Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 13, 2019 • 7:00 am

It’s the weekend, and Anna and I have named the new mallard drake “Gregory Peck” after a reader’s suggestion. It’s “Greg” for short. But I have alternative names, too: Dr. Quackenstein (because he’s constantly quacking) and Mallard Fillmore.

Oh yes: it’s April 13, 2019, and National Peach Cobbler Day, celebrating a dish best served warm with vanilla ice cream. It’s also a day proclaimed by Franklin D. Roosevelt: Jefferson’s Birthday. Christopher Hitchens was also born on this day in 1949 (the same year as I). He died eight years ago, and many of us miss him dearly.

On April 13, 1613, the Native American woman Pocahontas was captured in Passapatanzy, Virginia in an attempt ransom her for English prisoners held by her father, the chief Powhatan. The tribe anted up but the princess wasn’t returned; she married colonist John Rolfe, moved to England and then, on a voyage back to Virginia, took ill and died in 1617 at the age of 21.

On this day in 1861, after the previous day’s Confederate bombardment of the Union Army garrison on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the Fort surrendered. The Civil War was about to begin.

On April 13, 1919, exactly a hundred years ago, the  Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place. British troops, firing on unarmed Sikhs gathered in a garden in Amritsar, India, killed at least 379 men, women, and children (the toll could have been over a thousand) and wounded at least 1200. Many (as you’ll see in the clip below) jumped in a well, where they drowned. Reginald Dyer, the British general who was convinced that the Sikhs were planning an insurrection, ordered the slaughter. Although heavily criticized, Dwyer suffered little punishment and even some reward: he was allowed to retire and presented with £26,000, a huge sum in those days. Among those who condemned Dwyer and the massacre was Winston Churchill. The brutal act caused many Indians to give up any allegiance to Britain, prompting increased Indian resistance to colonization and then to the British withdrawal 28 years later.

Here’s a reenactment of the massacre from the movie Gandhi:

On this day in 1943, according to Wikipedia, “The discovery of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war killed by Soviet forces in the Katyń Forest Massacre is announced, causing a diplomatic rift between the Polish government-in-exile in London from the Soviet Union, which denies responsibility.” That is why in Poland today is Katyn Memorial Day. Because today is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated on this day in 1943: his 200th birthday.  On April 13, 1958, the American pianist Van Cliburn, only 23 years old, won the first prize at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.  The Russians were chagrined because, like the 1936 Olympics, the competition was designed to demonstrate national superiority. The Russians had to ask Nikita Khrushchev for permission to give Van Cliburn the prize (Nikita said “yes”).

In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first black male to get the Best Actor Oscar; he won it for his performance in Lilies of the Field.

Notables born on this day include  Catherine de’ Medici (1519), Thomas Jefferson (1743), Butch Cassidy (1866), Jacques Lacan (1901), Samuel Beckett (1906, Nobel Laureate), Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919), Jack Chick (1924), Seamus Heaney (1939, Nobel Laureate), Tony Dow (1945), and Christopher Hitchens (1949).

I met Hitchens only once. Here’s a picture I took of him in 2009 at the Ciudad de los Ideas in Puebla, Mexico. We talked only briefly as he had a smoke, mutually kvetching about Robert Wright:

Reader Chris informs me that, in honor of Hitch’s birthday, Radio 4 will present an hourlong show on the man at 2000 GMT tonight. You can listen to it live or, if it’s archived, go to this link below (click on screenshot):

Those who joined the Choir Invisible on April 13 include Diamond Jim Brady (1917), Wallace Stegner (1993), Muriel Spark (2006), and John Archibald Wheeler (2008). 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains Hili’s latest utterance:

This is a play on a Polish expression: to daydream in Polish is “to dream about blue almonds”. I have no idea about the origins of this strange expression but when Hili says that she is dreaming about blue mice our Polish readers will understand immediately what she is talking about. Not so those poor people lacking a good knowledge of Polish.

A: Are you asleep?
Hili: Yes, I’m dreaming about blue mice.
In Polish:
A: Śpisz?
Hili: Tak, śnię o niebieskich myszkach.

Tweets from Grania. In the first, Dawkins proves to be wrong, as the comments show (I’ll give a few):

Facultatively bipedal cat!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1116454944054435840

Indeed! And in the Boston Globe!

Clearly a gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis):

Tweets from Matthew. First: OMG, a weevil mimics a fly, and we don’t know why:

Gil Wizen thinks that, unlike Nany Miorelli, it’s not a case of Batesian mimicry in which a tasty weevil gains protection by mimicking a distasteful fly, but of Müllerian mimicry, in which both fly and weevil are distasteful and each gains advantages by resembling the other one:

Matthew said “sigh” in response to this one, and my response is “+1: double sigh”:

Matthew says that “WEIT has featured some of these”:

A little known but endearing cat, (Prionailurus planiceps). It’s endangered, with fewer than 2,500 individuals left in the wild. Hi, flat-headed cat—and good luck!

11 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  2. I’ll definitely be catching that Radio 4 show on Hitchens tonight.

    Incidentally, it annoys me quite a bit that in 2007 Hitch was in Edinburgh for a debate. So close to me, yet I was too young to know anything about it! I’d have loved to seen him in action, perhaps even met him for a book signing or the like. Alas.

    Reply

  4. “English has different words for ape and monkey. Interestingly, most European languages don’t …”

    Dawkins’s claim appears to be an inverse instance of the trope-namer for what the
    linguists at Language Log have dubbed the “snowclone” — after the old saw about how many words Eskimos have for flakes of frozen precipitation.

    Reply

  5. Radio 4 will present an hourlong show on the man at 2000 GMT tonight.

    According to my laborious back-of-the-envelope calculations, that would be 4 pm “real time” here in the center of the known universe otherwise known as the east coast of the United States. 🙂

    So that’s when I’ll be tuning in, unless someone points me to an error in my calculations.

    Reply

  6. The “dream of blue almonds” line made me think of the end to Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”:

    “People are not going
    To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
    Only, here and there, an old sailor,
    Drunk and asleep in his boots,
    Catches tigers
    In red weather.”

    Reply

  7. Save those names! Honey is such a temptress. There’ll be more swains (not swans) flying in to dally with her, and they’ll need names.

    Reply

  9. Big bucks for genomes when, according to what I heard last fall, Hudsonalpha Institute in Huntsville AL (and a great thing to point to about Alabama!) can do yours for $6.5K these days, but presumably there’s considerable more effort required for ancient specimens. Plus there are the planned conferences…

    This is now the second seemingly positive thing that’s crossed my window re. Templeton of late. The first one is that they’re funding searches for pure American Chestnut trees to be used in anticipated crosses with the transgenic tree (that incorporates the gene encoding oxalate oxidase from wheat) once it’s cleared for release. This effort will help create a broad spectrum of native variation since trees heterozygous for OXO show robust resistance to the blight fungus.

    Is this a sign that Templeton has run out of woo to support?

    Reply

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