Monday: Hili dialogue

July 30, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday, July 30, 2018, the penultimate day of the month, and National Cheesecake Day. It’s also the International Day of Friendship, celebrated most vigorously in South America. I am down to six ducks: five ducklings plus Honey, and will do another census when I feed them in an hour. One thing’s for sure: I’ll have Honey for a while longer, as she is only now growing flight feathers after her molt.

On this day in 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, Virginia, met for the first time. And on this day in 1930, Uruguay won the first FIFA World Cup in its home town of Montevideo. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it, and I’ve put in a short video:

The first FIFA World Cup™ was one of a kind. Taking place wholly in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, the sport’s inaugural showpiece was rich in details that might bemuse the modern football fan: four teams arriving together on the same boat, an unfinished stadium, even a one-armed goalscorer in the Final. Yet it ended with a familiar outpouring of joy as the whole of Uruguay took a public holiday after La Celeste became the first world champions by defeating neighbours Argentina 4-2.

On July 30, 1956, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the Congressional resolution making “In God we Trust” the U.S. National Motto. Oy gewalt! Exactly six years later, the Trans-Canada Highway, the longest national highway on the planet, was officially opened.  And on this day in 1965, Lyndon Johnson created a huge feat of socialism, signing into law the Social Security Act of 1965, which included Medicaid and Medicare.  On July 30, 1966, England defeated West Germany 4-2 in the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final (played in London) in extra time. Here’s a 9.5-minute video of that dramatic match.

On this day in 1974, President Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon turned over the subpoenaed White House “Watergate tapes” to the special prosecutor after the U.S. Supreme Court said he had to.  One year later, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared from the parking lot of a restaurant outside Detroit, Michigan, and was never seen again. His fate remains a mystery. Finally, on July 30, 2003, the last Volkswagen Beetle made in the old style rolled off a Mexican assembly line.

Notables born on July 30 include Emily Brontë (1818), Thorstein Veblen (1857), Henry Ford (1863), Casey Stengel (1890), Henry Moore (1898), Buddy Guy (1936), Peter Bogdanovich (1939), Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947), Hilary Swank (1974), Misty May-Treanor (1977) and Hope Solo (1981). Those who expired on this day include William Penn (1718), George Pickett (1875), Claudette Colbert (1996), “Buffalo Bob” Smith (1998), and Michelangelo Antonioni (2007).

Moore did drawings as well as sculptures; here’s his “Jaguar”, drawn in 1981:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again fixated on noms:

Hili: We can talk about it at lunch.
A: Talk about what?
Hili: What’s for dinner..
In Polish:
Hili: Możemy o tym porozmawiać przy lunchu.
Ja: O czym?
Hili: Co będzie na obiad?

Some tweets from Matthew. First, street violence in Sweden.

https://twitter.com/Agha_Zadeh/status/1023290165622652931

More hares, this time in England:

Matthew explains the tweet below: “Phymata are assassin bugs, and their minds are always killing, even if they are otherwise occupied… Milichids are kleptoparasitic flies.”

Matthew says, “Watch until the end”:

https://twitter.com/RelktntHero/status/1023371591701409794

Not a leaf. What is it?

It’s this, a near-perfect example of mimicry:

This question is a bit confusing, but make a guess about where the heart might be:

From reader Gethyn:

Some tweets from Grania:

https://twitter.com/OregonJOBS2/status/1023009268939677696

This will probably be too late, as the poll expires in ten hours (I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon), but see the vote. I’d take physical immortality any day, though the conditions of aging and other stuff need to be specified.

Look at that d*g’s face!

https://twitter.com/PopularPups/status/1023052916243025922

A decent science pun:

The second tweet is the one to look at:

Finally, a cartoon, also contributed by Grania:

 

Sunday: Duck report (with fledging)

July 29, 2018 • 3:00 pm

Three of the ducklings have left the pond, apparently permanently (they were not there this morning or this afternoon). Five are left along with Honey. The smaller hen Phoebe is still timorous and hard to feed, which makes me anxious. I hope the other ducks go on their way soon so I can take proper care of her.

Pictures tomorrow.

Where did they go? I don’t know. Will I ever see them again? I doubt it. But I can take satisfaction in knowing that I helped get them strong and healthy for their migration.

It’s always the Jews’ fault

July 29, 2018 • 2:15 pm

I’m sick unto death of comments like this. This person, and I’ll withhold the expletives here, thinks it’s the Jews’ fault that they’re the victims of anti-Semitism around the world. Since when has it been okay to commit crimes or harass a group because of what some other members of that group are purported to do? It’s as if it’s okay to commit hate crimes against Muslims because of what ISIS does.

I’m sorry, but I can’t think of this person as anything but an anti-Semite, ready to say that because of Israel, Jews around the world deserve what befalls them.

I’m too weary to deal with this, so I’ll throw it to the readers. Right now I have ducks to feed: a genuinely pleasurable experience.

Worst restaurant items in America

July 29, 2018 • 12:30 pm

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has given out its Xtreme Eating Awards for 2018, and, I found some of these beyond belief. Now if you’re a regular here you know that I occasionally eat large meals, especially on vacation, and sometimes food considered “bad”, like rib tips and fries. But more often I eat healthier, and am doing so even more since I started fasting two days a week (I have lost considerable weight and am considering cutting back on the fasting). Today, for instance, I had a latte with 2% milk for breakfast, a salad and an apple with lunch, and tonight I’ll have an omelet with green peppers and some baguette, as well as a glass of decent wine. But if I couldn’t binge out once in a while, I’d consider life not worth living.

But here are some items that stretch the boundaries of badness. Have a look at the page, but here are some of the CSPI’s winners, along with their rationale (just below):

Each of these restaurant items manages to cram in close to a day’s calories, often accompanied by at least a day’s saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar.

That’s not easy. After all, a typical restaurant entrée has “only” about 1,000 calories. That’s one reason why “only” two out of three adults and one out of three children or teens are overweight or obese. But these dishes go the extra mile…just so more of us can start looking for extra-large-size apparel.

THE WINNER (for calories). I have to say, though, that I’d probably eat this as a binge food:

 

This one surprised me. When I was a kid in Germany, I used to eat soft pretzels, but haven’t had any in America that are close to the German version. Plus I almost never eat at the movies:

Now this doesn’t appeal to me at all, and look at the food-equivalent at the bottom:

Now, some of my guilty pleasures: An entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (I haven’t done this for a while), the large rib tips with mild sauce and fries at Uncle J’s BBQ on 47th Street (eaten as two meals), the giant Costco apple pie (eaten in about six goes).

I believe it was A. J. Liebling who said his aspiration was to think, on his deathbed, that “There have been kings who haven’t eaten as well as I.” And that’s the way he went!

76 merganser chicks in the Big Parade

July 29, 2018 • 10:15 am

I’ve been sent this story and photo by many readers, and have delayed putting it up. Could it be I was miffed because this duck outdid Honey? At any rate, the photo of a common merganser hen (Mergus merganser) with a train of 76 ducklings has gone viral. The story and one likely explanation is recounted in the New York Times piece (click on the screenshot to see it):

 

Why is this so popular? Three reasons, I think. The least of them is probably that this is an almost unprecedented number of ducklings tended by one hen. The other reasons are anthropomorphic: we see a huge number of cute baby ducks following mom in a neat line, and we emphathize with a mother who tends all those babies. A minor reason may be because the layperson has a scientific curiosity about how this can happen. But what do I know; I’m just an average Joe who does genetics.

At any rate, some excerpts from the NYT piece, with one explanation below:

Where she goes, they follow. All 76 of them.

A female duck in Minnesota has about six dozen ducklings in her care, a remarkable image that an amateur wildlife photographer captured on a recent trip to Lake Bemidji, about 150 miles northwest of Duluth, Minn.

“It was mind blowing,” the photographer, Brent Cizek, said in an interview. “I didn’t know that a duck could care for that many chicks.”

It’s not unusual to see many ducklings gathered together. Some 20 or 30 have been reported with a single hen. But 70-plus?

Here’s Cizek’s tweet:

Another excerpt:

The females at Lake Bemidji, many of which are related, lay eggs that hatch around the same time, he said. Afterward, he said, the adult ducks go off to molt their feathers, leaving their broods in the care of a matriarchal female.

“She’d be kind of like the great-grandmother,” Mr. Rave said.

