Friday: Hili dialogue

September 22, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning and happy End Of the Work Week: it’s Friday, September 22, 2017, and we’re into fall. It’s also the 265th day of the year, so we’ve got but a hundred to go until 2018.  Today is also my last physical therapy bout for the shoulder, so my aging carcass, having suffered some trauma, is healing well—though of course my finger remains crooked.

It’s the Autumn Equinox, when the day is as long as the night, and Google is celebrating with this cute animated Doodle. The rodent, however, is using a tea bag, when we all know that rodents prefer a proper cup of tea brewed with leaves.

It’s National White Chocolate Day; lacking chocolate liqueur, and beefed up with milk solids and sugar, this substance is basically cocoa butter, better applied to your skin than your stomach. I can eat the stuff only in white-chocolate/macadamia nut cookies. I’m surprised there isn’t a postmodernist article on the stuff. And it’s HOBBIT DAY, celebrating the birthdays of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins as recounted in Tolkien’s books; it’s also the beginning of Tolkien Week. As I said, I haven’t read the books for decades, and haven’t seen a single Tolkien movie, but that epic stands as the greatest fantasy book of our time. Wikipedia notes this about Hobbit Day.

Some Tolkien fans celebrate by having parties and feast emulating the hobbit’s parties. Other fans celebrate by simply going barefooted in honor of the hobbits, who don’t wear shoes. Some schools and libraries use this as an opportunity to pique interest in Tolkien’s work by putting up displays and hosting events

Well, I’m barefoot now (in bed, and as I write this it’s 4:20 a.m.), but not for long.

On September 22, 1692, the last person convicted in the Salem witch trials was hanged, with the other accused people released. On this day in 1776, the 21 year old Nathan Hale was hanged by the British for spying. It’s banner day for Mormons, for on this day in 1823, Joseph Smith claimed he retrieved those golden plates after the Angel Moroni, directed by God, led him to their burial site in New York. On such thin and unbelievable tales are religions founded. On this day in 1888, the first issue of National Geographic was released, and it’s been going downhill for a long time, publishing soppy articles on Where Jesus Walked.

Finally, on this day in 1896, Queen Victoria passed her grandfather (King George III) as the longest-reigning British monarch. She eventually ruled for 63 years and 216 days. But now Elizabeth II has passed that: as of today she’s been reigning for 65 years and 226 days. But both pale compared to other monarchs; in fact, according to Wikipedia’s list, Victoria is only #50. The longest reigning ruler of any country given there is Sobhuza II, ruler of Swaziland from December 10, 1899 to 21 August, 1982—a total of 82 years and 252 days. When he died he had had 70 wives and left over a thousand grandchildren. (Take that, Cordelia Fine!) Sobhuza II became king at the age of only four months. Here he is after having reigned many years:

Wikipedia says this, which I didn’t know: on September 22, 1948, “Gail Halvorsen officially started parachuting candy to children as part of the Berlin Air lift.” In operation “Little Vittles,” Halvorsen dropped bubble gum and chocolate to the sugar-starved kids of Berlin. On this day in 1975, Sara Jane Moore unsuccessfully tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, and exactly five years later, Iraq invaded Iran.

Notables born on this day include Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism (1539), Michael Faraday (1791), Debby Boone (1956) and Joan Jett (1958).

Those who died on this day include Nathan Hale (1776; see above), Shaka Zulu (1828), Marion Davies (1961), George C. Scott (1999), Isaac Stern (2001), Eddie Fisher (2010), and Yogi Berra (2015).  The video below is in honor of Scott in his greatest performance, Patton. Who wasn’t mesmerized by this opening scene? (Note: don’t bother to tell us if you don’t like it; just don’t watch it). Make American great again!! Punch Nazis!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, where the staff is eating plum pies [ 🙁 ], Hili is more interested in her kibbles:
A: Hili, you had your breakfast half an hour ago.
Hili: Yes, but I burned up all those calories in walking around. I need my strength to be able to sleep.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, pół godziny temu jadłaś śniadanie.
Hili: Tak, ale wszystkie kalorie spaliłam podczas spaceru, muszę nabrać sił, żeby móc się przespać.

Matthew sent two tw**ts; this one shows a young seal leaping into a boat to avoid Death by Orca. When I wrote back, “Poor seal,” Matthew responded “Poor orcas,” and then lectured me on how horrible nature is. I think he didn’t have a good breakfast.

And a baby rhino and mom:

 

A loveless left-handed snail can’t find a mate

September 21, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Is there a Match.com for gastropods? Because if there is, “Jeremy,” a rare left-handed variant of what the Torygraph says is a garden snail (Cornu aspersa) needs to put up his profile pronto:

Left-handed garden snail seeks mate for companionable dinners (no garlic butter!), long crawls on the beach, and, above all, mating. No right-handed snails need apply.

Most land snails have right-handed coiling, but the Torygraph reports that researchers at Nottingham University found a rare, left-handed variant: a one in a million find. Naming it “Jeremy” (these are hemaphrodites), they started a worldwide search for another left-handed snail, because, for reasons shown just below, lefties can only mate with lefties, and righties with righties:


Alas, poor Jeremy was a big-time loser. As the Washington Post reports:

And just weeks later, after drawing international attention, Jeremy’s love story appeared to reach a fairytale ending. Not one, but two left-coiling mates came forward: “Lefty,” a snail owned by a collector in England, and “Tomeu,” a snail rescued at a restaurant while awaiting a fate as a menu item.

As winter hibernation came to a close, Davison hoped the heat would turn up for Jeremy and one of his two possible mates.

“But in a tragic twist, Jeremy has been left shellshocked after being given the cold shoulder by both of his suitors,” Davison said.

That’s right, Jeremy was thrust into a love triangle. The other two snails took a liking to each other, leaving Jeremy a bachelor once more. Lefty and Tomeu began copulating, and now have produced about 170 eggs between them, Davison announced Wednesday.

“We liken it to when you’re interested in someone romantically and you end up introducing that person to your best friend,” Davison said. This first batch of eggs to hatch were “fathered” by Lefty and laid by Tomeu in April. (Snails are hermaphrodites so they can take on the role of either mother or father.) Two more batches of eggs — another laid by Tomeu and one laid by Lefty and fathered by Tomeu — will soon be hatching.

The curious thing is that all the offspring of Lefty and Tomeu have right-handed coiling! How could that be? Well, it’s an interesting story of snail genetics and how the genes for coiling are inherited and activated, but I’ll let a reader fill in that part.

Here’s Jeremy along with a snail of opposite coiling:

Photo by Angus Davidson

And Lefty and Tomeu mating (TRIGGER WARNING: SEX: NSFW!) Poor Jeremy!

“Lefty” and “Tomeu” are pictured mating. (Courtesy of Angus Davison).

As of last May, the aging Jeremy was still a virgin. Lefty went back to hir owner (these are rarities), but the researchers still hope that Jeremy and Tomeu will mate. With further judicious crosses, they could produce an entire race of left-handed snails, and they’d in effect be producing a new species, since members of that group couldn’t mate with the right-handed type.

“Testosterone Rex”, a biased polemic, wins the Royal Society book prize

September 21, 2017 • 12:45 pm

I’ve now finished Cordelia Fine’s newest book, Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society. I’ve also read her earlier work, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, so I’ve polished off both of her highly-regarded books on sex differences in behavior. Both books have a similar thesis: there’s essentially no evolved difference between males and females that can account for differences in behavior, preference, and so on. (The former book is more about brain structure and the latter about hormones, but since hormones affect behaviors mediated through the brain, it’s basically the same egalitarian thesis.) Fine’s lesson is that the sex differences we do see are overwhelmingly the result of cultural influences (read: males enforcing behavior differences).

Now that’s a bit of an exaggeration, for when pressed Fine will come out with an admission like this (taken from the review of Testosterone Rex [“TR“] I’ll mention in a minute):

To be very clear, the point is not that the brain is asexual, or that we shouldn’t study sex effects in the brain… genetic and hormonal differences between the sexes can influence brain development and function at every level… [I]nvestigating and understanding these processes may be especially critical for understanding why one sex can be more vulnerable than the other to certain pathologies of brain or mind.

As Stuart Ritchie, who reviewed the book in March for Quillette, notes, that statement is about pathology, and is a bit weaselly, for immediately Fine qualifies it. As Ritchie notes after reading Fine’s admission above:

Absolutely! Autism, Alzheimer’s, depression and other conditions have very skewed male:female ratios—a primary reason neuroscientists are interested in sex differences. How odd, then, that Fine ends the paragraph by saying: “The point is rather that, potentially, even quite marked sex differences in the brain may have little consequence for behaviour”. True, this contains a “potentially” and a “quite” and a “may”, but it’s a strange conclusion. Unless you’re a dualist who thinks that behavioural differences—such as the reliable sex differences in physical aggression or spatial ability—are manifest somewhere other than the brain (and unless you think pathologies don’t lead to behavioural differences), the same logic Fine is happy to use for pathology applies just as much to behaviour.

Before I started TR and then while I was reading it, I wrote two posts (here and here) about Fine’s claim that there’s no evolved differences in male and female behavior. I also criticized her completely muddled and erroneous claim (based on bogus statistics) that sexual selection doesn’t work because the “Bateman experiment”—showing a greater variance in reproductive success among male than among female fruit flies—was wrong. Well, it wasn’t wrong, it was inconclusive, and later work, as Ritchie notes, has supported the sex difference in reproductive-success-variance that’s a crucial assumption of sexual selection. Bateman’s result was just a one-off that tells us nothing. Sexual selection is alive and well, and supported by tons of data. Nevertheless, Fine’s argument, which is really dumb if you know even a bit of biology and math, persuaded many people, including a Guardian reviewer, and Ritchie takes it apart in his review.

I’m not going to review TR in detail here (Ritchie’s piece makes that superfluous) except to say that its style and tactics are much of a muchness with Delusions of Gender. Fine is very good at taking apart bad scientific papers, especially those that have an agenda of female inferiority, but she is not good at dealing with papers that go against her hypotheses, and, at best, relegates them to footnotes. In other words, she cherrypicks the literature to support what seems to be her preconceived belief: there are no biological difference between men and women.

I’ve written about that in detail before, particularly in the post I cited above, “When ideology trumps biology.” It’s in the interest of the Regressive Left to ignore science that goes against their belief in an “everybody’s equal” hypothesis, for, they think, showing differences in behavior, preferences, abilities, and so on between genders or ethnic groups will supposedly lead to racism and sexism.

Yet as I’ve said many, many times, that’s bogus: while scientists have in the past buttressed racism with supposed group differences (often fabricated), there is no need for us to do that, for a biological “is”, whatever it may be, doesn’t translate to a social “ought”. If males and females differ genetically in behaviors and preferences, as I think they surely must, that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have the same rights in our society, or not have the same opportunities. That kind of equality is a moral issue independent of whatever differences groups may have. Making social equality contingent on biological equality leaves you open to having to revise your conclusions if biological differences are found—a bad way to ground your social justice.

I was glad to see that Ritchie’s review reaches the same conclusions as I did: Fine is good on some things, but undercuts her credibility by cherrypicking the literature, and treating studies inimical to her aims differently from those congenial to them. In other words, her book, like the earlier one, is plagued by confirmation bias. As Ritchie says:

This fits into a pattern: evidence contrary to Fine’s position is often cited, but it’s not mentioned in the text, instead being relegated to endnotes where it can’t cause too much trouble. Witness, for instance, Fine’s mention of “stereotype threat”, where a single supporting study is discussed in the text but a contrary meta-analysis is only mentioned in the endnote. Or her discussion of a 2015 paper on how males’ and females’ brains aren’t essentially different, but are a mosaic of features: you wouldn’t know that four strong scientific critiques of the study had been published (with a response) unless you flick to the back of the book. This allows Fine to use the main text to critique only the most overblown claims about sex differences, and avoid having to deal at length with more reasonable arguments.

Admittedly, Fine does deal effectively with those overblown claims. Her chapter on testosterone itself is a useful pushback against assertions about the ubiquity and power of a molecule whose behavioural effects are not well-understood. But for all her stinging critiques of “Testosterone Rex” research, Fine is far more magnanimous—often completely silent—about the weaknesses of the research that supports her view. For instance, in response to self-reported studies of numbers of sexual partners, which are subject to expectancy bias (they might over-report male promiscuity), Fine cites an interview study of 50 men who frequent prostitutes, apparently not realising that such qualitative research is far more vulnerable to the same kind of bias. The final chapter speculates heavily about the idea that “gendered” toys (blue versus pink; cars versus dolls) have effects on girls’ career choices, uncritically citing weak studies (for instance this one, which included only 62 children). The harshest Fine gets about a sympathetic paper is when she discusses a ropey-looking social-priming study on men’s “threatened masculinity”, finishing with the bland statement that “we have to be careful that findings like these are robust and replicable”.

And his conclusion is on the money (I’ve added a link to “curate’s egg” since it’s a British idiom):

In the end, Testosterone Rex is a curate’s egg (or perhaps, given the topic, a curate’s egg-and-sperm). It’s a semi-straw man, successfully debunking the most extreme and simple-minded claims about sex differences, but giving a terribly one-sided view of the science. If you’re a dinosaur who thinks men and women are completely different species, or that testosterone is the only reason sex differences exist, the book might be a useful corrective. Anyone with an even slightly more nuanced view should look elsewhere.

Testosterone Rex is not a bad book, but a biased book. It’s not a judicious work of science, but a polemic. So I was amazed to see that it just won the Royal Society’s Insight Investment Book Prize, to the tune of £25,000 pounds. You can see the panel at the link; Richard Fortey was the Chair. The announcement:

Judges praised Fine’s powerful book for its eye-opening, forensic look at gender stereotypes and its urgent call for change.

Chair of this year’s panel, palaeontologist and award-winning writer and television presenter, Professor Richard Fortey FRS, said: “A cracking critique of the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ hypothesis, Cordelia Fine takes to pieces much of the science on which ‘fundamental’ gender differences are predicated. Graced with precisely focused humour, the author makes a good case that men and women are far more alike than many  would claim. Feminist? Possibly. Humanist? Certainly. A compellingly good read.”

“Call for change”? Did the judges not know the details about sexual selection in both humans and other animals? Or did they not care? Were the judges trying to make a political statement and flaunt their virtue despite some wonky science? Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette, seems to think that’s the case:

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/910458353804963840

Now they want to demonize Francis Crick

September 21, 2017 • 9:15 am

The Statue-Removing Squad has finally jumped the shark. I can sympathize—and even agree—with people’s desire to remove statues honoring the Confederacy, though I quail a bit at taking down statues of Robert E. Lee, who did fight for the Union before secession. But now, it seems, everyone from the past who uttered an offensive remark, or evinced any sign of racial or sexual bigotry (and that includes Mahatma Gandhi), must have their statues taken down.

The problem with wholesale statue removal and effacing of people’s memorials is that before the 20th century, nearly every white person evinced some bigotry, and nearly every male evinced some sexism. As Steve Pinker has pointed out in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the world has undergone a moral improvement in the last few centuries, and what was once acceptable speech or thought is no longer acceptable. Yes, some people keep bigotry to themselves, but you’d be foolish to argue that there’s been no improvement in the recognition and dispensation of human rights.

So what do we do about those statues and memorials? Perhaps some statues of truly odious characters can be moved (rather than destroyed), or accompanied with plaques or counter-statues to emphasize that things have changed. But if we just sanitize history by taking down statues of Gandhi, Woodrow Wilson, or anyone else who every said anything offensive, we’ll have an empty history—or rather, a history populated by statues of oppressed minorities who, it’s often said, cannot be racist—or by women who, by the same token, cannot be sexist. (Remember that racism and sexism = power PLUS prejudice).  I’m truly undecided about the statue issue, about which so many people seem to have moral certainty. No country has a history that’s is totally admirable, and I think we need to find ways to remember it without extolling the bad parts.

But, by God, things have gone too far when some whippersnapper starts suggesting that we start taking down statues and renaming institutions honoring people like Francis Crick. Yet that’s what Yarden Katz (identified as “a fellow in the department of systems biology at Harvard Medical School and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University”) wants to do with Francis Crick. This opinion appears in Katz’s Guardian piece called “It’s time to take the ‘great’ white men of science off their pedestals.” (Note that he doesn’t say some great white men, nor mention any women or people of color, despite the fact that such people, too, were sometimes bigots. No, he’s referring to “great white men” in general, for of course that’s a universally denigrated group.)

Katz begins by calling out, properly, a hamhanded Nature editorial defending the statue of J. Marion Sims who, it turned out, advanced gynecological surgery, but only by experimenting on black slave women and infants—clearly an odious thing to do. That seems, to me, to tip the balance of his contribution toward the bad side, for such advances would eventually have been made without doing Nazi-style experiments. If there’s any criterion for whether we honor or efface a person, it must somehow involve whether, in the net, their contributions to humanity have been good or bad.

But Katz, on his high horse, goes further. He denigrates a Nature editorial partly extolling H. G. Wells because Wells saw white people as superior to Jews and people of color.

And then he starts on Francis Crick:

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 21, 2017 • 7:30 am

It took me many months of begging and pleading with Pete Moulton, an excellent wildlife photographer, to get him to give me some photos to put up. Day after day I’d see him posting stunning photos—usually birds—on his Facebook page, and day after day I’d ask, “Can I have this, please?”. Finally, when I posted a photo of myself on his page in a posture of supplication, he relented. His excuse was that his photos weren’t good enough. Not true—he was being way too modest.

But at any rate, we have our first selection from Pete in a long time, and here it is. I’d say it was worth the wait, but I don’t want to wait so long for the next batch. Pete’s notes are indented:

I’m really sorry to have taken so long with these. Sad to say, my photography’s been decidedly subnormal this year, and it’s taken longer than usual to accrue enough images that you and your readers might like.

My significant other and I made our annual Labor Day weekend pilgrimage to the east side of the Huachuca Mtns, near Sierra Vista, Arizona, where we spent considerable time visiting with an old friend who operates a birder-oriented bed and breakfast inn in Ash Cañon.

During the weekend we saw at least nine species of hummingbirds, of which the Lucifer Hummingbird (Calothorax lucifer) is the real prize. The Lucifer is primarily a Mexican species which reaches its northernmost range limit in southeastern Arizona, and during the last ten or so years our friend’s feeding station has become the premier spot to see one (or twenty) in the United States. This one is a juvenile male, and the single tiny magenta throat feather barely visible on the far side of his throat is but a harbinger of many more to come.

Adult male Lucifer Hummingbird. The youngster will look like this some day. Altogether, there were probably about 15 Lucifers coming to the feeders. They aren’t very aggressive as hummingbirds go, and favor the single-port feeders where the others won’t beat them up.

Birders who live in the northern Rocky Mtns will know the next one despite its unobtrusiveness. This is a juvenile male Calliope Hummingbird, Stellula calliope. It’s the smallest regularly occurring North American bird.

I noticed some new features in the yard, including a bubbling rock, which serves the hummingbirds perfectly for bathing purposes. Hummingbirds are incapable of walking, and so can’t just wade into puddles for baths the way other birds can. Here, they can land in very shallow flowing water for their baths. This is a juvenile male Rufous Hummingbird, Selasphorus rufus, at his ablutions.

Juvenile male Costa’s Hummingbird, Calypte costae, at the Autumn Sage (Salvia greggii). One of these was reported during the weekend, but I never saw it. This one was at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona.

Hummingbirds aren’t the only attraction. This is a Sleepy Orange, Eurema nicippe.

And this one is a Gulf Fritillary, Agraulis vanillae.

And, finally, a couple of shots from the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. This is one of our feral Rosy-faced Lovebirds, Agapornis roseicollis. The AOS has determined that the Phoenix metro area population is large and stable enough to qualify as a ‘countable’ species.

We still have plenty of butterflies flying in the desert. This is a Cloudless Sulphur, Phoebis sennae.

 

My poor deformed finger

September 21, 2017 • 7:00 am

Well, I finished finger therapy yesterday after my April 4 accident in Rotorua, New Zealand, when I broke a tendon on a right-hand finger trying to stuff clothes into my backpack. It was a long haul of splinting and exercises, and, like the last time I acquired what’s known as a “mallet finger” (doing exactly the same thing but in São Tomé over a decade ago), I knew it was likely that the tendon, which reheals, would never do so in a way to allow the finger to be straight.

My other mallet finger, the middle one on the same hand, healed with about a ten-degree bend. This one didn’t do as well: they measured the bend at twenty degrees. That is acceptable for all functional purposes (though borderline); the bend is only aesthetically displeasing. I could have had surgery to straighten it, but why bother? That would have involved putting a wire in the finger and then removing it—and a long process of healing and rehealing.

Anyway: voilà.  You can see the difference in angle between the normal and mallet finger. But I can still type and do everything I could do before, and there’s neither pain nor awkwardness.

And so our bodies decay, accumulating injuries and deformities as we age. I’ll go to the grave with this bent finger, my only consolation being that after the tendon decays, my skeleton will finally have a straight digit!

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

September 21, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning: it’s Thursday, September 21, 2017, considered the official start of Fall in the Northern Hemisphere (it starts in Chicago at 3:02 this afternoon). It’s also the 264th day of the year: 101 days to go until 2018. We’ve had record heat in Chicago the past few days, with high temperatures predicted for both today and tomorrow of 92° F (33° C ). That’s ungodly hot!

It’s National Pecan Cookie Day (meh), and three separate Independence Days: of Armenia from the Soviet Union (1991), and of both Belize and Malta from the United Kingdom (the former in 1981, the latter in 1984).

On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold, a general in the American Continental Army, gave the British the plans for the American fortifications at West Point, committing treason. He later went over to the British Army and, contrary to popular wisdom, was not caught and executed by the Americans, but moved to London where he lived out his life as a merchant. The name “Benedict Arnold,” however, is synonymous with “traitor” for every American—or at least those over the age of 35.  On September 21, 1937, J. R. R. Tolkien published The Hobbit, a book I liked better than the Ring Trilogy, though I haven’t read any of them since I was a teenager. On September 21, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines put his country under martial law until 1981. Ruling until 1986, he then fled with his wife to Hawaii, bringing, according to Wikipedia, the following items with him:

As per the official twenty-three page US Customs record, the two C-141 transport planes that carried the Marcos family and their closest allies had 23 wooden crates; 12 suitcases and bags, and various boxes, whose contents included enough clothes to fill 67 racks; 413 pieces of jewelry; 24 gold bricks, inscribed “To my husband on our 24th anniversary”; and more than 27m Philippine pesos in freshly-printed notes. The jewelry included 70 pairs of jewel-studded cufflinks; an ivory statue of the infant Jesus with a silver mantle and a diamond necklace. The total value of these items was $15 millon. Meanwhile, when protestors stormed Malacañang Palace shortly after their departure, it was famously discovered that Imelda had left behind over 2,700 pairs of shoes in her closet.

Finally, on this day in 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor’s nomination for Supreme Court justice was unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate, making her the first woman Justice.

Notables born on September 21 include H. G. Wells (1866), Gustav Holst (1874), Chuck Jones (1912), the great Austrian climber Hermann Buhl (1924; died in a climbing accident in 1957), Leonard Cohen (1934; there’s a really nice profile of him, free to read, in a recent New Yorker), Stephen King (1947), Bill Murray (1950), Shinzō Abe (1954) and Ethan Coen (1957).  Those who died on this day include Virgil (19 BC), Jai Sing II (1743), Walter Scott (1832), Arthur Schopenhauer (1860), Walter Brennan and Jacqueline Susann (both 1974) and Florence Griffith Joyner (1998, epileptic seizure).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I am greatly honored by having been allowed to construct both a Hili dialogue and furnish the photo for it: a first for me. Andrzej does the Hili dialogues by choosing a photo in which a dialogue simply appears to him. That is what happened to me when I looked at my photo (below) of Hili and Monika, and so I sent the dialogue to Malgorzata, and, mirabile dictu, Andrzej approved it!

Hili: Monika, you are very pretty
Monika: Why, thank you, Hili!
Hili: Of course, I am even prettier, and I also have a fur coat.
In Polish:
Hili: Wiesz, Moniko, jesteś bardzo ładna.
Monika: O, dziękuję, Hili!
Hili: Oczywiście ja jestem jeszcze ładniejsza, a w dodatku mam futro.
(Dialog i zdjęcie Jerry Coyne)
 We also have a Leon monologue today, but it’s a bit arcane, so Malgorzata explains it:

There  is a new Leon which would be a bit cryptic for non-Poles. Our current government has carried out a total revolution in the education system of Poland. Among many other things, they changed the curriculum, all the textbooks and all the tests for pupils. This was done with unseemly haste, and the textbooks and tests are rife with mistakes and errors. Both of Leon’s staff, as experienced teachers, are in despair. Leon agrees that this is a disaster.

Leon: Have you seen what they are writing in the tests?
Finally, Grania sent a couple of cat tw**ts: