by Grania
Good morning! Enjoy the start to your weekend.
Today is the birthday of UK PM Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), Sacha Baron Cohen (1971) creator of Ali G and Borat, Christopher Judge (1964), American actor and producer, A.K.A. Teal’c on SG1.
Sacha can also sing, here he is Mr Pirelli the fake Italian barber in the Tim Burton adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Today in 1908 suffragette Margaret Travers Symons burst into the UK parliament and became the first woman to speak there. In 1892 Edward Emerson Barnard discovered D/1892 T1, the first comet discovered by photographic means. In 2010 The mining accident in Copiapó, Chile came to an end as all 33 miners made it to the surface after surviving 69 days underground.
Hili is casting dreadful aspersions on artists this morning.
Hili: This chair was not made with cats in mind.A: No.Hili: It must have been an artist who designed it.
Hili: Ten fotel nie był robiony z myślą o kotach.
Ja: Nie.
Hili: Pewnie jakiś artysta to wymyślił.
Leon, who is enjoying a Japanese cat’s snack.
Leon: I will have a bit before going back to hunting.
From Twitter this morning:
The provenance of this one one is hard to pin down, some sources say Albania, others say Germany, and it may in fact be a spooked herd of sheep who suddenly went for their shepherd. (Do not quote the Daily Mail article to me, the news they print is so fake that if they get anything right it is almost certainly unintentional.)
A less harrowing Ovis aries experience
And another. Yesterday must have been Day of the Sheep or something.
And just in case you think you are safe at home in a no-sheep zone
Turning the tables
Possibly the first cat photo.
We need to do something about the state of littering on beaches everywhere
Peekaboo
Actually, I’d never heard this one, but if you have – it isn’t true.
And a whole thread on Stanley the Cat’s time-observation hypothesis.
An inter-species love story
We really need to sort out human-robot relations before these guys gain sentience. Afterwards, it will be too late.
Don’t do this. (Well, also don’t punch in your password for anything in front of a recording camera).
And finally a travel advisory
Hat-tip: Matthew, Heather
10 Comments
Not only can he sing, but SBC can also deliver the best “commencement” speech ever–specifically at Harvard Class Day, 2004. Booyakasha!
How is it that “first ever photos” (cat) are also best ever photos?
Looks to me like the shepherd tripped and a single ram (look closely!) took issue with him. My experience with caring for a flock of Welsh Mountains in a previous career showed me that rams are just like billy goats and bulls – bad-tempered bastards. Attaching the tupping crayon to them was always interesting – a big wax pencil worn on the abdomen and held with a belt around the ram’s belly. I’ll let you work out what it was for.
She did not trip. The video below tells the full story: the shepherdess, distracted by the car, turns her back on the ram who attacks her from behind & follows up with three further attacks.
I sympathize with her. Could be me!
“How Cats Know What Day of the Week it is — A Theory”
Clever Hans redux.
This video is dated September 2014 & the description says it’s Albania, female shepherd, German car driver & this:
You can see the the same one ram attacks her four times, starting when her back is turned distracted by the car.
Perhaps I’ll check out Tim Burton’s film,as I do like Depp and Cohen, but my first encounter with the story of Sweeney Todd was by way of the little- known 1936 non-musical film starring the inimitable Tod Slaughter, is my favorite, and it was definitive for me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweeney_Todd:_The_Demon_Barber_of_Fleet_Street_(1936_film). As far as I’m concerned, nothing can hold a candle to the 1936 film or to Tod Slaughter as Sweeney Todd. Slaughter’s Wiki states that he “was an English actor, best known for playing over-the-top maniacs in macabre film adaptations of Victorian melodramas,” and he came out of the venerable British theatre tradition, and he’s my favorite over-the-top maniac. Here’s the full 1936 film on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W0YoxQkTjs.
The silly conversion rumor about Neil Armstrong has been around for a while. Probably getting new currency due to interest generated by First Man. False, of course. According to biographer James Hansen, Armstrong was a deist, possibly an atheist. A polite one. He sat quietly while Buzz Aldrin took communion on the moon.
It ranks with two obscene remarks alleged to have been stated on the air by Johnny Carson, but in fact never were.