Sunday: Hili dialogue

March 25, 2018 • 6:45 am

Good morning: it’s March 25, 2018, and, luckily, the snow missed Chicago yesterday. I hope that’s the last threat of snow we have before summer. It’s International Waffle Day, too, and I could use one, topped with butter and real maple syrup. Alas, this isn’t in the offing: I had two pieces of cinnamon toast and a latte. Finally, it’s Tolkien Reading Day, so read some Tolkien.

On March 25, 1306, Robert the Bruce became the King of Scotland.  On this day in 1655, Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. In 1807, the Slave Trade Act became a law in Britain, abolishing slave trading throughout the British Empire. On this day in 1811, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for writing his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (a quote from that pamphlet is the frontispiece of Faith Versus Fact).  On this day in 1911, the disastrous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred in New York City. Escape from the burning garment sweatshop was difficult because some of the exit doors were locked. As Wikipedia notes:

The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian and Jewish immigrant women aged 16 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and “Sara” Rosaria Maltese.

63 of the victims jumped to their deaths. As a result, New York State reformed its labor laws, began installing sprinklers, making sure there were fire exits, and so on.

On this day in 1931, the nine Scottsboro Boys, a group of black youth riding a train, were arrested in Alabama and charged with rape. They were almost surely not guilty, yet all but one served prison time. It was a huge case, touching on issues of endemic racism (the accusers were two white women, there was no physical evidence of rape, and the conviction were of course brought in by an all white jury).  Finally, on this day in 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, on their honeymoon in Amsterdam, held their first Bed-In for Peace at the local Hilton, which lasted 7 days. Remember this?:

Notables born on March 25 include Simon Flexner (1863), Gutzon Borglum (1867; he designed the Mount Rushmore monument), Howard Cosell (1918), author Paul Scott (1920), Flannery O’Connor (1925), Gloria Steinem (1934), Elton John (1947), Sarah Jessica Parker (1965), and Danica Patrick (1981). Those who expired on this day include Claude Debussy (1918), Viola Liuzzo (1965), photographer Edward Steichen (1973), and Buck Owens (2006).

Here is Steichen’s “Nude with Cat’ (1902-1903):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili contemplates a quote from Winnie the Pooh. If you can’t read the framed quote, here it is:

Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other one was the left, but he never could remember how to begin.

The dialogue:

Hili: I like this quotation.
A: Why?
Hili: It reminds me that we always have to make our own decisions.
In Polish:
Hili: Lubię ten cytat!
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Uświadamia mi, że decyzja należy zawsze do nas.

Reader cesar sent a photo, which reminds me of Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a man but a cat.”:

Matthew found this tweet of an amazing dust storm approaching a ship:

https://twitter.com/historylvrsclub/status/977192477861007363

Now why on earth would they do this? Seriously??!?!

Metamorphoisis from a caterpillar to an adult moth or butterfly is an amazing process, and its evolutionary origins are still obscure:

The story of Dusty and Otter in three minutes. DUCKS! Look at their “duck mansion”! These ducks live in paradise, even getting tucked in every night. (I’m going to try feeding tomatoes to my ducks.)

I’m not sure what a Guillermo del Toro monster is, but here you go:

Grania loves cross-species friendships, and here are four:

And a cat playing an organ:

Finally, Matthew sent baby ferrets. LOOK AT THEM!

 

Saturday squirrels

March 24, 2018 • 1:30 pm

I haven’t neglected my squirrels, who get sunflower seeds, peanuts, and fresh water at least twice a day. Sometimes in the morning, when I haven’t yet fed them, they tap or bang on my office window to remind me that they’re hungry (they’re fed next door, in the lab). I’ll hear a banging or scratching, and this is what I see:

When I leave the window open while changing the water, they often come into the lab (one poked its head in my office the other day, looking for noms). I’ll shoo them outside and make sure they have a big pile of food.  If I leave the window open for a while, they’re perfectly capable of finding my bag of peanuts, gnawing it open, and making off with a pound or two. Yes, they’ve done that.

 

 

Misfortune in the grocery store

March 24, 2018 • 12:45 pm

This has happened to me twice in the last week. When it first occurred, I wrote about it on Facebook, with mixed comments, and then it happened again this morning. I had to pick up some produce, which included just a small amount: a wee bag of radishes (try them the French way: sliced on a baguette with sweet butter), two limes, and six pears. When I shop at the produce store early (it opens at 8 a.m.), I usually have the place largely to myself. As I approached the checkout line, a portly man with a cart full of groceries—and by that I mean at least 30 items—got there right before me. I looked at him wistfully, holding up my small amount of food and hoping he’d say “Oh, go ahead.”

No dice. He slowly and painfully put his items on the belt (he was older), and I shuffled my feet while this whole tedious process took place (he had trouble paying, too). The dude knew that I could have breezed through the line in a few seconds (I had cash, too), but ignored me.

Six days ago, I posted this on Facebook:

Supermarket crowded, “10 items or less” line closed, and I have a single bottle of vinegar in my hand. Everyone in front of me has a full basket. What do you think happened? Did people wave me to the front, saying, “Oh, go ahead” given my 10-second transaction (I also had exact change)? Nope; I waited 25 minutes.

People are no longer gracious and polite.

GET OFF MY LAWN!

For some reason this inspired a lot of comments, including some from Canadians saying that they’d have let me cut ahead of them (of course!), one from a Texan who told me to move away from the big, cruel city, another from someone telling me to go to Costco to buy the five-gallon jug of vinegar so this wouldn’t happen too often, and even someone saying I shouldn’t go to the grocery store to make such a small purchase. BUT THAT’S WHAT THE “10 ITEMS OR LESS” line is for (it should say “10 items or FEWER”).

I would always let someone with a tiny purchase go ahead of me. And in fact others have done so, but far less frequently than politesse would dictate. Further, the people who insist on being ahead of me with their truckload of groceries always have trouble paying.  Either their debit card doesn’t work, or they painfully and slowly write a check, or they fumble interminably in their change purse.

If I was superstitious, I would think I’ve been cursed to always get in the slowest grocery line. Even when I pick one with fewer people waiting, there’s inevitably some holdup, like a cashier who doesn’t know the price of shallots or a person who decides to ditch some of their groceries at the register because they’re too expensive.

As far as I can see, there is no way around this. I am not a Buddhist and am unable to live in the moment and practice awareness while waiting in a grocery line. But if I were King of the World:

  1. The “fast aisles” would have signs that said “fewer” rather than “less”
  2. Everybody would be given a tutorial in school about how to let people go ahead of them if those people are buying just one or two items
  3. EVERYBODY paying with checks should be required to fill them out in advance in line, leaving only the amount blank. Convenient places would be provided to write said checks
  4. People would also be taught to have their cash or credit cards in hand after the groceries are totted up. No fumbling in purses!

The way things should be (h/t: Justin Zimmer):

Guardian columnist calls for banning “hate speech”

March 24, 2018 • 11:15 am

The UK is well on its way to legalizing censorship of offensive views, either by deplatforming those whose speech is politically inconvenient, by constructing proscribed lists of speakers (Britain’s National Union of Students), or by the government simply not allowing rabble-rousers into the country to give talks. Pushing the censorship along, Nesrine Malik, a Guardian columnist of Sudanese descent, has a new article “Hate speech leads to violence. Why would liberals defend it?”

Right off the bat you can ask two questions. “What does Malik define as hate speech?” and “Does hate speech really lead to violence?”

She answers neither question, but gives examples of the kind of speakers she thinks should be banned. These include Lutz Bachmann, a right-wing German nativist who was denied entry to the UK for intending to address a “free speech rally” at London’s Hyde Park—a traditional sanctuary for all speech.  She also mentions the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos as well as Martin Sellner, an Austrian “white supremacist” who was trying to enter the country but was refused entry; Tommy Robinson—apparently someone else who also doesn’t deserve hearing—gave Sellner’s talk for him.

Clearly, Malik doesn’t feel that extreme right-wingers should be giving talks; that is, Malik has appointed herself The Decider. Yet these people are still worth listening to. For one thing, you don’t know what somebody believes until they open their mouths. For another, if you can’t defend yourself against the people you wish to censor, you don’t deserve speech yourself. Odious speech is one way to examine, hone, and refine your own views. Finally, those who practice “hate speech” may say things useful to hear. In the U.S., for example, restrictions on immigration, which are clearly needed in some form, are espoused mainly by the Right; if you listen to the Left, you might think that they want completely open borders, something that simply isn’t sustainable. I, for one, constantly listen to views on immigration from all political sides, as some reforms are needed but it’s hard to decide which ones.

