Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

January 27, 2019 • 6:45 am

It’s Sunday, January 27, 2019 and that means it’s National Chocolate Cake Day. It’s also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, honoring the day in 1945 when the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. If you’re ever in Kraków, Poland, do go visit it, as I did a few years ago. I can’t say it’s a pleasant excursion (see my short post on it here), but the visit will remain in your mind the rest of your life.

A tweet to help us remember:

You can read about the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau here, and here’s a video with interviews of historians and some survivors of the camps:

And a reader sent me a story just a few minutes ago:

Decades ago, when I worked in the anesthesia department of a hospital for special surgery (ophthalmology), one of my patients noted that, as I examined his arms looking for a suitable I.V. site & found his tattoo, a tear well up in my eye; he looked into my eyes, took my hand in his & comforted me!  Such was this survivor who was finally getting his cataracts out.  He did not want pity, but understanding.
On this day in 1302, Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence for belonging to the wrong faction of a fight between supporters of the Pope and of the Holy Roman Emperor. On January 27, the trial of Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators of the “Gunpowder Plot” began; they were all executed four days later.  On this day in 1820, according to Wikipedia, ” a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev discovers the Antarctic continent, approaching the Antarctic coast.” On January 27, 1944, the Siege of Leningrad by the Germans, which had lasted 900 days, was lifted. 

Exactly one year later, the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division liberated the inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau who had not been marched away. On this day in 1967, three Apollo astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed in a fire while their spacecraft was being tested at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Finally, it was on this day in 1996 that Germany first observed the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Notables born on this day include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756), Lewis Carroll (1832), Samuel Gompers (1850), Jerome Kern (1885), Elmore James (1918), Donna Reed (1921), Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948), Mimi Rogers (1956), and Rosamund Pike (1979). Here’s Elmore James, king of the slide guitar, playing “Dust My Broom”:

Those who died on January 27 include Francis Drake (1596), John James Audubon (1851), Giuseppe Verdi (1901), Nellie Bly (1922), Crew of Apollo 1 (1967; see above), Mahalia Jackson (1972), André the Giant (1993), Jack Paar (2004), John Updike (2009), J. D. Salinger (2010), and Pete Seeger (2014). And here’s Audubon’s raven (Corvus corvax) from the Birds of America folio (1840):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a new toy that dispenses cat treats when it’s batted about, but I suspects it annoys her, as she can’t figure out how it works! As Malgorzata wrote me, “This is not a new toy. We had it for about a year and Hili never understood that there are goodies inside and that she could get at them. This cat is not as intelligent as we thought. After a biscuit fell out and she ate it, she looked to Andrzej to produce another one. Last Friday we had a visit from Elzbieta and we gave her the ball to take home. Leon got the trick at once and is now happily pushing the ball and eating biscuits.”

When I wrote back that Leon was smarter than Hili, Malgorzata replied, “Yes, it is definitely so. But we love her anyhow.”

A: Inside this ball are scrumptious cat biscuits. You just have to bat it.
Hili: You do it!
In Polish:
Ja: W tej piłeczce są pyszne chrupki, wystarczy ją popchnać.
Hili: Zrób to.

Leon is still hiking in the mountains of southern Poland. Here he plans a trip:

Leon: I would love to travel where chamois are.
In Polish: Tu chciałbym pojechać,gdzie są kozice.

A tweet from reader Barry, who wonders why the pigeon doesn’t fly away:

https://twitter.com/Koksalakn/status/1089210997884309505

Tweets from Grania. The first is a response by Maajid Nawaz to the “progressive” new Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who isn’t that progressive. The incident he refers to is described here. An excerpt:

Omar, who has been under fire for not backing down from anti-Israel rhetoric, and who accused the Covington Catholic H.S. teens on Twitter of “taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants” (she has since deleted the false accusation), and then accused President Trump of backing a “coup in Venezuela” and installing “a far right opposition” opposed to Socialist Dictator Maduro is now getting heat for a letter that she wrote to a judge in 2016 defending a Minnesota man caught trying to join the terrorist organization ISIS.

Go look at the thread below to see what Germans think Americans eat. It’s funny! Hint to die Deutschen: Wir essen keine Lebensmittel “mini”!

