Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 2, 2018 • 6:46 am

It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day, which means a day of napping and eating: September 2, 2018. It’s also National “Grits for Breakfast” Day, but why the scare quotes? Grits are an awesome and integral part of the American Southern breakfast, which ideally includes homemade biscuits with homemade peach preserves, country ham with red-eye gravy, fried eggs, grits (to mix with the smooshed eggs), and lots of strong coffee. It’s also National Blueberry Popsicle Day, another tribute to a quiescently frozen confection.

Recommended reading for today: Heather Hastie’s new post, “The NRA bait and switch,” a good indictment of American gun culture. I’ll reproduce one of her illustrations to show how ridiculously lame the NRA’s (and gun advocates’) defense of gun ownership is:

On this day in 44 BC, Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt (yes, that Cleopatra), named her son (Ptolemy XV Casarion) as co-ruler.  On September 2, 1666, the Great Fire of London began. Starting at a bakery on Pudding Lane, it destroyed, besides the original St. Paul’s Cathedral, the homes of about 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents.  On this day in 1752, Great Britain and some of its overseas colonies adopted the Gregorian Calendar, established by Pope Gregory in 1582, advancing the date from October 4 to October 15.  On September 2, 1901, President Teddy Roosevelt, speaking at the Minnesota State Fair, for crying out loud, said his famous phrase, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

On this day in 1939, on the second day of World War II, Nazi German annexed the Free City of Danzig, an autonomous city-state (it’s now Gdánsk, Poland).  On September 2, 1946, the Interim Government of India was formed, with Jawaharlal Nehru having the power of a Prime Minister. On September 2, 1963, the first network news broadcast lasting a half hour took place on CBS. Previously all evening news was just 15 minutes long, but since that’s the only show I watch regularly, I’d prefer it to be an hour long, as it is on PBS. On this day in 1998, Swissair Flight 111 crashed near Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, killing all 229 people aboard (I’ve been to the memorial site). Finally, five years ago today, the replacement span for the eastern portion of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened at 10:15 p.m. It cost $6.4 billion and was a replacement for the original span damaged in the 1989 earthquake.

Not many notables were born on this day, which means that not many people had sex in December (I guess it was too cold). Those born include Billy Preston (1946), Christa McAuliffe (1948), Keanu Reeves (1964), and Salma Hayek (1966).  Those who expired on September 2 include Henri Rousseau (1910), Alvin C. York (1964), J. R. R. Tolkien (1973), geneticist Barbara McClintock (1992, Nobel Laureate), Christiaan Barnard (2001), and Bob Denver (2005).

Here’s a lovely Rousseau called “The Tiger Cat“:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili faces a dilemma (the snacks were sent from Japan by Hiroko):

A: Do you prefer Japanese treat or cream?
Hili: Both.
In Polish:
Ja: Co wolisz, japoński przysmak, czy śmietankę?
Hili: Jedno i drugie.

Tweets sent by Matthew. This first one reflect the words of a man who might very well be President of the U.S.—and sooner than we think.

Here’s a graph; go to the original tweet to see Brits and Eastern Europeans.  This reflects the national psyche, I suppose:

Matthew calls this a “sad tweet”, and I agree with him when he says, “He shouldn’t be in a zoo, but then I don’t give him much hope outside.”

Tweets from Grania. The first one is quite amazing.

https://twitter.com/kengarex/status/1035399931975090177

This could start a whole genre: renamed paintings.

Baby bears in a pool—what could be cuter?

Reader Nilou sent the first tweet, but now have a look at the responses:

Responses:

https://twitter.com/ArunDickshit/status/1034676077451337729

And this reminds me of the most bizarre name I’ve ever heard given the guy’s profession.  It’s the doctor below, who works in Northern Virginia. He’s real, and he was the gynecologist of a friend of mine. See here.

Why didn’t he at least go by “Harold”? And imagine the jibing he got!

A Jewish cowboy

September 1, 2018 • 2:52 pm

I photographed this years ago in the local museum in Independence, California. I know nothing about this guy, nor where “Hominy” is, except that this must have been the only Jewish cowboy in history. And he looks it—as if someone took a yeshiva bocher and put him in cowboy boots and a hat. (The photo is not a joke, by the way.)

This should have been in my book Jewish Sports Heroes that a friend gave me. And that book includes, as a sport, chess.

When I returned to the museum several years after I took this photo of a photo, it had disappeared. I was sad because I wanted to buy it.

Caturday felid trifecta: Cats wait for the mailman, cat versus seal, angry texting cat

September 1, 2018 • 9:45 am

I’m off to California this week, but I’ll try to keep the Caturday felids going while I’m gone. (As far as I know, I haven’t missed one in years.) In the meantime, here’s today’s trifecta, beginning with a series of video clips of cats dealing with the mailman (mailperson?). I like the ones in which the cats either accept or reject the mail going through the slot.

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Go to this link (click on screenshot) to see a cat pwning a seal:

 

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Here’s a cute video in which a cat and its staff text back and forth, with the cat reacting to the adoption of a new kitten:

h/t: Su, Heather Hastie

Live coverage of John McCain’s service in Washington (10 a.m. ET)

September 1, 2018 • 8:49 am

NBC News is livestreaming on YouTube the memorial service for John McCain at Washington National Cathedral. The cortege stopped at the Vietnam Memorial so Cindy McCain could lay a wreath—a poignant moment (go to 45 minutes in the feed).

You can see the service livestreamed below; the service starts in about 10 minutes, and features as speakers both George W. Bush and Barack Obama: a show of bipartisanship arranged by McCain himself before he died.

Say what you will about McCain—and I’ve had readers who say he should be demonized rather than eulogized—you have to hand it to him for explicitly refusing to invite Donald Trump to both of his memorial services. (Sarah Palin wasn’t invited either).

CNN reports this:

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Meghan McCain, one of the late senator’s daughters, are also on the list of those slated to speak at Saturday’s memorial service.

Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden, who delivered an emotional eulogy for McCain at a memorial service in Arizona on Thursday, will serve as a pallbearer on Saturday.

Actor Warren Beatty, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and former chief of staff to McCain Mark Salter will also serve as pallbearers, among others.

Here’s a screenshot of Barack and Michelle Obama before the service began. The ex-President looks very somber:

Watch the service here:

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 1, 2018 • 7:30 am

It’s time for me to make my sporadic plea for wildlife photos, as the tank is getting too low for my taste. If you have good ones, please send them my way.

From reader Barbara Wilson we have a bizarre fungus:

There was a dead man’s foot in the garden on campus yesterday.  So I photographed it. It is Pisolithus arhizus, a bascidiomycete, a fungus.  It produces bundles of spores in a black, gelatinous matrix that can be used for dyes, so it’s also called dyeball.  It breaks down to release a mass of brownish spores.  The non-fruiting part is a mass of underground, thread-like structures that are mycorrhizal symbionts of conifers and perhaps other plants.

 

From Reader William Benzon, who took these near Jersey City, New Jersey:

Here’s a wonderful fungus on one of the birch trees:  [JAC: this doesn’t look like an oyster mushroom; does anyone know the species?]

Here are some of your beloved ducks. The building in the background at the lower right is One World Center, aka, the Freedom Tower, during construction.

Reader Amy Edmonds sent a cicada that landed on her porch umbrella (I don’t know the species):

Saturday: Hili dialogue

September 1, 2018 • 6:32 am

We’re now into September, which used to fill me with dread as it was “back to school time.” Now, however, I just mourn the passing of summer and the departure of my ducks. It’s Saturday, September 1, 2018, the first day of the three-day Labor Day weekend in America, and National Gyro Day. (I may have rib tips, as a new place opened up on 71st Street). In New Zealand, my second country, it’s Random Acts of Kindness Day (Feb. 17 in the U.S.) and I wonder if anyone here will perform one. If you do, put it below with details.

On this day in 1715, Louis XIV of France died; he had reigned 72 years—the longest reign of any European monarch. (In contrast, Queen Victoria reigned a mere 63½ years.) On this day in 1878, Emma Nutt became the world’s first female telephone operator, recruited by Alexander Graham Bell to work for the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company. Here she is working alongside her sister Stella and two male operators in that same year. Note that they had to work standing up—what a job!

On September 1, 1914, St. Petersburg, Russia, had its name changed to Petrograd. A decade later it became Leningrad, and then reverted to St. Petersburg in 1991. On the very same day, the last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha was estimated to be 29 years old, dying of old age (she’s now stuffed and mounted). Here she is still alive in that year:


Stuffed and mounted (2015):

 

On this day in 1934, the first MGM animated cartoon, The Discontented Canary, was first shown in movie theatres. Here it is:

And of course it was on this day in 1939 that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe. On that same day, Hitler signed an order to begin systematically euthanizing disabled and mentally ill people. On this day in 1952, Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea, was first published. Exactly two decades later, Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland to gain the world chess championship.  On September 1, 1983, a Soviet jet fighter shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 when the plane accidentally entered Russian airspace. All 269 people on board were killed. Finally, on September 1, 1985, a French and American expedition located the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.

Notables born on September 1 include Engelbert Humperdinck (1854), Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875), Rocky Marciano (1923), Art Pepper (1925), Ann Richards (1933), Alan Dershowitz (1938), Barry Gibb (1946, the last surviving Bee Gee), Russ Kunkel (1948), Gloria Estafan (1957) and Padma Lakshmi (1970).

Here’s Pepper’s live rendition of “But Beautiful” at the Village Vanguard. I think it’s one of the most moving and plaintive jazz songs ever—a scream of anguish through a saxophone. (Pepper had a rough life.)  George Cables is on piano, George Mraz on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums.

Notables who died on September 1 include Jacques Cartier, Louis XIV (see above), Siegfried Sassoon (1967), Albert Speer (1981) and Luis Walter Alvarez (1988, Nobel Laureate).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili made a funny:

A: Look how many apples have fallen during the night.
Hili: Gravity must’ve been exceptionally strong.
In Polish:
Ja: Patrz ile jabłek w nocy spadło.
Hili: Musiała być wyjątkowo silna grawitacja.

Reader Barry wants to know what breed of cat this is, as he suspects it may be a robot.

https://twitter.com/Koksalakn/status/1035477009986715648

From reader Blue; this has been verified by Snopes:

Tweets from Matthew. We all know that honey badgers are fierce, but have a look at them coming up against lions:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1033637861919088640

Look at the snout on this weevil!

. . . and a very bizarre fish:

A striking example of sexual selection:

There are some wits on the Internet:

Tweets from Grania. Who knows what these medieval artists were smoking?

A kitty playing patty-cake with its staff:

and interspecific love. . .

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1035191820182011905

 

Friday duck report

August 31, 2018 • 2:45 pm

Honey was here all day yesterday, and was joined at some point between yesterday evening and this morning by Jim (James Pond), her enormous and handsome boyfriend.  Apparently they’ve bonded somehow, as he probably came back here for her, the noms, or both.  I have no idea where the two of them go when they’re not here. At any rate, Anna and I decided that we couldn’t let them migrate south in a state of sin, so Anna pronounced Jim and Honey married and then we gave them lunch.

Here’s Honey yesterday afternoon. Look at those flight feathers all lined up neatly. She’s a beauty!

At yesterday’s feeding—and both ducks are now gobbling the duckling chow that Honey rejected during her molt—Honey was bothered by both turtles and fish. There are two species of fish: goldfish (koi) and those small dark numbers in the photo below. Can anyone identify this fish?

Anna was amused by the goldfish competing for food with Honey, and took her picture. I then took a picture of Anna taking a picture of Honey. I quite like this shot, which Anna describes as “meta.”

Honey on Duck Island #1 (the north one). She and Frank sometimes rested on separate islands, but after they were officially wed today they both repaired to this island for their Honeymoon.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Honey, as it shows the great beauty of her plumage, her high cheekbones, the neat array of her feathers, and her cute beady brown eyes. It’s also a good photo of her bill for identification should she return next year.

Honey and James having breakfast this morning. He’s still very polite, and they eat together without competition or rancor.

See?

Here’s a low-quality video of breakfast (it was dark and early when I took this). Note that at 54 seconds, James swims backwards, something I’ve seen him do even more strikingly, and something that I’ve never seen Honey do. I don’t know how he does that, but he’s capable of swimming about six feet backwards very fast. Since he’s become tamer, and since he’s discovered that what we feed Honey tastes really good to him, too, he’s come closer to us. Thus we’ve discovered that James constantly emits a series of low quacks. I have a video that should reveal the quacks, but I’ll put that up this weekend.

I still think that, because of his white feathers and huge size, James is a partial hybrid with a domesticated mallard (Long Island duck).

No bread!:

Have a good Labor Day weekend (if you’re American)! I’ll be here tending the ducks (if they’re here).