Category: Leon monologue

Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

July 12, 2020 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Sunday, July 12, 2020: National Pecan Pie Day. Protip: Pecan pie is one of the best pies around, but in its apogee the pecans go throughout the filling rather than forming only a thin layer atop a gelatinous Karo-syrup goo.

Here’s a good pecan pie:

Here’s a bad pecan pie. If you see this in a diner or restaurant, pass it up.

It’s also National Eat Your Jello-O Day (no thanks), Simplicity Day, (Henry David Thoreau, the great advocate of simplicity, was born on this day in 1817), Different Colored Eyes Day (do any readers here have heterochromia?), and Paper Bag Day (treat your cat!).

News of the Day:  Over at the Washington Post, Robert Mueller has a mealymouthed op-ed about Roger Stone, mentioning that Stone “remains a convicted felon, and rightly so,” but saying nary a word about Trump’s pardon. Why did Mueller bother to write this, except to defend himself?

I was surprised to read that many defeated American Southerners fled to Brazil after the Civil War, and there’s still a lively pro-Confederate culture there, with the Stars and Bars everywhere. Now the controversy over the flag has spread to that country.

Despite the resurgence of coronavirus in Florida, Disney World reopened yesterday, and, according to the New York Times, “thousands of giddy visitors” streamed in. Good God! Is there no end to the madness? Even at our duck pond, where the University put up signs advertising the new rule that all visitors must wear masks and socially distance. When I ask people politely to put masks on, many of them just laugh at me. I’d like to tell them: “It’s people like you who are keeping the pandemic going,” but I keep my silence.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 134,577, an increase of about 700 deaths over yesterday’s report. The world death toll now stands at 564,531—an increase of about 5,400 from yesterday.

Stuff that happened on July 12 includes:

  • 1543 – King Henry VIII of England marries his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, at Hampton Court Palace.
  • 1776 – Captain James Cook begins his third voyage.

It was on this voyage that Cook was clubbed and speared to death in Hawaii. As Wikipedia reports:

The esteem which the islanders nevertheless held for Cook caused them to retain his body. Following their practice of the time, they prepared his body with funerary rituals usually reserved for the chiefs and highest elders of the society. The body was disembowelled, baked to facilitate removal of the flesh, and the bones were carefully cleaned for preservation as religious icons in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the treatment of European saints in the Middle Ages. Some of Cook’s remains, thus preserved, were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea.

They baked him!

I have met one winner of this prized medal: Lou Millett, a friend of my father’s in the Army. Millett lead the last major bayonet charge of the Army during the Korean War.

As UCR reports:

The Stones played 16 songs that night, an impressive collection of cuts by Robert Johnson, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Fats Domino and a whole lot of Chuck Berry. They must have made a good impression, because shortly thereafter they were invited to hold down a residency at the competing Crawdaddy Club by Russian promoter Giorgio Gomelsky. Shortly after that, they found themselves back performing regularly at the Marquee before signing a deal with Decca and cutting their first record. The rest, as they say, is history.

  • 1963 – Pauline Reade, 16, disappears in Gorton, England, the first victim in the Moors murders.
  • 1975 – São Tomé and Príncipe declare independence from Portugal.

I’ve been to Sao Tomé several times, but not in a decade or so. Here are two pictures I took on our last field trip there (we were studying the altitudinal zonation of two sister species of Drosophila).  First, a view down to the sea from the peak of the volcanic island, altitude 2024 meters.

And some schoolkids in the capital, all in pink.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1849 – William Osler, Canadian physician and author (d. 1919)
  • 1884 – Louis B. Mayer, Russian-born American film producer, co-founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (d. 1957)
  • 1895 – Buckminster Fuller, American architect and engineer, designed the Montreal Biosphère (d. 1983)
  • 1904 – Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and diplomat, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1973)
  • 1908 – Milton Berle, American comedian and actor (d. 2002)
  • 1917 – Andrew Wyeth, American artist (d. 2009)

Here’s an Andrew Wyeth painting, “Cat in a Window”:

  • 1934 – Van Cliburn, American pianist and composer (d. 2013)
  • 1937 – Bill Cosby, American actor, comedian, producer, and screenwriter
  • 1943 – Christine McVie, English singer-songwriter and keyboard player

Those who attained quietus on July 12 include:

Riperton, who died at only 31 of cancer, had a five-octave range, amply displayed in her most famous song, “Loving You”. Those high notes are for real!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a two-part interaction between Hili and Szaron today. First, Hili takes the veranda shelf but Szaron sasses her:

Hili: I agree to co-habitation but this shelf is mine.
Szaron: I will jump on it anyhow when you go away.
In Polish:
Hili: Zgadzam się na kohabitację, ale ta półka jest moja.
Szaron: I tak tam wskoczę jak sobie pójdziesz.

But. . .

Szaron: She’s gone!

In Polish: Poszła sobie

And in nearby Wloclawek, Leon is famished (as usual):

Leon: The sun went down and I haven’t had dinner yet.
(Photo: Marta Wierzbicka)
(In Polish): Słońce zaszło,a ja jaszcze nie jadłem kolacji.

From Zach Weinersmith’s SMBC, an optical illusion (h/t Rick). Count the dots in the middle panel:

From Jesus of the Day:

A new MAAG hat sent by reader Charles, who added, “A reasonable hat, given inaction by Trump. The mutated, now dominant, strain of SARS-CoV-2 with a spike protein that seems to increase its R0 suggests 200,000 deaths by 11/2020 will be a lowball estimate.”

An overheated squirrel:

This is supposed to be bad?

Two tweets from Simon: First, a new lip syncher to go alongside Sarah Cooper. Meet Meggie Foster doing an incident at the last Democratic Socialists of America convention. (Note that she’s also reading Titania’s latest book.) The incident is real, and you can see it on video here (note the jazz hands).

Where was the line editor on this one?

From reader Barry, a physics lesson:

Tweets from Matthew. First: Cowlift!

It took me a minute to figure this one out:

This would have been better as a video:

 

Friday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

June 19, 2020 • 6:30 am

It’s the end of the work week, but does anybody know that it’s a Friday (June 19, 2020)? Well, it’s National Martini Day, so help yourself to a Friday libation (shaken, not stirred).  It is of course Juneteenth, and here’s a brief history of the holiday from Wikipedia:

Juneteenth (a portmanteau of June and nineteenth), also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, and Cel-Liberation Day, is an American holiday celebrated annually on June 19. It commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union general Gordon Granger read federal orders in Galveston, Texas, that all previously enslaved people in Texas were free. Although the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed them almost two and a half years earlier, and the American Civil War had largely ended with the defeat of the Confederate States in April, Texas was the most remote of the slave states, with a low presence of Union troops, so enforcement of the proclamation had been slow and inconsistent.

Celebrations date to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. It spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, it was eclipsed by the struggle for postwar civil rights, but grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African American freedom and arts. By the 21st century, Juneteenth was celebrated in most major cities across the United States. Activists are campaigning for the United States Congress to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday. Juneteenth is recognized as a state holiday or special day of observance in 47 of the 50 U.S. states.

There’s a special Google Doodle on Juneteeth (and if you click on it you’ll go to the video below the screenshot):

The YouTube notes for the video:

Today’s video Google Doodle, illustrated by Los Angeles-based guest artist Loveis Wise and narrated by actor and activist LeVar Burton, honors the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth. Short for “June Nineteenth,” Juneteenth marks the true end of chattel slavery across the United States — which didn’t actually occur until 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. . . Go behind-the-scenes of the Doodle: https://youtu.be/ipodBEnW9Hk

Finally, it’s National Eat an Oreo Day, National Flip Flop Day, Ugliest Dog Day, Garfield the Cat Day (see below), and a superfluous holiday this year: Work at Home Father’s Day.  Here’s Scamp, voted the World’s Ugliest Dog last year:

News of the Day:

The big news, of course, is the Supreme Court overturning Trump’s attempt to dismantle the DACA plan. This heartening decision is said by some to be a possible bump for Trump, who can now use the decision to fire up his base (only 30% of Republicans approve what the court did), but I don’t care: what’s right is right, and the Court should not make decisions about what will or will not help re-elect a President. Trump will one day be gone (hopefully in November), but the law is forever. (Well, almost . . . )

Meanwhile, coronavirus infections are spiking in several states, prompting states like California to enact mandatory mask-wearing laws. But conservatives are pushing back on these laws.

And, it finally happened: all the op-eds on the  front page are either woke or along with the Party line. I suspect we’ll see very few  contrarian or heterodox op-eds there in the future after the editorial-page editor was fired over the Tom Cotton kerfuffle.  A screenshot of today’s page:

 

Today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 118,458, an increase of about 700 over yesterday’s report.  The world death toll now stands at 453,878, an increase of about 5,000 from yesterday.

Stuff that happened on June 19 includes:

  • 325 – The original Nicene Creed is adopted at the First Council of Nicaea.
  • 1846 – The first officially recorded, organized baseball game is played under Alexander Cartwright’s rules on Hoboken, New Jersey’s Elysian Fields with the New York Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbockers 23–1. Cartwright umpired.
  • 1862 – The U.S. Congress prohibits slavery in United States territories, nullifying Dred Scott v. Sandford.
  • 1865 – Over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Galveston, Texas, United States, are finally informed of their freedom. The anniversary is still officially celebrated in Texas and 41 other contiguous states as Juneteenth.
  • 1953 – Cold War: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York.
  • 1964 – The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.
  • 1978 – Garfield, holder of the Guinness World Record for the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip, makes its debut.
  • 1991 – The Soviet occupation of Hungary ends.
  • 2012 – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange requested asylum in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy for fear of extradition to the US after publication of previously classified documents including footage of civilian killings by the US army.

Assange is now in prison in London, with his next hearing in September.

  • 2018 – The 10,000,000th United States Patent is issued.

Here’s that patent (click on screenshot to see the whole schmear):

Notables born on this day include:

Moe, like his brothers, changed their names because Jewish names (his was Moses Harry Horowitz) were verboten in American film. Here’s Moe and Larry in their last picture, made in 1974 (“Larry Fine”‘s real name was Larry Feinberg). Both died the next year.

  • 1903 – Lou Gehrig, American baseball player (d. 1941)

Here’s part of the Iron Horse’s touching farewell speech in 1939 at Yankee Stadium, made after he was diagnosed with ALS (the full text is here). He was only 36, and died on June 2, 1941.  His nickname came from his endurance; until Cal Ripken, Jr. broke the record, Gehrig’s record of 2,130 consecutive games was considered untouchable (Ripken’s number was 2,632). Gehrig’s uniform number, 4, was the first number to be retired in major league baseball (this means that no Yankee player can ever wear that number again).

  • 1910 – Abe Fortas, American lawyer and jurist (d. 1982)
  • 1919 – Pauline Kael, American film critic (d. 2001)
  • 1945 – Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician, Nobel Prize laureate
  • 1947 – Salman Rushdie, Indian-English novelist and essayist

Those who began pushing up daisies on June 19 include:

  • 1953 – Ethel Rosenberg, American spy (b. 1915)
  • 1953 – Julius Rosenberg, American spy (b. 1918)
  • 2013 – Slim Whitman, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1923)
  • 2017 – Otto Warmbier, American college student detained in North Korea (b. 1994)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili was caught lying on freshly-washed laundry:

A: Hili: This is a clean towel.
Hili: And I am a clean cat.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, to jest czysty ręcznik.
Hili: A ja jestem czystym kotem.
Nearby, at his (and Mietek’s) future home, Leon is kvetching:
Leon: The meadow is wet again.
In Polish: Znów mokra łąka

From Jesus of the Day. How indeed?!

Two memes from Bruce Thiel:

From Dom we have a tweet reporting a paper on a fruit-eating frog. If true, this would be a one-off, since no frog is known to eat fruit. Greg Mayer cites the Journal of Zoology article and say it “looks legit.” As far as I know (I may be wrong), all frogs eat other animals, which can include small rodents and invertebrates.

From reader Barry, who says “aliens live below us”:

 

Tweets from Matthew. Re the first one; I remember these ludicrous prognostications. Are we there yet? Nope!

Okay, somebody tell me how storm petrels manage to do this (sound up, please):

Neither Matthew nor I had any idea that measles came from rinderpest in cattle. Rinderpest has been vanquished from the planet, but its relative measles is still with us:

Look at this amazing beast! The caption has been translated from Spanish:

The people on Twitter are debating whether this video shows lunacy in Serbia or Russia, but it’s clearly lunacy as people fight for water that’s been poured over the relic of a saint’s foot. UGH!

Matthew says this comes from Saint James’s Park yesterday morning. The “thousands of geese” seems a bit exaggerated, but it is a sight nonetheless!

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

April 30, 2020 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Thursday, April 30, 2020, which puts us about three or four days from D-Day (Duckling Day). Fingers crossed! It’s both and National Raisin Day and National Oatmeal Cookie Day. The latter often contain the formers, but I see the whole enterprise of making these unpalatable cookies as failed attempt to replicate chocolate-chip cookies.

It’s also Bugs Bunny Day (the sarcastic rabbit, then named “Happy Rabbit,” made his cartoon debut on this day in 1938), National Mr. Potato Head Day (this was the first toy ever advertised on television—on this day in 1952; did you ever have one? I did.), Hairstyle Appreciation Day (not this year!), International Jazz Day, a UNESCO holiday, Honesty Day, and, of course, Walpurgis Night. Finally, it’s Captain Tom Moore’s 100th birthday. Read about him below: he’s raised over $39 million for the NHS by using his walker to go back and forth in his yard.

Here’s an early cartoon in which Bugs Bunny, looking very different as Happy Rabbit, appears.  Notice that Elmer Fudd is already in full character. But Bugs (who appears 42 seconds in) is not yet neotenous, having a long, pointy face. You can see his evolution, which parallels that of Mickey Mouse, below the video:

The evolution of Bugs Bunny:

. . . and of Mickey Mouse. Notice how in both cases the head gets larger while the feet get larger. Steve Gould wrote about this with respect to Mickey, claiming that the character became more like a young animal, like a puppy or kitten (or human baby), to appeal to the public’s love of young-animal appearance:

Today’s Google Doodle is another lockdown game, one in which you can play the theramin. Click on the screenshot:

News of the Day: What do you think? Coronavirus deaths have reached 61,504 in the U.S. and about 228,000 worldwide. Several things happened yesterday, including a promising test of an antiviral drug. T

In Illinois, too, two Republican lawmakers have brought suit against Governor Pritzker, claiming that he does not have the authority to lock down the state (he does).  One suit, at least, was a personal suit, claiming that the lawmaker was personally injured. A judge has ruled in favor of the lawmaker, exempting him from the restrictions, but the state attorney general has appealed.

The New York Times has a news summary where you can click on these links.

Stuff that happened on April 30 includes:

  • 1492 – Spain gives Christopher Columbus his commission of exploration.
  • 1789 – On the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City, George Washington takes the oath of office to become the first elected President of the United States.
  • 1803 – Louisiana Purchase: The United States purchases the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the young nation.
  • 1897 – J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory announces his discovery of the electron as a subatomic particle, over 1,800 times smaller than a proton (in the atomic nucleus), at a lecture at the Royal Institution in London.
  • 1905 – Albert Einstein completes his doctoral thesis at the University of Zurich.

Here’s Einstein’s doctoral thesis. I guess they were printed up professionally in those days:

Here are the two great stars, along with the owner of the theater, Sid Grauman:

  • 1938 – The animated cartoon short Porky’s Hare Hunt debuts in movie theaters, introducing Happy Rabbit, an early version of Bugs Bunny. [See above]
  • 1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide after being married for less than 40 hours. Soviet soldiers raise the Victory Banner over the Reichstag building.
  • 1966 – The Church of Satan is formed in The Black House, San Francisco.
  • 1973 – Watergate scandal: U.S. President Richard Nixon announces that White House Counsel John Dean has been fired and that other top aides, most notably H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, have resigned.
  • 1993 – CERN announces World Wide Web protocols will be free.
  • 2008 – Two skeletal remains found near Yekaterinburg, Russia are confirmed by Russian scientists to be the remains of Alexei and Anastasia, two of the children of the last Tsar of Russia, whose entire family was executed at Yekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks.

All of the remains have, I think, been retrieved. Here’s a photo I took of their tombs at the Fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg (August 2011), along with pictures of the executed family:

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1651 – Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, French priest and saint (d. 1719)
  • 1777 – Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician and physicist (d. 1855)
  • 1877 – Alice B. Toklas, American memoirist (d. 1967)
  • 1916 – Claude Shannon, American mathematician and engineer (d. 2001)
  • 1920 – Tom Moore, British army officer and fundraiser. 

Moore is 100 today, and reader Jeremy reminded me of his birthday. His great action, of course, was raising tons of money for the NHS and its Covid-19 staff by walking around his yard on a walker. Jeremy gave this information:

The Wikipedia page is pretty up-to-date: here’s the link to the relevant section of the article.  Here is a link to the Just Giving page, where you can see the total raised in real time.  £1 is currently worth $1.24, so right now the total he has raised is about £31 million ($39 million). The RAF will be marking his birthday with a special flypast and the BBC’s report also has photos of the 125,000 birthday cards he has been sent.
This is one of the loveliest stories to come out of the pandemic. Moore, a World War II veteran, has raised an immense amount of money, and, touchingly, did it by hobbling back and forth in his garden. He aimed for 100 traverses, but reached that on April 16, and is still walking! You can donate at the page above.  After I read more about his story, I donated as well. How can you resist? What a great feeling he must have after having raised so much dosh!
Captain Tom Moore (source)
  • 1926 – Cloris Leachman, American actress and comedian
  • 1945 – Annie Dillard, American novelist, essayist, and poet
  • 1985 – Gal Gadot, Israeli actress and model

Those whose life petered out on April 30 include:

  • 1865 – Robert FitzRoy, English admiral, meteorologist, and politician, 2nd Governor of New Zealand (b. 1805)

FitzRoy, depressed and impecunious, committed suicide by slitting his throat with a razor. He was, of course, the captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin’s voyage. Curiously, FitzRoy’s predecessor also committed suicide while on the previous voyage of that ship.

Here, from The Met, is Manet’s “Cats” (etching on paper; 1838-1839):

 

  • 1900 – Casey Jones, American engineer (b. 1863)
  • 1936 – A. E. Housman, English poet and scholar (b. 1859)
  • 1983 – George Balanchine, Russian dancer and choreographer (b. 1904)
  • 2016 – Harry Kroto, English chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1939)

Meanwhile in Dobzyn, Hili has a case of confirmation bias:

Hili: Is this the ray of hope?
A: No, it’s the flash of the camera.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy to jest światło nadziei?
Ja: Nie, odbłysk flesza.
Here’s Szaron:

And nearby, Elzbieta shares her sandwich with Leon:

Leon: Give me a bite to eat!

In Polish: Daj coś przekąsić!

And Mietek is all grown up and wanting to hunt.

Mietek: What a pheasant!

In Polish: Ale bażant!!!

From Susan:

From Facebook:

From Jesus of the Day. Cats! You can’t live without them, and you can’t live without them. . .

From reader Barry. This is one honking big shark, and why is the woman swimming so close to it? Reader Barry notes that she got into trouble for doing this.

https://twitter.com/backt0nature/status/1254547052236886021

Good news from reader Simon: Trump lost his “virus bounce” and is back to an approval rating ten points lower than his disapproval rating.

A tweet from Heather Hastie:

Matthew’s tweets. He suggested I try this, and, shaggy as I am, I’m willing to think about it!

Battling harvestmen, grappling with their chelicerae:

An amazingly melodic duck:

This is by far the best boredom-dispeller to come from the lockdowns. It’s the Fine Arts Game!

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 15, 2020 • 7:00 am

Good morning on Wednesday, April 15, 2020: TAX DEADLINE in the U.S. If you’re hoping for that $1200 Pandemic Reparation, you’d better file by midnight! (Actually, they’ve pushed the deadline back to July 15, but if you want that dosh it’s best to file now.)

It’s snowing in Chicago, and will be cold for several days. I’m worried about my two nesting mallard hens.

As for food, it’s National Ham Day, which of course means that Jews and Muslims are erased as Americans on this day. My entire existence has been nullified with this day that’s both Islamophobic and anti-Semitic. Ham Day in fact makes me feel unsafe, for it’s violence. 

The third Wednesday in April is also National Banana Day.

It’s Jackie Robinson Day, honoring the first African-American to play in major league baseball; Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, and of course wound up in the Baseball Hall of Fame (see video below).  Other holidays include McDonald’s Day (Ray Kroc opened the first franchised McD’s in Des Plaines, Illinois on April 14, 1955), World Art Day, and, for curmudgeons like Matthew and me, National Griper’s Day and National That Sucks Day.  Both holidays have interesting origins. For example, here’s National Griper’s Day:

National Griper’s Day was created in 1984 by Jack Gilbert, a freelance writer from Columbus, Ohio, in an effort “to give the disgruntled, disappointed and depressed a new audience.” He thought the creation of the day would help encourage and bring back “old-time personal communication” and “get people to feeling like people again and not afraid of high technology and computers and all that stuff.”

Gilbert published his name, phone number, and address so that people could call him up to gripe. “If I am right that it’s becoming more and more difficult to have people listen to you, the whole idea of having people call is good,” he said. During the first year, people called Gilbert to complain about topics such as consumer costs, space garbage, weather damage, unemployment, and chemicals in food.

Gilbert also said that in the first year some schools, taverns, and communities brought people together to create “griper’s corners,” bulletin boards where complaints were aired. Gilbert got the inspiration for these after stopping at a Speakers’ Corner in London, a spot where soap-box orators are listened to. It was also Gilbert’s hope that small communities would designate the day and have people gather together in their parks.

About the second holiday you can read this:

Bruce Novotny of the website That Sucks created National That Sucks Day after he noticed that April 15 has been an unfortunate day throughout history. It is the date of when President Lincoln died in 1865 after being shot the previous evening at Ford’s Theatre, and it is the date of when the RMS Titanic sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg the previous night. April 15 is also usually Tax Day. As these things are all considered to suck, Bruce Novotny thought April 15 was an appropriate day to hold National That Sucks Day.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) honors those “coronavirus helpers” who deliver our packages:

News of the day: The death toll from Covid-19 now stands at 26,061 in the U.S. and  126,681 throughout the world.  And Trump’s behavior gets more erratic: he’s stopped U.S. funding for the World Health Organization (we contribute a bit more than 12% to their coffers) in a lame attempt to put all the blame on them for the pandemic. While Trump claimed just a day or so ago that he had sole power to “re-open” America, he’s walked that back after governors said they’d oppose him and lawyers said his stand was unconstitutional.

But perhaps things are looking up. When I made my daily latte a few minutes ago a propitious pattern formed, purely by accident!:

Stuff that happened on April 15 includes this (note that most of these do indeed suck but there’s also some good news):

  • 1755 – Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language is published in London.
  • 1865 – President Abraham Lincoln dies after being shot the previous evening by actor John Wilkes Booth. Vice President Andrew Johnson becomes President upon Lincoln’s death.
  • 1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg. Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.
  • 1920 – Two security guards are murdered during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti would be convicted of and executed for the crime, amid much controversy.

Arrested for murder during the robbery, Sacco and Vanzetti, who were atheistic anarchists, pleaded not guilty, and their conviction was a travesty of justice. They were electrocuted 7 years after the crime: August 23, 1927. Here’s a photo with the Wikipedia caption:

Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left), handcuffed to Nicola Sacco (right). Dedham, Massachusetts Superior Court, 1923. This photo was taken in 1923 when Sacco was on the 23rd day of a hunger strike.

This is where Anne Frank and her sister died. The Allies found 60,000 inmates, most seriously ill, many from typhus and gastroenteritis. The conditions were indescribable: read about them here.

Here’s a short video of Robin’s debut in the major leagues:

And here’s the first franchised McDonalds, not far from here, though it no longer exists:

  • 1989 – Hillsborough disaster: A human crush occurs at Hillsborough Stadium, home of Sheffield Wednesday, in the FA Cup Semi-final, resulting in the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans.

Most Americans don’t know about this, but nearly all Brits do. Here’s a short documentary from the BBC:

  • 2013 – Two bombs explode near the finish line at the Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts, killing three people and injuring 264 others.
  • 2019 – The cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris in France is seriously damaged by a large fire.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1707 – Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician and physicist (d. 1783)
  • 1772 – Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, French biologist and zoologist (d. 1844)
  • 1858 – Émile Durkheim, French sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher (d. 1917)
  • 1889 – Thomas Hart Benton, American painter and educator (d. 1975)

Here’s Benton’s “Still Life With Black Cat” from 1958:

  • 1892 – Corrie ten Boom, Dutch-American clocksmith, Nazi resister, and author (d. 1983)
  • 1894 – Nikita Khrushchev, Russian general and politician, 7th Premier of the Soviet Union (d. 1971)
  • 1894 – Bessie Smith, African-American singer and actress (d. 1937)
  • 1912 – Kim Il-sung, North Korean general and politician, 1st Supreme Leader of North Korea (d. 1994)
  • 1922 – Harold Washington, American lawyer and politician, 51st Mayor of Chicago (d. 1987)
  • 1959 – Emma Thompson, English actress, comedian, author, activist and screenwriter

Those who gave up the ghost on April 15 include these notables:

  • 1865 – Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States (b. 1809)
  • 1889 – Father Damien, Belgian priest and saint (b. 1840)
  • 1980 – Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher and author, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)
  • 1990 – Greta Garbo, Swedish-American actress (b. 1905)
  • 2002 – Byron White, American football player, lawyer, and jurist, 4th United States Deputy Attorney General (b. 1917)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is very pensive, for, along with the rest of us, she’s in the dark about how and when “normalcy” will happen:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: I’m trying to imagine the world after the pandemic.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Próbuję sobie wyobrazić świat po pandemii.

Nearby, Leon, restive from the lockdown in Poland, dreams of his walks last year, and puts up an old picture.

Leon: I’m yearning to be in the forest!

In Polish: Z tęsknoty za lasem

Reader Paul sent a beautiful duck painting called “Just hatched”, by Robert Fuller, whom Paul describes as a “local Yorkshire artist.” Given the quality of his work, he certainly deserves more than just “local” fame. This one was on his Facebook page and it’s lovely (you can buy prints here). I think Honey will have a brood of eight as well.

 

From somewhere on the Internet, ducks in tutus.

A mock book from The Purrfect Feline Page:

If you read the link to this article highlighted by Titania, you’ll see that the Canadian Army in fact requires the use of “they/them/their” in personnel reports, which MIGHT NOT BE the person’s preferred pronoun. Shame on Canada!

From reader Barry. This is a lovely haul for a dung beetle and, as Barry says, will make a meal that will last for weeks.

Tweets from Matthew. He’s working on his next book, which is about biotechnology involving genetics, and caught this un-prescient statement in Nature:

Big stars muff their lines. The first one, with Bette Davis, is great. What a potty mouth!

https://twitter.com/bludelb/status/1249119414647218176?s=20

 

Do you see any invertebrates here? I don’t, but it’s ghoulish anyway:

Of this one Matthew remarked, “He could have done this just on the 40 miles between Manchester and Liverpool, where the accent changes every couple of miles (srsly).”

A fine demonstration of how people amuse themselves in lockdown. You will, of course, watch to the end (sound up).

https://twitter.com/dodaistewart/status/1249881789503623170?s=20

A nice visible demonstration of gravity:

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 21, 2020 • 6:45 am

We’ve reached Caturday, March 21, 2020, National Crunchy Taco Day. There are a ton of holidays today: it’s also Maple Syrup Saturday, National French Bread Day (if that’s not cultural appropriation, I don’t know what is), National California Strawberry Day, National Corn Dog Day, National Flower Day, and National Healthy Fats Day. Finally, its also these holidays:

In honor of the international nature of poetry, I’ll proffer a link to a great poem by Ezra Pound; his rendition in English of a verse written by the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po, also known as Li Bai: “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter.” I don’t think Pound could read Chinese, so his “translations” are probably poetic renditions of other people’s translations.

News of the Day: The lockdowns of American cities growing, and now include Chicago as of 5 p.m. today.  Fortunately, thanks to our President and Provost, I’ll still be able to take walks and feed the ducks. Also, country singer Kenny Rogers died yesterday at 81.

Stuff that happened on March 21 includes:

  • 630 – Emperor Heraclius returns the True Cross, one of the holiest Christian relics, to Jerusalem.

Here’s one of a gazillion pieces of the True Cross; photo from Wikipedia labeled “Treasure Room, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. In center: the True Cross. Near the walls: holy relics.”

And a painting depicting the finding of the True Cross, supposedly discovered around 300 AD along with two other False Crosses. The painting was by the Florentine Agnolo Gaddi, and was made about 1380. What a crock cross! It’s remarkably well preserved after being buried for 300 years, no?

  • 1556 – On the day of his execution in Oxford, former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer deviates from the scripted sermon by renouncing the recantations he has made and adds, “And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine.”
  • 1871 – Journalist Henry Morton Stanley begins his trek to find the missionary and explorer David Livingstone.

Livingston was found on November 10; and here’s the meeting. The famous words, “Dr. Livingtsone, I presume?” are apocryphal,

  • 1925 – The Butler Act prohibits the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee.

This was of course the act that John Scopes was convicted of violating in the famous Monkey Trial. Note that the statute did not prohibit the teaching of evolution—something that many people get wrong, but the teaching of human evolution. Had Scopes simply taught evolution without mentioning humans, it’s doubtful that the trial would have taken place (Scopes volunteered himself as a test case).

  • 1935 – Shah of Iran Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asks the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran.
  • 1946 – The Los Angeles Rams sign Kenny Washington, making him the first African American player in professional American football since 1933.
  • 1952 – Alan Freed presents the Moondog Coronation Ball, the first rock and roll concert, in Cleveland, Ohio.
  • 1963 – Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary (in California) closes.
  • 1965 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. leads 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
  • 1986 – Debi Thomas became the first African American to win the World Figure Skating Championships
  • 1999 – Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones become the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1839 – Modest Mussorgsky, Russian pianist and composer (d. 1881). He was outlived by his arrogant brother, Immodest Mussorgsky.
  • 1902 – Son House, American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1988)
  • 1910 – Julio Gallo, American businessman, co-founded E & J Gallo Winery (d. 1993)
  • 1920 – Éric Rohmer, French director, film critic, journalist, novelist and screenwriter (d. 2010)
  • 1932 – Walter Gilbert, American physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate

Wally Gilbert ‘n’ me in Chicago discussing photography on May 30, 2013 (photo by Manyuan Long). After Wally retired, he took up artistic photography full time, but since I know a bit about it, we had some stuff to talk about. One of his photos is on the computer screen behind us.

 

More births:

  • 1962 – Rosie O’Donnell, American actress, producer, and talk show host
  • 1970 – Cenk Uygur, Turkish-American political activist

Cenk is 50 today. I don’t like him.

Ronaldinho, now retired, was one of the greats of soccer, and a terrific ball handler. (Curiously, he’s now imprisoned for six months in Paraguay for entering the country using a false passport.) Here he demonstrates his pedal dexterity.

 

Those who “passed” on March 21 include:

  • 1556 – Thomas Cranmer, English archbishop and saint (b. 1489)
  • 1617 – Pocahontas, Algonquian Indigenous princess (b. c. 1595)
  • 2017 – Chuck Barris, American game show host and producer (b. 1929)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn: Szaron appears in his first Hili dialogue. Hili is not letting him onto the veranda (but they still have peaceful relations).

Szaron: May I come in?
Hili: Try.
In Polish:
Szaron: Czy mogę wejść?
Hili: Spróbuj.

Szaron is developing quite the personality, which right now seems to be skeptical:

Szaron: Most questions still remain without answers.

In Polish: Szaron: Większość pytań nadal pozostaje bez odpowiedzi.

In nearby Wloclawek, Leon and Mietek have been silent for a while, as Elzbieta’s camera broke. Fortunately, here’s one recent photo of Leon and his staff on Elbieta’s FB page, though there’s no caption:

 

From Merilee:

A gif from Nicole:

Predicted Aussie neologisms posted by Stash Krod:

From Pliny the In Between’s Far Corner Cafe (click to read text):

The Queen calls out Ilhan Omar:

I retweeted this, but the original whistling-walrus tweet came from Matthew. Listen to it go!

An excellent tweet from Simon, showing the necessity of science, and the futility of faith, during this pandemic:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. This first one breaks my heart:

And a surprising hoarder:

https://twitter.com/planetpng/status/1240076780796600322

Tweets from Matthew. First, the director of the National Institutes of Health reacts to another Trumpism:

A black panther, which in this case is simply a leopard with a mutation giving it a dark coat. (In the New World, “black panthers” are jaguars that carry a similar mutation.)

Watch this BBC segment and tell me if you don’t think the Brits produce the world’s best eccentrics. One of my favorite books when I was younger was Dame Edith Sitwell’s The English Eccentrics. 

A cat plays Super Mario Bros 3!!

Friday: Hili dialogue (and Leon and Mietek monologue)

January 24, 2020 • 6:30 am

We’ve reached the week’s end, as it’s Friday, January 24, 2020, with light snow and just-about-freezing temperatures predicted for Chicago this weekend.  Although wretched January is waning, it’s still gray, slushy, and soul-eroding.

It’s National Peanut Butter Day, a peculiarly American comestible, and National Lobster Thermidor Day, a dish I’ve never had.  And don’t forget it’s National Eskimo Pie Patent Day, celebrating the day in 1922 when Christian Nelson patented this chocolate-covered ice cream bar. I suspect most Americans here have had at least one. The story of the patent on Eskimo pies is a tortuous one, and you can read about it here.  But here’s one of the frozen confections (they also come on a stick, which is unacceptable.)

It’s National Compliment Day, so let me begin: you’re a swell bunch of readers! Finally, it’s National Beer Can Appreciation Day, celebrating that day in 1935 when Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale became the first beers to be sold in cans. I prefer bottles but will take beer from a can so long as the contents are poured into a glass. Here’s what those first cans looked like:

Stuff that happened on January 24 includes:

  • 1848 – California Gold Rush: James W. Marshall finds gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento.
  • 1908 – The first Boy Scout troop is organized in England by Robert Baden-Powell.
  • 1918 – The Gregorian calendar is introduced in Russia by decree of the Council of People’s Commissars effective February 14.
  • 1961 – Goldsboro B-52 crash: A bomber carrying two H-bombs breaks up in mid-air over North Carolina. The uranium core of one weapon remains lost.

More than that; one of the bombs that fell out of the broken-up plane was armed, and some experts say we came very close to a nuclear detonation over North Carolina!

When American forces captured the island in the 1944 Battle of Guam, Yokoi went into hiding with nine other Japanese soldiers. Seven of the original ten eventually moved away and only three remained in the region. These men separated,
but visited each other periodically until about 1964, when the other two died in a flood. For the last eight years, Yokoi lived alone. He survived by hunting, primarily at night. He also used native plants to make clothes, bedding, and storage implements, which he carefully hid in his cave.

Despite having hidden for twenty-eight years in a jungle cave, he had known since 1952 that World War II had ended. He feared coming out of hiding, explaining, “We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive.”

After a whirlwind media tour of Japan, he married and settled down in rural Aichi Prefecture.

Yokoi became a popular television personality and an advocate of austere living. [He died in 1997.]

Yokoi was the antepenultimate Japanese soldier to surrender after the war, preceding Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda (relieved from duty by his former commanding officer on 9 March 1974) and Private Teruo Nakamura (arrested 18 December 1974). [JAC: the last “holdout” was Teruo Nakamura, who surrendered on December 18, 1974, after 29 years and three months in hiding!]

Here’s Yokoi’s first haircut in 28 years; his cave (visible on the Wikipedia page) is now a tourist attraction.

  • 1984 – Apple Computer places the Macintosh personal computer on sale in the United States.
  • 1989 – Notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, with over 30 known victims, is executed by the electric chair at the Florida State Prison.

There were many notables born on this day, including Theodosius Dobzhansky, my academic grandfather:

  • 1670 – William Congreve, English playwright and poet (d. 1729)
  • 1712 – Frederick the Great, Prussian king (d. 1786)
  • 1862 – Edith Wharton, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1937)
  • 1900 – Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ukrainian-American geneticist and biologist (d. 1975)

Here’s Dobzhansky, known as “Doby” or “Dodek” to his friends and students; it looks as if he’s examining Drosophila salivary-gland chromosomes under the microscope, something he spent much of his life doing. You can read the stuff written about Doby on this site at this link.

Others born on January 24 include:

  • 1917 – Ernest Borgnine, American actor (d. 2012)
  • 1918 – Oral Roberts, American evangelist, founded Oral Roberts University and Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association (d. 2009)
  • 1928 – Desmond Morris, English zoologist, ethologist, and painter
  • 1941 – Neil Diamond, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
  • 1941 – Aaron Neville, American singer
  • 1943 – Sharon Tate, American model and actress (d. 1969)
  • 1947 – Warren Zevon, American singer-songwriter (d. 2003)
  • 1949 – John Belushi, American actor and screenwriter (d. 1982)
  • 1955 – Alan Sokal, American physicist and author

Those who ceased to exist on January 24 include:

  • AD 41 – Caligula, Roman emperor (b. 12)
  • 1895 – Lord Randolph Churchill, English lawyer and politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer (b. 1849)
  • 1965 – Winston Churchill, English colonel and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1874)

JAC: Winston predicted he’d die on the same day of the year as his father, and he did!

  • 1975 – Larry Fine, American comedian (b. 1902) [JAC: one of the Three Stooges [JAC: Real name was Louis Feinberg; like Curly and Moe, he was Jewish and changed his name.[
  • 1989 – Ted Bundy, American serial killer (b. 1946)
  • 2017 – Butch Trucks, American drummer (b. 1947)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej discuss the state of the world. I’m told that she’s responding to Andrzej’s angst about (I quote) “what’s going on in Poland (dismantling of independent judiciary) and what’s going on in the world (among many other things, mass murder of Christians in Africa while the world is busy with fighting Islamophobia and mourning 6 million Jews one second while trying to kill 6 million living Jews a second later). Hili cynically reminds Andrzej that the world was never sane.”

A: I have the impression that the world’s gone crazy.
Hili: So what’s new?
In Polish:
Ja: Mam wrażenie, że świat zwariował.
Hili: I co w tym nowego?

And in Wloclawek, Leon naps with his brother Mietek:

Leon: It’s time for an afternoon nap.

In Polish: Pora na poobiednią drzemkę.

A cartoon sent by reader Jon, Bound and Gagged by Dana Summers; strip for January 23, 2020″:

From Jesus of the Day with the caption, “SQUEE!. PHOTO CREDIT: Daisy Gilardini Photography”. A tuchas ride!

A tweet from Titania. Be sure to listen to the song!

And another. Although I don’t formally “follow” the Queen of Wokeness on Twitter, I look at her tweets nearly every day.

A tweet from reader Barry about otter love (remember “Muskrat Love“?):

https://twitter.com/Otter_News/status/1220047294063611910

From Dom. Look at this beetle grub cake! It’s too pretty to eat.

A tweet from Heather Hastie. (I may have posted it before, but it’s worth seeing again.)

Tweets from Matthew. The first one settles a longstanding etymological question:

Another murmuration (Matthew and I love these):

Ah, the power of sexual selection! Be sure to watch the video.

Saturday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

January 18, 2020 • 6:30 am

It’s Saturday, January  18, 2020, and National Gourmet Coffee Day (I buy my beans at Trader Joe’s, which seems to me the best value in high-quality fair trade coffee). It’s also National Peking Duck Day, which once again is cultural appropriation because that is a genuine Chinese dish. In fact, it should be called “Beijing Duck Day.” Finally, it’s Winnie the Pooh Day, celebrating the birthday of creator A. A. Milne in 1882. Here’s Milne at 40:

If you’ve read the Winnie the Pooh books, it’s likely that you identify with one of the characters. Can you guess my Pooh “spirit animal”? Answer below the fold.

Finally, it’s also the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, but there’s no need to care about that since prayer doesn’t work and Christianity is disappearing anyway.

News of the day: Donald Trump has added both Ken Starr (independent counsel in Clinton’s impeachment trial whose investigations led to that episode) and Alan Dershowitz to his legal team in Trump’s impeachment proceedings. Dershowitz has really jumped the rails in the last few decades; I suspect he just loves public attention. And Clinton’s people are still after Starr:

 “Whether it was representing Big Tobacco, obsessing about President Clinton’s sex life or disgracing himself in the Baylor rape scandal, Ken Starr has always been on the wrong side of history, ethics, and common decency,” said Paul Begala, a former White House counselor to Mr. Clinton. “He is therefore the perfect lawyer for Donald Trump.”

On a lighter note,somewhere in America a Magellanic penguin helped a sailor propose to his girlfriend (h/t: GInger K.)

Stuff that happened on January 18 includes:

  • 1486 – King Henry VII of England marries Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV uniting the House of Lancaster and the House of York.
  • 1778 – James Cook is the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he names the “Sandwich Islands”.

No, Cook did not find the Polynesians eating hoagies. The islands were named after John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich. However, Montagu is said to have invented the sandwich.

  • 1788 – The first elements of the First Fleet carrying 736 convicts from Great Britain to Australia arrive at Botany Bay.
  • 1896 – An X-ray generating machine is exhibited for the first time by H. L. Smith.
  • 1919 – World War I: The Paris Peace Conference opens in Versailles, France.
  • 1919 – Ignacy Jan Paderewski becomes Prime Minister of the newly independent Poland.
  • 1943 – Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: The first uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
  • 1967 – Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler“, is convicted of numerous crimes and is sentenced to life imprisonment.

DeSalvo is said to have killed 13 women, and pleaded guilty, after which he was sentenced to life without parole. DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison in 1973.

  • 1977 – Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires’ disease.
  • 1990 – Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry is arrested for drug possession in an FBI sting.
  • 1993 – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is officially observed for the first time in all 50 states.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1782 – Daniel Webster, American lawyer and politician, 14th United States Secretary of State (d. 1852)
  • 1880 – Paul Ehrenfest, Austrian-Dutch physicist and academic (d. 1933)
  • 1882 – A. A. Milne, English author, poet, and playwright (d. 1956)
  • 1892 – Oliver Hardy, American actor and comedian (d. 1957)
  • 1904 – Cary Grant, English-American actor (d. 1986) [JAC: real name was Archibald Leach]
  • 1911 – Danny Kaye, American actor, singer, and dancer (d. 1987)
  • 1941 – David Ruffin, American singer (The Temptations) (d. 1991)
  • 1952 – Michael Behe, American biochemist, author, and academic

Kaye was a remarkable talent: he could sing, dance, act, and make people laugh. Here he is playing Hans Christian Andersen in the eponymous film. (He was Jewish and his birth name was David Daniel Kaminsky.)

As for Behe, who has wasted his life promulgating Intelligent Design (his last book was a flop), this statement still appears on the site of Lehigh University’s Department of Biological Sciences, where Behe works:

That caveat, of course, is there to let prospective students know that he’s the lone loon in the Department, so that the students won’t be deterred from coming to Lehigh.

Those who expired on January 18 include:

  • 1862 – John Tyler, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 10th President of the United States (b. 1790)
  • 1936 – Rudyard Kipling, English author and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1865)
  • 1952 – Curly Howard, American actor (b. 1903)
  • 1989 – Bruce Chatwin, English-French author (b. 1940)
  • 2011 – Sargent Shriver, American politician and diplomat, 21st United States Ambassador to France (b. 1915)
  • 2016 – Glenn Frey, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (b. 1948)

Here’s what I consider Frey’s greatest song, and the live performance is stunning.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3n82z0

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is checking out the human loo. She is not impressed.

Hili: I’ve never understood your litter box.
A: Some cats know how to use it.
Hili: It’s not natural.
In Polish:
Hili: Nigdy nie rozumiałam tej waszej kuwety.
Ja: Niektóre koty potrafią z niej korzystać.
Hili: To nie jest naturalne.
And in nearby Wloclawek, Leon and Mietek are cuddling. What a wonderful relationship! (Mietek, by the way, is completely better.)
Leon: Are you already asleep, young one?
In Polish: Leon: Ty już śpisz, Młody?
I posted this on my Facebook page 9 years ago yesterday. I still think it’s darkly hilarious:

This picture, posted by Diana MacPherson on her Facebook page, is also very good:

From Amazing Life via reader Rick: a gorgeous Bengal kitten, apparently named “Bear”. This is the kitten I want, or one just like him:

Titania’s latest tweet, which is pretty much on the mark for the Woke Left:

https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1218249387228499968

A tweet I made featuring a story from reader Jacques Hausser:

Two tweets from Heather Hastie. First, Mrs. Lumpy the badger eats an egg:

A panoply of starfish tuchases:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1216060534262394880

Four tweets from Matthew. Can you see the angry duck?

 

Sound up on this one. I’m not sure, though, that these skillful hackeysackers are being “casual”.

A nice animation about how ticks bite and suck, from a recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports. The abstract:

Here, we propose for the first time an animated model of the orchestration of the tick mouthparts and associated structures during blood meal acquisition and salivation. These two actions are known to alternate during tick engorgement. Specifically, our attention has been paid to the mechanism underlining the blood meal uptake into the pharynx through the mouth  and how ticks prevent mixing the uptaken blood with secreted saliva. We animated function of muscles attached to the salivarium and their possible opening /closing of the salivarium, with a plausible explanation of the movement of saliva within the salivarium and massive outpouring of saliva.

For those of you with horse benches, you might want to consider a replacement:

Click on “read more” for the answer to see my Pooh spirit animal:

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