While the practice is common for this species, Mr. Rave said, the size of the crèche in the photo is exceptional. “That’s a lot,” he said. “I’ve seen crèches up to 35 and 50 often, but 70 — that would be a very big crèche.”

Mr. Cizek, the photographer, has gone back to the lake several times to photograph the ducklings as they grow. He said he had seen other adult ducks around the brood, but when Mama swims away, the ducklings follow her.

“Everybody is really just amazed,” Mr. Cizek said. “Everybody keeps saying, ‘Mom of the Year.’”

Now that of course is not necessarily an explanation, for we want to know why this female duck tends so many young. After all, if none of them are her offspring, she has nothing to lose by flying off—unless they contain some of her genes, as suggested by the fact that some of the mothers are related, and may be related to “SuperMom”. We could test that by seeing if this kind of phenomenon is more common in lakes where females are more related. Alternatively, it’s her brood in there, too, and she simply has no way of cutting out the others, while other ducks have everything to gain by parasitizing the care of another female.  I’ll write Bruce Lyon, our Official Website Ornithologist™, to get his take on this.

More photos are here, including this one:

Lauren Southern prohibited from a Muslim “no go” zone in Sydney, Australia

July 29, 2018 • 8:45 am

It is necessary—but should be superfluous—for me to begin this post by saying I have no truck with Lauren Southern. A darling of extreme right-wingers everywhere, she’s a nativist, a jingoist, an anti-immigrant activisit, and, I suspect, a white supremacist. You might contest the latter characterization, but there’s no doubt that she’s a bigot.

Nevertheless, she has the right to speak and the right to go anywhere she wants in public. In this encounter, though, she wants to enter to a “no go” part of Sydney, Australia inhabited largely by Muslims. There’s no doubt she wanted to stir up trouble, as she did when she and her minions distributed “Allah is gay” flyers in Luton, England. The thing is, she has a right to do that; and, indeed, calling public attention to Islamic homophobia or sharia law has its beneficial side. Just as I’d defend anybody’s right to utter offensive speech, and just as the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party’s right to march in uniform and display swastikas in the largely Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois in 1977, I emphatically defend Southern’s right to say and do what she wants in public.

But there’s no First Amendment, I guess, in the Australian constitution. Here, in a 4-minute video, an Aussie police inspector tries to keep Southern from entering a “no go” zone”: the Sydney suburb of Lakemba. His reason? He has “grave concerns that she might cause a breach of the peace” because the area is “highly religious”:

Regardless of what you think of Southern, her counterarguments are sound: any “breach of the peace” would be the fault of those who would cause the trouble, not Southern. The cop, in fact, tells her that she isn’t allowed to enter the area and almost threatens her with arrest. He asks her “why do you want to criticize Islam?”, when in fact his warning answers that very question.

This, and the no-go zones in Paris I talked about yesterday, where Jews are unsafe, indicates how thoroughly the Muslims have insulated themselves from criticism—indeed, from the presence of non-Muslims!—in some parts of the West.  While street harassment of that type is not unique to Islam—I’m told there are parts of Jerusalem where those dressed “provocatively” on the Sabbath will be harassed by Orthodox Jews—the problem of “no-go” zones is largely due to the threat of Muslim offense. That threat is what has made this cop a coward, and has made the French government timorous when it comes to that nation’s burgeoning anti-Semitism.

If we allow Muslims, or those of any faith, to silence dissent by making threats of violence, then we might as well prohibit any cartoons that mock, disparate, or criticize religion, like the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Indeed, we might just silence any speech that offends someone else. And lest you say that the cop’s argument is sound because Southern’s presence might cause “imminent violence,” it is not a call for imminent violence, something that’s illegal under the courts’ construal of the American First Amendment. The call for violence comes from the Muslims who would attack her, not from Southern.

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 29, 2018 • 7:30 am

We haven’t heard from Stephen Barnard for a while. Apparently the fishing is too good in Idaho; but he found the time to snap some hummingbirds:

I’ve attached some in-flight hummingbird photos. Black-chinned (Archilochus alexandri) and Rufous (Selasphorus rufus). It should be obvious which is which. One rufous is a male in breeding plumage.They migrate through this time of year in great numbers and fight over the feeders with gusto. One of the female rufous is preparing for an imminent attack from above.

I’ve been fishing more and photographing less.