usually refers to this as The Original McDonald’s, although it is not the first McDonald’s restaurant but the ninth; the first was opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California in 1940, while the oldest McDonald’s still in operation is the third one built, in Downey, California, which opened in 1953. However, the Des Plaines restaurant marked the beginning of future CEO Kroc’s involvement with the firm. It opened under the aegis of his franchising company McDonald’s Systems, Inc., which became McDonald’s Corporation after Kroc purchased the McDonald brothers’ stake in the firm.

The actual Des Plaines restaurant was demolished in 1984, but McDonald’s realized they had a history to preserve, so they built a replica.

I do remember when burgers, shakes, and fries were each 15 cents, so you could get a filling lunch for less than half a dollar. I grow old!

On this day in 1989, 96 Liverpool fans were killed during a human crush at Hillsborough Stadium in the FA Cup semifinal. This is known as the Hillsborough disaster.  Finally, it was on this day six years ago that the Tsarnaev brothers set off two bombs near the finish of the Boston Marathon, killing 3 and injuring 264.  One of the brothers was killed in the manhunt, while the other, Dzhokhar, was sentenced to death in federal court and is on death row in Colorado.

Notables born on this day include Leonardo da Vinci (1452), Guru Nanak (1469, the first Sikh guru), Leonhard Euler (1707), Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772), Émile Durkheim (1858), Thomas Hart Benton (1889), Nikita Khrushchev and Bessie Smith (both 1894), Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907), Kim Il-sung (1912), Harold Washington (1922), Dodi Fayed (1955), Emma Thompson (1959; she’s 60 today), and Seth Rogen (1982).

Those who gave up the ghost on Tax Day include Abraham Lincoln (1865, see above), Matthew Arnold (1888), Father Damien (1889), the victims of the Titanic, including John Jacob Astor IV and Isidor and Ida Strauss (all 1912), Wallace Beery (1949), Jean-Paul Sartre (1980), Jean Genet (1986), Greta Garbo (1990), Pol Pot (1998), and Edward Gorey (2000).  Gorey, of course, loved cats and often drew them:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is asking about the domestication of cats:

Hili: What actually united humans and cats?
A: I’m afraid it was mice.
In Polish:
Hili: Co właściwie połączyło ludzi i koty?
Ja: Obawiam się, że myszy.

And in nearby Wloclawek, it’s exam time for secondary-school students, and Leon wishes them luck:

Leon: Exam tomorrow? I’m keeping my claws crossed.
Jutro egzamin? Trzymam pazurki!

A gif from the CHEEZburger site, courtesy of reader Su. This cat would be a great goalie in the Feline League:

I found this one by looking at the Twitter sites that Matthew and Grania follow:

A tweet from reader Barry:

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1117109181402710017

Tweets from Matthew. I believe the first one is Kevin Richardson, aka The Lion Whisperer. Somehow he remains alive.

Oh man, that goose is a real jerk:

Progress in making robots is dramatic. Look at this one!

I don’t know what kind of kittens these are (Abyssinians?) but they’re adorable.

https://twitter.com/Mr_Meowwwgi/status/1116813347465375745

Tweets from Grania. The first one is muy heartwarming:

https://twitter.com/andrewfalloon/status/1117303245829885952

Poor lion! But he’s a good swimmer.

This should help you appreciate how small hummingbird nests and eggs are. You dare not eat that peach!

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1115677971891666944

The results of a human sneeze: