Caturday felids: The British Museum cats, the best of Caturdays, and a reader mourns her cat

September 30, 2017 • 9:00 am

The British Museum has a swell post and podcast about its cats. For years there were feral cats hanging around the Museum, and then most were “eliminated” (best not to ask questions).  Then, for two decades, they took care of a half dozen cats to keep the mouse population down. You can read the story, but I’d recommend listening to the podcast because of the Received Pronunciation of the speakers, the anecdotes that are funnier when spoken, and the funny names of the  Museum Cats:

This is the old sign that got Nick Harris interested in the story:

The Museum eventually decided to remove their feline inhabitants, and a dedicated group of volunteer staff brought the population down to just six (all through very humane means). At this point a cleaner called Rex Shepherd (who became known to staff as the Cat Man) formed the Cat Welfare Society. For the next 20 years, Rex and the Society kept the Museum cat population healthy and at a manageable number.

This group of cats consisted of Suzie, who spent much of her time prowling the Museum’s colonnade waiting to catch pigeons in mid-air, Pippin and Poppet who could roll over on command (all you had to say was ‘sayonara’) and Wilson, named after the British Museum director Sir David Wilson (who did not like cats). The cats even became an international phenomenon thanks to the coverage they received from the media during the 1980s and 1990s. But for all that coverage, the only reason I now know anything about them is thanks to an outdated sign stuck to a wall en route to the Museum canteen.

Pippin, Maisie and Poppet

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The Cheezburger Site has a “Caturday collection” of some of its best photos. Here are a few. The first is an all-time classic:

This is a great one:

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Finally, a sad email from reader Ginger, who sent photos and a memoriam for her late cat:

My sweet little baby girl kitteh Daphne Lucky Squeaky died on 8/31/17.  She was in terminal renal failure.  She had no quality of life, so I sent her to Ceiling Cat.  She is my second kitteh I lost this year.  The first was Timmy Starr Garcia on 1/5/17.
Daphne was a quiet, shy little girl.  She spent most of her time hiding under the bed because the late Timmy Starr picked on her a lot.  When she was out she loved spending time with her boyfriend Taber Socks.  She adored Taber.  She slept next to him, put her arms around him, groomed hm, sat with him.  Unfortunately, Taber Socks rarely reciprocated.  But little Daphne remained undaunted in her affections.  Her name Lucky means that we were lucky to find each other.  She got the name Squeaky because she didn’t meow; she squeaked like a hinge that needs some WD40.
Daphne is on the left, her sister Lucy on the right:
Little Daphne loved breakfast cereal.  Not the sugary kind, but plain flakes like Special K.  She’d always beg me for some.  Of course I let her have a flake or two and she was satisfied.
 
I miss my little girl.  Lucy Lucky Sweetpea is looking for her sister.  They’ve never been separated.  I got them together at the pound; they were in the same cage.  Naturally, Daphne was afraid of me at the pound.  When I removed her from her cage, I said to her, “you don’t have to be scared, little girl.  I’m your new Mama.” All her life she was tiny, probably the runt of the litter.

I love you, Daphne.  I’m glad we were in each other’s lives for 15 years.

h/t: Paul, Malcolm, Michael

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 30, 2017 • 8:00 am

Don’t forget to send me in your good photos. Please make sure everything’s in focus and the animals aren’t hard to see.

It’s Bafftime for Beasts! Today we have two sets of photos by Reese Vaughan. Squirrels (yes, they’re wildlife) first:

In Texas, in August, enjoying the new birdbath/fountain.

Then a female Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) has her ablutions:

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

September 30, 2017 • 7:00 am

It’s Saturday, September 30,2017, and it’s going to cool off at last in Chicago: the high temperature is predicted to be 64° F (15° C). And, god help us, it’s National Mulled Cider Day. Who cares? And it should be in October, anyway. It’s Recovery Day in Canada, but that’s not about the hangovers that drunken Canadians acquired from debauchery last night; it’s about recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.

On September 30, 1791, the first performance of The Magic Flute was staged in Vienna. On this day in 1915,  Radoje Ljutovac became the first soldier in history to down an enemy aircraft by firing a gun from the ground.  Ljutovac used a cannon, of all things, and downed an aircraft that was presumably Teutonic. It was on this day in 1927 that Yankee outfielder Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run of the season against the Washington Sentators, establishing a record that wasn’t broken until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. Lou Gehrig was vying for the record that year, too, but finished with only 47. What a team that would have been to see! (I did see Maris and Mantle play in 1961.) Here are the first six men in the Yankees lineup, called “Murderer’s Row” for their hitting prowess:

On this day in 1938, France, Germany, Britain, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to take over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia,—one of the appeasements of the Allies that didn’t work. In 1947, the baseball World Series was televised for the first time (do you know who played?).  On September 30, 1962, James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi, becoming the first black student in that previously segregated state university. And exactly 12 years ago today, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the controversial cartoons of Muhammad, beginning the modern era of Offended Muslims demanding retribution in blood.  You can see the cartoons at the link. The controversy (and cowardice) continues as a museum in Denmark didn’t include the cartoon in a new exhibition of blasphemous art.

Notables born on this day include Hans Geiger (1882), Lester Maddox (1915), Buddy Rich (1917), Truman Capote (1924), Elie Wiesel (1928), Johnny Mathis (1935), Marilyn McCoo (1943), Gary Coyne (1961; not me!), Monica Bellucci (1964), and Martina Hingis (1980). Those who died on September 30 include James Dean (1955; crashed his sports car at age 24), Virgil Thomson (1989), Patrick White (1990), and Barry Commoner (2012).

Marilyn McCoo had a terrific voice, but who remembers her? Here she is with The Fifth Dimension (I saw them live in college), singing a Laura Nyro classic, “Wedding Bell Blues”.

This is lip-synched, but “One Less Bell to Answer” is my favorite of all her recordings (it’s a Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has learned some biology, though she might not be aware that there’s controversy about whether programmed cell death in plants—as opposed to animals—should be called “apoptosis.”

Hili: Apoptosis.
A: I can’t deny it.
In Polish:
Hili: Apoptoza.
Ja: Nie mogę zaprzeczyć.
Here are two tw**ts sent by Matthew Cobb. The second one, which went viral this week, is hilarious, but I wonder if the incident is real:

https://twitter.com/walkwithnature1/status/912789915720667139

. . .and two tw**ts I’ve stolen from Heather Hastie’s daily compendium:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/913837051434369024

Trigger warning: Animal predation.  Here, from Life on Earth, is a video of three cheetahs taking down an ostrich. It’s not an easy job.

Irony of the year: Librarian who claimed The Cat in the Hat was racist was photographed (twice) dressed like the Cat and celebrating the book

September 29, 2017 • 5:03 pm

Ladies and gentleman, brothers and sisters, comrades: here we apparently have two pictures of Cambridgeport Elementary School teacher Liz Phipps Soeiro, whose actions I described this morning. To wit: sent a copy of The Cat in the Hat by Melania Trump, Phipps went off on her, lecturing the First Lady in a public letter that said her school didn’t need such “clichéd” books, nor books like this one that were imbued with Seuss’s “racist propaganda”.

Well, here she is (I am not 100% sure, but pretty sure, since it was reported by both Fox News and MassLive.com), celebrating that racist book. Twice!

https://twitter.com/Donmatos3/status/913798247885524993

BUSTED!

Here’s a before-and-after photo ferreted out by reader Darren and noted in the comments below:

Before she pulled her little virtue-flaunting stunt, perhaps she should have realized that The Internet Never Forgets.

What a sanctimonious hypocrite! How dare she hug that feline symbol of racism?!

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Extra credit reading: Washington Post editorial “What the librarian who rejected Melania Trump’s Dr. Seuss books as ‘racist’ got wrong.“

A horrifying arachnid attacks a man’s hand

September 29, 2017 • 3:00 pm

This isn’t really a spider, but, like real spiders, it’s an arachnid. This is an amblypygid, or “whip spider”.  The formal difference: both real spiders and whip spiders are in the class of arachnids, but true spiders are in the order Aranae, while amblypygids are in the order Amblypygi.  (I can’t find the divergence time between the two groups, but it’s probably about 200 million years ago.) Whip spiders aren’t venomous and can’t bite, but they can “pince” you with their pincers, as this one—in the species Euphrynichus amanica—is doing. There are about 35,000 species of spiders, but only about 190 species of amblypygids. Amblypygids walk on six legs and use the front two for probing and defense.

I didn’t know much about this group until I found this old post among the 1700 draft posts that languish on my dashboard (most will never see the light of day), but it’s worth learning about a new group. To see how weird looking they all are, go here. They’re scary, but can’t really hurt you.

 

Here’s the arachnid phylogeny; you can see that these are in a sister clade to true spiders, and are more distantly related to other arachnids like scorpions and ticks.

p.s. You can keep these things as pets, but I wouldn’t tease them the way this guy is doing.

The illiberalism of Islam in Malaysia

September 29, 2017 • 12:15 pm

This is just one more in my series of “Dear Reza Aslan” posts documenting that Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia—countries repeatedly touted by Aslan as being both Muslim and liberal (ergo that Islam isn’t always oppressive)—are not nearly as liberal as The Whitewash King maintains. The piece below (click on screenshot to go to article) was originally called “From my detention in Malaysia, thoughts on Islam and tolerance,” and I’m not sure the new title is better. But the point is the same: don’t expect “liberal” Malaysia to go easy on those who criticize Islam.

Akyol, an American resident, was in Kuala Lumpur to give a series of lectures on Islamic theology, and made the mistake of unpacking a statement that Islam-whitewashers love to use: “there is no compulsion in religion.” As he found out, this doesn’t mean what the whitewashers say it means:

I arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Sept. 22. The next day I gave my first lecture on the suppression of rational theology by dogmatists in early Islam, making the point that this “intellectual suicide” still haunts Muslim civilization.

The second talk was on a more controversial topic: apostasy from Islam. I argued that Muslims must uphold freedom of conscience, in line with the Quranic dictum “No compulsion in religion.” I said that apostasy should not be punished by death, as it is in Saudi Arabia, or with “rehabilitation,” as it is in Malaysia. The practice of Islam must be on the basis of freedom, not coercion, and governments shouldn’t police religion or morality.

It turns out all you have to do is speak of the police and they will appear.

At the end of my talk, a group of serious-looking men came into the lecture hall and showed me badges indicating that they were “religion enforcement officers.”

“We heard that you just gave an unauthorized talk on religion,” one of the men said. “And we got complaints about it.” They took me to another room, photographed me and asked questions about my speech.

When they were done with their questioning, they handed me a piece of paper with Malay writing on it and told me that I shouldn’t speak again without proper authorization. They also warned me away from my next planned talk, which was going to be about my most recent book, “The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims.”

“We heard that you will speak about commonalities between Islam, Judaism and Christianity,” one officer said. “We don’t like that kind of stuff.” Then they left.

I didn’t know they had “religion enforcement officers” in Malaysia.

Wisely, Akyol canceled his last lecture, but when he tried to fly out of Kuala Lumpur, he was detained and then put in prison. He was then taken before a sharia court and interrogated, but eventually let off—thanks to the intervention of his native country, Turkey. He was later told that the court was “protecting religion.” But Akyol found out that that’s based on a particular interpretation of the Quranic dictum:

This incident showed me once again that there is a major problem in Islam today: a passion to impose religion, rather than merely proposing it, a mind-set that most Christians left behind at the time of the Inquisition.

Luckily, there are antidotes within Islam to this problem. One of them is the Quranic verse that the JAWI officers repeatedly chided me for daring to recite: “No compulsion in religion.”

In fact, mainstream Muslim tradition, reflecting its illiberal context, never fully appreciated the freedom implied by this verse — and other ones with similar messages. “The ‘no compulsion’ verse was a problem to the earliest exegetes,” as Patricia Crone, a scholar of Islamic history, has noted. “And they reacted by interpreting it restrictively.” The verse was declared “abrogated,” or its scope was radically limited.

This is still evident in a parenthetical that is too frequently inserted into translations of the verse. “There shall be no compulsion in religion (in becoming a Muslim).” I’d known that Saudi translations added those extra words at the end. Now I have learned that the Malaysian authorities do, too. They append the extra phrase because while they agree with the Quran that no one should be forced to become a Muslim, they think that Muslims should be compelled to practice the religion — in the way that the authorities define. They also believe that if Muslims decide to abandon their religion, they must be punished for “apostasy.”

It’s still not clear to me what the “no compulsion in religion” phrase (it’s “Al Baquara 256”; see some exegesis here) really means in the Qur’an.  Here’s one translation, but they’re all pretty much the same:

Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things.

It’s clear that this means that following the Qur’an is the path of truth, and those who reject it are in error. Presumably you could say that those who reject it aren’t to be punished (“no compulsion”), but throughout history, and not just recently, Muslims have punished nonbelievers in lands they’ve conquered. They haven’t necessarily forced them to convert, but have often denied them rights and levied extra taxes on them.

Yet even in Malaysia, where you can be a Christian and not be taxed, and have the same rights as everyone else, you don’t have the right to criticize Islam. And that’s a compulsion: a compulsion to avoid criticizing Islam (but not Christianity). And if you aren’t compelled to convert, why are you punished as an apostate when you de-convert? Why freedom to go one way but not the other? Clearly, the “compulsion” phrase isn’t what “reformers” like Aslan make it out to be.

Akyol’s “lesson” from his detainment—that Islam needs to chill out and stop being authoritarian—is trivial. The existence of “religion enforcement officers” already says that. There is a lesson for us, though: Malaysian Islam is not as innocuous as apologists make out. And perhaps there’s something inherent in the faith that gives it a tendency to be authoritarian.