Those who have been said to practice “hate speech” in the UK don’t fall within Malik’s definition, either. Maryam Namazie, who campaigns for Muslim reform, has been repeatedly deplatformed and even denounced by feminist organizations, all for trying to oppose sharia law and other forms of Muslim illiberalism. Others on the Left who have been deplatformed or censored include  Kate Smurthwaite (Goldsmith’s College), Germaine Greer  (the University of Cambridge, considered a “hater” of transgender rights), and gay rights activist Peter Tatchell.

One could argue that the words of all of these people could in principle cause remote violence, as could video games, books, or movies. But, at least in the U.S., the kind of speech that incites violence is illegal only if it incites it on the spot, posing a “clear and present danger” to listeners and others in the area. Otherwise, the violence is not the fault of the speaker, but those who commit it. Those who criticize Islamic doctrine, such as Namazie, are particularly susceptible to the “inciting violence” canard, as Islamism has made violence, or the threat of it, a useful tool for shutting up (and shutting down) their critics.

Malik makes several mistakes in her piece. One is saying that right-wing people are not serious practitioners of free speech, but merely “grifters” seeking to get attention.  Well, I’m not sure if there’s a distinction between wanting to espouse your ideas and wanting to get attention, but saying that we should ban those who “exploit” free speech in this way is deeply misguided. Malik:

Characters such as Bachmann are no innocents practising their freedom of speech: they are cynical exploiters of it. They’re little better than loiterers waiting round the corner to jump on your windshield, pretending to be hurt, shaking you down for money. It’s a scam, trading notoriety and worse for attention. Why do we fall for it?

By “why should we fall for it?”, I presume that Malik means “we shouldn’t allow these people to speak freely.” Further, she asserts, wrongly, that claiming freedom of speech is identical to claiming that someone deserves a platform:

Most freedom of speech debates now start on the false premise that denying someone a platform is censorship. So we must begin with the correct one, which is that freedom of speech is freedom from punishment. If you are not being convicted and penalised by the state for speaking, then you have freedom of speech.

Well, that might be the legal definition in the UK, if they even have “free speech” in the law (someone enlighten me), but it’s not in the U.S. In the U.S., being denied a platform can be grounds for a violation of the First Amendment. If a public university, for example, regularly allows Left-wing speakers a venue but not those from the Right, or allows speakers to criticize Christianity but not Islam, those are grounds for a lawsuit. Right now the Freedom from Religion Foundation has a suit in federal court arguing that allowing religious people to deliver invocations in Congress, but not a secularist like Dan Barker, violates the First Amendment.

Further, there’s the spirit of free speech that needs to be defended along with its legal use. Even if a private college doesn’t have to allow someone to speak, they are doing their students a disservice by banning speakers who say things that aren’t politically fashionable, as Brandeis did with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Really, would it be useful for a university to prevent her from speaking to students, even if that university had the right to do so? Should they also ban discussions of how to deal with transgender people, affirmative action, abortion, Zionism, and other touchy subjects? I don’t think so.

Finally, Malik gives not a single example of the assertion in her title: “Hate speech leads to violence.” I suppose she could have argued that Charlie Hebdo was an example of “hate speech” that led to violence—except it wasn’t hate speech, and no humanist I know of would claim that the French magazine should have been banned because it offended Muslims who can retaliate with murder.  Trying to shut down all speech that is said to provoke violence merely enables people like Antifa or Islamists to threaten violence as a way of silencing views they don’t like. It’s clear that in the UK the government is afraid of reprisal when Islam is criticized, but not Christianity.

I’ve said all this before, and am growing weary of saying it again. I’ll finish with the claim that Malik fails to identify The Decider beyond herself, and ends her piece with the bizarre claim that she—a Guardian columnist with a regular public platform—doesn’t have her speech defended:

Useful liberals have swallowed two freedom of speech myths whole: the redefinition of the term to encompass not only freedom from persecution but the right to a platform; and the delusion that freedom of speech is a neutral principle uncontaminated by history or social bias. There are hard choices here. Too often, those who should know better argue for the wrong ones. They fight to their deaths to defend the rights of Bachmann, Sellner and the other peddlers of hate – but not mine.

Wrong. Any liberal would fight just as hard to defend Malik’s speech as that of the people she names. Try me! It’s just that censorship these days seems to come more often from the Left than the Right. When it does come from the Right, as when Donald Trump threatens the press, we’ll be up in arms calling him out. It’s just that Trump hasn’t done anything about this beyond yammering—unlike Britain’s National Union of Students, which has indeed prevented people from speaking.

Caturday felid trifecta: recapturing California’s “fire cats”, cats made up to look like Trump, cheetah mom gives birth to EIGHT cubs in a zoo

March 24, 2018 • 9:00 am

The New York Times has a piece (click on screenshot) about finding the cats who went missing in the October wildfires in California. While fire-panicked dogs tended to run to their “masters” (cats don’t have masters; they have staff), cats simply took off, and the story tells about the dedicated volunteers trying to find people’s pets:

“If you want to catch a cat you have to stay up all night — that’s just the name of the game,” Ms. Petruska said as she prepared for another dark and cold round of cat stalking. “I’ve been a horrible insomniac my whole life, so it suits me.”

Coffey Park, the neighborhood where Ms. Petruska is focusing her efforts, may as well have been struck by a bomb. Well over 1,000 homes were leveled. Ms. Petruska and her team say they realize that with nearly 5,000 homes destroyed in the Santa Rosa area alone their effort is ancillary to the grieving and massive effort of reconstruction that is only just beginning.

Volunteers posted flyers of cats found in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The bleak landscape of charred lots is still teeming with creatures stealthily crawling throughout the night, mostly unseen.

Ms. Petruska says she knows there are still many cats on the loose because her motion-activated cameras capture them nearly every night, along with a parade of other nocturnal animals such as skunks, opossums and raccoons.

Barbara Gray, right, and her daughter Kelly searched through a burned property where cat traps had been set out earlier. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

To the families who lost everything, recounting how Ms. Petruska helped recover their cats often brings tears.

“I just wanted my cat — that was the only thing I wanted back,” said Kelly Stinson, whose home in Coffey Park was destroyed. “I spent hours every single day looking for her.“

Ms. Petruska located Evy and after an evening of coaxing returned a day later and grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck.

A cat that was found at the Journeys End Mobile Park in Santa Rosa.

. . . To lure Santa Rosa’s fire cats back into domestic life, Ms. Petruska assembles personality profiles of each cat she stalks. One cat likes the sound of whipped cream fizzing from a can. She carries a can in her car. Another cat answers to the sound of the crinkling of a bag of a specific brand of cat treats. She carries the treats.

Unsurprisingly the most effective lure appears to be fish. Ms. Petruska soaks socks in the juices from cans of mackerel and hangs them from trees.

*********

Yes, reddit has a sub-reddit with cats made up to look like Trump. The Internet has everything—especially related to cats.  Here are a few: (they’re usually orange cats because their wigs are made from their own fur):

Source
Source
Source

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In November a female cheetah at the St. Louis Zoo gave birth to eight—yes, eight!—cubs. This is a first for a zoo: the average litter size is 3-4 cubs.

Four-year-old Bingwa (pronounced BING-wah), which means “champion” in Swahili, continues to be an exemplary mother, according to the cheetah care team. She has quickly become adept at caring for her very large litter of cubs — grooming, nursing and caring for them attentively.

Here are three videos at different ages.

Three weeks:

At seven weeks:

Here they are at ten weeks:

h/t: Ed Suominen, Jim E., Julius aka Moto

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 24, 2018 • 7:45 am

Reader George Pawlus, who once brought me diet sodas during the Great Soda Tax Episode in Cook Country, found Sandhill Cranes (Antigone canadensis) in Illinois:

Attached are some pictures of a pair of Sandhill Cranes I took in my girlfriend’s backyard –in Bartlett, IL.  They are 4 to 4.5 feet tall.  Completely unafraid of people. I got within 10 feet of them to take the pics.  Their beaks dissuaded me from getting closer. I put the pics up on her Facebook site with this comment:

“My recent visitors. These two have been hanging around my back yard for a couple of weeks. They vocalize (very loud), poop, dig in my lawn with their beaks and preen. Sometimes they go to the front of the house. They walk down the street. You can get very close to them. One has been banded. Has a green band with the letters JHZ. Should I call him/her Juhaz?”

Diana MacPherson has been AWOL (we can expect more photos when her chipmunks emerge), but sent three photos:

Here is a picture of a Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) in the Snow. I took this picture February 7 but only got around to downloading it now.

Junco on the fat and American Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) tail:

Finally: harbingers of Spring from reader Christopher;

Here are three photos of the delightful Skunk Cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, in various stages of growth that I took exactly two years ago at the Lyon Forest Preserve near the Fox River, Yorkville Il. It’s a fantastically bizarre early spring wetland plant with a funky smell released by crushing or tearing a leaf. According to Wikipedia, and I did not test this to see if it’s true, “While not considered edible raw, because the roots are toxic and the leaves can burn the mouth, the leaves may be dried and used in soups and stews.”

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 24, 2018 • 6:45 am

It’s the weekend: Saturday, March 24, 2018, and it’s National Cake Pop Day, an overpriced treat beloved by yuppies in fancy restaurants. It’s also WHO’s World Tuberculosis Day (see below for the date 1882).

Some sad news from France:

Beltrame, the French gendarme who swapped places with a woman hostage taken by the Islamist killer in Trèbes, and then was shot, has died.  Yes, the word “hero” is overused, applied to, say, fencers who wear hijabs, but this man is a genuine hero: he gave his life for another. Beltrame leaves behind a wife but no children.

Arnaud Beltrame

On this day in 1721, Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated six concertos to Malgrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt, now known as the Brandenburg Concertos. One of my favorite pieces of classical music is the last (allegro) movement of of Concerto Number 6 in B flat major. Lovely! And here it is:

On March 24, 1837, Canada gave black men (not women) the right to vote. In 1882, Robert Koch announced that the agent responsible for tuberculosis was the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. On this day in 1944, 76 Allied prisoners of war escaped the German camp Stalag Luft III through a tunnel they’d dug secretly (this was dramatized in the movie “The Great Escape”). Of the 76, only 3 made it to freedom, and of the 73 recaptured, 50 were executed.  On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was drafted into the U.S. Army.  31 years later, the ship Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling 240,000 barrels of crude oil.  Finally, exactly ten years ago, Bhutan officially became a democracy, having its very first election.

Matthew sent this tweet about the execution of Poles who saved Jews, at risk to their lives, during the Nazi era. There are 13 tweets in the series, and they’re well worth a look, helping restore one’s faith in humanity. Unfortunately, the family was turned in by other Poles, and merely mentioning any complicity of Poles in the Holocaust is now against the law in Poland.

Notables born on this day include Harry Houdini (1874), Nobel laureate physicist Peter Debye (1884), photographer Edward Weston (1886), George Sisler (1893), Wilhelm Reich (1897), Clyde Barrow (1909; shot to death in 1934), Nobel laureate biochemist John Kendrew (1917), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919; still alive at 99!), Steve McQueen (1930, curiously, he was a star of “The Great Escape”), paleontologist Robert T. Bakker (1945), Peyton Manning (1976) and Jessica Chastain (1977). Edward Weston loved cats, and her he is with some of his beloved felids (photo by Imogen Cunningham):

Deaths were few on March 24; they include Pieter de Hooch (1684), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1882), Garry Shandling (2016), and the famous soccer player Johan Cruyff (2016). Curiously Cruyff, who died of lung cancer, was one of the sport’s all-time greats despite being a lifelong heavy smoker. He’s famous for a dribbling trick:

The Cruyff Turn (also spelled Cruijff Turn in the Netherlands) is an evasive football move that was named after Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff.  To do this move, Cruyff would look to pass or cross the ball. Instead of kicking it, he would drag the ball behind his planted foot with the inside of his crossing foot, turn through 180 degrees, and accelerate away from the defender. This feint was executed by Cruyff in the 1974 FIFA World Cup, first being seen in the Netherlands’ match against Sweden where he outwitted Swedish defender Jan Olsson.  The move was soon widely copied by other players around the world. It remains one of the most commonly used dribbling tricks in the modern game.

Here it is:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is sad about the news, which includes a bad abortion bill in Poland (fetuses cannot be aborted when they have grave illnesses or deformities) and more UN resolutions against Israel (Hili is a Zionist cat):

Hili: Czytałam rano wiadomości ze świata.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Moje królestwo nie jest z tego świata.

Reader Frank reminds us the Philomena will return in a BBC2 series on Britain, which, sadly, I’ll be unable to see. Readers in the UK—please report.

From Grania, a cat who doesn’t like things that aren’t in their proper place:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/977349798150983680

Well, here’s someone who doesn’t understand either evolution or scientific writing (“Abstract” is a short, one-paragraph summary that appears at the beginning or end of every biology paper.)

From Matthew, who says pay attention to the dates of these tweets!

https://twitter.com/DougExeter/status/976541016399364096

A giant cat:

And the death of a subspecies:

As well as the death of a beloved Tower raven:

Finally, a cool trick with a top and a paper clip:

https://twitter.com/thehumanxp/status/977228497369419778