Blissed out cat!

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1089202556360900609

Like most of us, Shappi Khorsandi is a fan of the unsinkable Titania McGrath. (In the UK, “BAME” refers to black, Asian, and minority ethnic people.) Unlike many, Shappi knows that Titania is a spoof of wokeness.

Tweets from Heather Hastie (via Ann German). This dog is being taught to be nice to birds:

https://twitter.com/StefanodocSM/status/1088741031825293313

Lunch to the right of me; lunch to the left of me. . .

Tweets from Matthew. Laurel and Hardy can’t possibly influence the brainwashed, can they?

A wonderful landing, but not much room for error! This reminds me of flying into the Lukla, Nepal airport in a Twin Otter. Turn the sound on for this one:

Matthew says “zoom in to see”.

Finally, one of the many pictures I took at Auschwitz in 2013. I always intended to do a full post on my visit there, but somehow couldn’t bear to do it. This shows the suitcases of Jews who, told that they would retrieve their belongings after their shower, were then gassed. The Germans kept the suitcases, as they did all the other “saved” possessions. This photo breaks my heart, as the suitcases bear the names and addresses of real people. On display at Auschwitz are also rooms full of toothbrushes, shaving apparatus, prosthetic limbs, and, saddest of all, the dolls of children who were killed.

 

Overpriced stuff

January 26, 2019 • 1:00 pm

I’ve previously written posts about things that I consider way overpriced: these includes coffee at Starbuck’s (a large black coffee can be over $3, not to mention the varieties of Confectionary Coffee like caramel macchiatos), as well as commercial toothpaste (Pepsodent costs about $1 a tube, and is just as good as much higher-priced toothpastes, which shows you how much the prices are inflated.)

On my fasting day on Thursday, having run out of diet soda (i.e., lunch), I visited the student union here to get a Diet Coke. I noticed that they had replaced the large paper cups with smaller plastic ones, which held, I estimate, about 12 ounces of soda. This cost $2.39. I don’t buy soda in cans, but I suspect that’s about six times what a can of the stuff would cost at the grocery store.

Yesterday I went to a local eatery for lunch, treating to lunch the departmental staff who watered my plants when I was gone. We all had sodas, and it cost $2.49 for an ice-laden soda. (Places also inflate prices by filling soda cups with ice, which of course is a ripoff: you don’t need that much ice to keep the drink cold.)

This is unconscionable, as the actual cost of the liquid to these places must be something downwards of 25¢. Like wine in nearly all restaurants, soda prices are inflated because, I guess, people are willing to pay too-high prices for drinks, so it covers the lower profit margin on food.

I protest! But my recourse is simply to buy diet sodas in 2-liter bottles at the grocery store, as I buy Pepsodent when I see it. I’m sure other readers have beefs about items they consider overpriced, and I encourage you to describe these beefs below.

Weekend reading

January 26, 2019 • 10:45 am

It’s supposedly my day off, though with the weather being Arctic, there’s not much to do outside—or even a reason to go outside. But I’ve read a few things that I’ll recommend if you too are housebound today.

First, a good column—especially the first part—from Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine (h/t Simon). It’s worth keeping up with him, as he’s becoming a voice of reason in this increasingly demented era of hatred and tribalism. Click on the screenshot:

This is about the Covington Mess and how both social and mainstream media, by going with their confirmation bias, is ruining America. And I agree. I’ll give a couple of good quotes:

Yes, the boys did chant some school riffs; I’m sure some of those joining in the Native American drumming and chanting were doing it partly in mockery, but others may have just been rolling with it. Yes, they should not have been wearing MAGA hats to a pro-life march. They aren’t angels; they’re teenage boys. But they were also subjected for quite a while to a racist, anti-Catholic, homophobic tirade on a loudspeaker, which would be more than most of us urbanites could bear — and they’re adolescents literally off the bus from Kentucky. I heard no slurs back. They stayed there because they were waiting for a bus, not to intimidate anyone.

. . . To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.

. . . Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. “I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,” Jessica Valenti tweeted. “And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.” This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.

There’s a reason why, in the crucial battle for the legitimacy of a free press, Trump is still on the offensive. Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism. My own trust in it is eroding. I’m far from the only one.

The other night I was having a drink with a friend who said he believed that the Trump threat was essentially over, as the shutdown took its toll. He noted what might become an inflection point in the polling. He was heartened by the midterms. He might be right. But I think that misses the core point about this presidency. From my perspective, the Trump threat to liberal democracy is deepening, largely because its racial animus and rank tribalism are evoking a response that is increasingly imbued with racial animus and rank tribalism, in an ever-tightening spiral of mutual hostility.

I especially like this bit:

What was so depressing to me about the Covington incident was how so many liberals felt comfortable taking a random teenager and, purely because of his race and gender, projected onto him all their resentments and hatred of “white men” in general. Here is Kara Swisher, a sane and kind person, reacting to the first video: “To all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming, after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go fuck yourselves.” Judging — indeed demonizing — an individual on the basis of the racial or gender group he belongs to is the core element of racism, and yet it is now routine on the left as well as the right. To her great credit, Kara apologized profusely for the outburst. The point here is that tribal hatred can consume even the best of us.

And this is what will inevitably happen once you’ve redefined racism or sexism to mean prejudice plus power. It’s reasonable to note the social context of bigotry and see shades of gray, in which the powerful should indeed be more aware of how their racial or gender prejudice can hurt others, and the powerless given some slack. But if that leads you to ignore or downplay the nastiest adult bigotry imaginable and to focus on a teen boy’s silent face as the real manifestation of evil, you are well on your way to creating a new racism that mirrors aspects of the old.

This is the abyss of hate versus hate, tribe versus tribe. This is a moment when we can look at ourselves in the mirror of social media and see what we have become. Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us. This process is greater than one president. It is bottom-up as well as top-down. Tyranny, as Damon Linker reminded us this week, is not just political but psychological, and the tyrannical impulse, ratcheted up by social media, is in all of us. It infects the soul of the entire body politic. It destroys good people. It slowly strangles liberal democracy. This is the ongoing extinction level event.

Andrew writes further about the legalization of marijuana, which has led to “dabbing”, or vaporizing concentrated weed resin. He decries this practice mainly because it leads to somnolence rather than facilitating good conversation, which is what he wants out of the drug. I am on his side, as I tend to become more gregarious when I partake. A few years ago tried dabbing in a state where it was legal to buy and smoke recreationally, and it blitzed me out for about 8 hours, in a way that just made me withdraw and want to sack out rather than chat. Our new governor has vowed to make marijuana legal in Illinois, and we’ll see if that happens. His third segment is about Brexit.

Speaking of Covington, one of the venues that’s tried its hardest to maintain its narrative in the face of changing facts is the Guardian, a site I rarely visit any more. Have a gander at this headline, from a story posted last Wednesday:

The article, and the Guardian as a whole, makes me ill; they’re presenting a caricature of the Left. When Wilson writes something like this, did he ever care about the truth? I don’t think so; he just wanted to maintain that the Covington students were still pariahs while dissing the conservative media that painted them as heroes. Nobody was a hero in that narrative, but neither were the boys nor the Native Americans pariahs. Wilson:

On Tuesday night, Fox News hosts continued to feast on the controversy, which was sparked by a standoff between Covington Catholic high school students and a Native American veteran called Nathan Phillips. Footage show students wearing pro-Trump Maga hats taunting the Omaha tribe elder. The relentlessly repeated talking point – that there was a collective “rush to judgment” on the boys because they were Trump supporters – was used by conservative anchors Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to attack mainstream media and left leaning social media users.

. . . As of Wednesday, as a result of these well-worn tactics, liberal media has almost completely backed away from their initial, justified take on the story.

When will we ever learn?

Yep, use the kids to go after your favorite targets.  And “initial justified take on the story”? I don’t think so!

Speaking of social-media outrage, here’s a good article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf:

A quote:

For example: I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.

Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent half an hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.

On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.

One cannot help but wonder whether there are better norms. . .

From Inside Higher Ed, Alan Sokal, author of the Great Hoax, criticizes the persecution of philosopher Peter Boghossian by his employer Portland State University (PSU) after Peter, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose submitted fake articles to humanities journals, exposing the egregiously low standards of those journals—and the disciplines as a whole. PSU found Peter guilty of violating rules about experimentation on human subjects—in this case, the subjects were journal editors and reviewers—without following “human subject research” policy.  Found guilty, Peter may be fired. Yet the federal regulations apply only to federally-funded research, which wasn’t behind Boghossian et al.’s work. Portland State just decided as its policy to follow the federal rules. Read on:

Sokal thinks this punishment is dumb, and I agree, but those who think the excesses of the humanities are just fine, thank you, are going for Peter’s throat. Vindictiveness reigns.

And Portland State University, like many other universities, has decided, as a matter of its own internal policy, to apply federal IRB rules to all research carried out by PSU employees or students — though such treatment is legally mandatory only for projects sponsored by the federal government, which Boghossian’s was not.

But common sense suggests that something has gone seriously awry here, when rules initially written to protect subjects in biomedical research from physical harm — and later extended to social-science research, where the harm could be psychological — are applied blindly and literally to an “audit study” aimed at testing the intellectual standards of scholarly journals. As Singal observed, “the potential for harm came in the form of reputational damage and humiliation to journal editors and reviewers.” But so what? The journal editors are professionals undertaking a public responsibility, not people in the street. If they screw up, why shouldn’t this be publicly known? Moreover, the journal editors are not voiceless: if their actions were defensible (as they may well have been), they and their supporters can set forth their reasons, and the rest of us can evaluate the competing arguments with our own brains.

Please note that the issue here is different from the one addressed in two recent articles, where it was proposed that research projects deemed to pose “low risk” might be exempted from IRB review (an issue that is quite delicate, as the comments on these articles show). Here I am not contending that the reputational risk to journal editors caught publishing grossly deficient articles is low. Quite the contrary: this risk can, depending on the circumstances, be severe. What I am contending, rather, is that journal editors do not deserve to be protected from this type of risk.

What we see here is a guy being punished not for violating sensible rules, but for violating senseless ideology.

Finally, The Washington Post calls out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for telling whoppers, which she does habitually. And it’s a shame, as I like many of her policy recommendations. But she keeps shooting herself in the foot with misstatements and a fulminating love of the limelight (h/t Heather Hastie for the link):

The Post:

Ocasio-Cortez deserves credit for using her high profile to bring attention to income inequality. However, she undermines her message when she plays fast and loose with statistics. A lot of Americans do not earn enough for a living wage, but we cannot find evidence that it is the majority. Amazon and Walmart pay well above the minimum wage, contrary to her statement, and it is tendentious to claim those companies specifically get some sort of a wealth transfer from the public when such benefits flow to all low-wage workers in many companies. Overall, she earns Three Pinocchios.

The new Representative is awarded three Pinocchios for her misstatements, which, on the Post’s ratings, represent “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of “mostly false.”

 

Caturday felids: Best of cat photos; Bessie Bamber, cat artist; and our own cat artist

January 26, 2019 • 9:15 am

We’re back again with the Caturday felids, though I’m not sure how many people want this feature to remain. Weigh in below if you do.

First up is an article from BoredPanda with a compendium of funny cat photos. There are at least fifty, but I’ll show six; go see the rest as they’re all good.

**********

The Great Cat, an inexhaustible source of feline art, has an article about Bessie Bamber (1870-?), one of the most famous cat painters of our era (of course who knows cat painters?). Here’s what they say about her and some photos of her paintings:

Would you pay thousands of pounds for one of these?

***********

Speaking of cat paintings, we have a better one from a reader. Greg Geisler sent what he describes this way:

The cat was a friend’s beloved pet. She was very upset at his passing so I made this portrait for her. His name was Able. The portrait is woodburning and mixed media on reclaimed wood.

h/t: Tom, Su, Michael

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 26, 2019 • 7:30 am

We have a batch of lovely insect photos from reader Mark Sturtevant. His captions and links are indented:

Here are more pictures of insects that were taken over the summer 2017.

A sign that summer is on the wane are the wandering fuzzy caterpillars looking for a place to make a cocoon. The first picture is of a caterpillar that was wandering, and so I placed it on a plant for pictures. It is the larva of the Virginian tiger moth (Spilosoma virginica).

Next are a mating cluster of Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica), with several males contesting access to a female. These are, of course, an invasive beetle that has become a serious crop and garden pest. When I was young I would not see these beetles since their invasion had not yet entered my area. Now they are everywhere, eating the leaves of a variety of plants. But it must be admitted they are also rather beautiful.

The odd looking black and yellow wasp in the next picture was completely new to me. It turns out to be Nysson plagiatus, and it has a rather interesting biology in that it is a kleptoparasite. Specifically, it lays its eggs in the provisioned burrows of related wasps like golden digger wasps plus a few other species. The larvae then eat the food provided by the first wasp, which will be paralyzed insects of one kind or another.

The next picture is of a generally black wasp on pure white flowers (difficult!). This is the one-spotted spider wasp, Episyron biguttatus, which provisions its burrow with paralyzed spiders.

Next are two pictures of European praying mantises (Mantis religiosa). The first is a male. He was extremely anxious to get away from me and would not hold still. I did not press it very hard and soon allowed him to move on.

The second is a very pregnant female that I rescued from a busy parking lot. She really needed to put down some oothecae to lighten up!

One of the fields that I visit has a very small, temporary-looking pond that is surprisingly popular with the local dragonflies. One day I had visited the location with a friend (who also does macrophotography), and there we saw a dragonfly that was new to both of us. We managed to take a couple of in-flight pictures, and from these they could be identified. They were wandering gliders (Pantala flavescens), which is an interesting species described in the Ohio DNR field guide—which btw publishes several different free, online field guides—as the only dragonfly that is found worldwide. It is a tremendous traveler and has even been seen far out to sea. Another thing noted was that multiple generations emerge in the summer and it likes to breed in temporary ponds. That explained this sighting.

In light of its having multiple generations, I made it a point to return every couple weeks. Sure enough, this paid off as I had hoped with a new generation of recently emerged “teneral” wandering gliders out in the field near the pond. With their new wings, they were unable to fly far and so were easy pickings for the camera. I like how the shiny new wings look like they are made of water.

Late in the summer appear numerous purple aster flowers growing in the wild, and these are favored by small bees. I have become a bit obsessed with photographing the metallic green Halictid bees, a.k.a. ‘striped sweat bees’ (Agapostemon) that are common visitors to these flowers, as the combination of bee and flower colors are simply amazing. The next picture shows a beautiful female A. virescens with an unknown bee admiring the scene. This is one of my favorite pictures from the summer of 2017, and I would encourage readers to embiggen it.

I have only recently come to realize that there are at least three different species of green Halictid bees in my area, and I have no doubt misidentified several in my picture collection. So next summer I will want to fill out this species inventory with more pictures that are properly identified. It does not take much to get me talking about the many things I have learned in this hobby! The internet meme shown in the last picture pretty much conveys what this hobby does to people.

 

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

January 26, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Saturday, January 26, 2019, and the weekend is here. It’s shaping up to be the coldest week in the 33 years I’ve been in Chicago, with two snowstorms between now and Monday and sub-freezing temperatures next week. Here are the high and low temperatures for both days in Fahrenheit and Celsius. At the moment it’s -5ºF (-21ºC). Look at Wednesday!

Fahrenheit:

Celsius:

It’s National Peanut Brittle Day, which is an okay treat if made with good peanuts and lots of butter, and also Australia Day in Australia, marking the anniversary of the arrival of Britain’s “First Fleet” in 1788, a fleet of 11 ships carrying about 700 convicts to found a penal colony. The group landed on January 26 at Port Jackson in what is now New South Wales.

On this day in 1564, the Council of Trent, reacting to the Protestant Reformation, declared all forms of Protestantism to be heresy. On January 26, 1838, Tennessee enacted the first U.S. Prohibition law in the U.S., banning the sale of spirits in stores and taverns. I can’t find out how long it lasted, but it surely lapsed before nationwide prohibition began in January, 1919.  Exactly three years later,  Commander James Bremer took possession of Hong Kong for the British.

On January 26, 1905, the world’s largest diamond, the Cullinan, weighing 3,106.75 carats (about 1.3 pounds!) was unearthed at the Premier Mine near Pretoria. South Africa. It was bought by the Transvaal Colony and given to King Edward VII on his birthday. Wikipedia describes the disposition of the big uncut stone:

Cullinan produced stones of various cuts and sizes, the largest of which is named Cullinan I or the Great Star of Africa, and at 530.4 carats (106.08 g) it is the largest clear cut diamond in the world. Cullinan I is mounted in the head of the Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross. The second-largest is Cullinan II or the Second Star of Africa, weighing 317.4 carats (63.48 g), mounted in the Imperial State Crown. Both diamonds are part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom.

Seven other major diamonds, weighing a total of 208.29 carats (41.66 g), are privately owned by Queen Elizabeth II, who inherited them from her grandmother, Queen Mary, in 1953. The Queen also owns minor brilliants and a set of unpolished fragments.

Here’s the rough stone, the Great Star of Africa in the Sceptre, and the Cullinan II in the Imperial State Crown:

On this day in 1926, Scottish engineer John Logie Baird made the first demonstration of television to the Royal Institution and the London Times.  In 1945, Audie Murphy, born to a family of sharecroppers in Texas, standing atop a flaming tank and wounded in the leg, held off a huge group of Germans single-handedly, killing or wounding 50 of them (he was a good shot). For this he won the Medal of Honor and went on to act in many films. He was perhaps America’s most decorated soldier in World War II. Here are his decorations, with the Medal of Honor around his neck:

On January 26, 1965, Hindi became the official language of India. And in 1998, Bill Clinton went on television to deceive the American public. He said, among other things, this:

Notables born on this day include Alexander Carlyle (1722), Douglas MacArthur (1880), Maria von Trapp (1905), Stéphane Grappelli (1908), Paul Newman (1925), Angela Davis and Jerry Sandusky (both 1944), Jacqueline du Pré (1945), Gene Siskel (1946), Anita Baker and Ellen DeGeneres (both 1958), and Wayne Gretzky (1961).

Those who died on this day include Edward Jenner (1823), Théodore Géricault (1824), Abner Doubleday (1893), Nikolai Vavilov (1943; geneticist who died in the gulag for promoting the truth about science), Lucky Luciano (1962), Hugh Trevor-Roper (2003), and Abe Vigoda (2016).

Here’s Vigoda playing Sal Tessio in The Godfather, being taken away to be killed for treachery towards the Family:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a Hili dialogue with a title! Backstory: the cream container is sitting on the table, but there’s not a drop in Hili’s bowl. Oy!

CONTEXTUALIZATION
Hili: This cream is taken out of context.
A: What is its context?
Hili: My bowl.
In Polish:

KONTEKSTUALIZACJA

Hili: Ta śmietanka jest wyrwana z kontekstu.
Ja: A jaki jest jej kontekst?
Hili: Miseczka.

Tweets from Matthew. The first one came from a “sort of cat”:

A lovely chimeric cat, with a video in the thread:

Neil Shubin is apparently camping in Antarctica, and also apparently looking for fish fossils (remember, it used to be much warmer there):

The latest on Matthew’s moggie Harry the Cat and his Cone of Shame (he had to wear it because he hurt his toe). Too bad there are no photos of this. . . .

Be sure you turn the sound up on this one. What stately geese!

Tweets from Grania. The first begins a thread that’s well worth reading. Tweeted by a journalism professor, it explains why newspapers are dying.

A slime-producing starfish. Can any reader enlighten us?

For the 12 year olds among us:

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1088830309515362304

This is a biology video; guess what it is (partial solution in the thread):

Twitter’s translation of the above:

[Presentation of research results] the movie was observed by a fluorescence microscope the state of intercellular signaling when the slime cells that expressed camp-sensitive fluorescent probes were set. It is understood that the signal is transmitted as a spiral wave in the group. Photographed by Mr. Hashimura.

Some great photos of cats looking at themselves in the mirror:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1088515310196387841

I think this is a margay kitten (Leopardus wiedii) but I’m not sure.

https://twitter.com/fluff/status/1087790489309532166