a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The mural shows several Seattle iconic signs and objects awash in seawater. I guess it could be seawater that had swept over the city from a tsunami .. or the elevated sea levels from Earth’s melting ice caps.
Some signs are from beloved businesses that had closed years ago, and others are from places that are very much still around.
‘And the world had to watch: Catastrophe for the climate – wildfires devour the Brazilian rainforest‘, says the front page of the Tagespiegel newspaper.
I cannot bear to watch news coverage of the torching of the Amazon rainforest. The Bolsonaro government of Brazil is defiant and doing nothing to stop it.
This is what happens when nationalistic dictators get into positions of power, and there is no one to stop them. Does this even register on the radar screen of the Trump Administration? Bah. Forget about it.
I just had to check out Greenland again on my Earth globe (with the stupid and completely unnecessary flap created around it, and all — by You-Know-Who in the White House).
Greenland is the world’s largest island and is a semi-autonomous country of the Kingdom of Denmark. It has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for more than a millennium.
I checked out the Douglass-Truth branch library today, on the corner of 23rd Ave and Yesler Way.
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York after he escaped from slavery in Maryland. Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was similarly an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who had escaped from slavery.
I was at the pharmacy today, and the pharmacist said ‘just so you know’, that they already have a shipment of the 2019/ 20 flu shots. ‘Let’s do it!’ I said, and got my flu shot right there and then.
It was a quadrivalent shot: a vaccine for four strains of the flu virus — for what it’s worth. I read online that the 2018/ 19 season’s flu shot was only about 30% effective. There was a late-surging strain, against which it was no help at all.
I watched the final of the Cincinnati Masters tennis tournament on TV today.
Daniil Medvedev* (Russia) beat David Goffin (Belgium) 7-6, 6-4 in the final. He went all-out for his serve in the final game, serving three aces.
In the post-match meeting with the press, Medvedev said he was starting to get cramps, and ‘as we say in Russia, Кто не рискует, тот не пьёт шампанского/ the one who does not risk, does not drink champagne’.
*On the way to the final, Medvedev also beat world No 1 Novak Djokovic.
Another birthday is rushing up to me, and we celebrated it on Saturday night at my house.
It did not take long to lose the helium balloon I was given for my birthday, though. (Aw. It became unmoored from where it was tied to the porch rail and floated up, up and away).
While we were outside on the deck, we spent a little time tracking the overhead incoming flights to Seattle-Tacoma airport (just 12 miles to the south of my house as the crow flies).
The nicest of them all was the new Airbus A350-900 (with its quiet twin jet engines) from Cathay Pacific Airlines, directly from Hong Kong, that flew over shortly after 8 pm.
As the rainy season draws to a close in Cape Town, South Africa, the six dams in the greater area around it are doing much, much better than they did in 2017 and 2018.
A big rainstorm this July boosted the levels of several dams by more than 5%.
The New York Times has launched a project called the 1619 Project. ‘The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are’.
Here is an excerpt from an essay written by Matthew Desmond, professor of sociology at Princeton University for the Times’s 1619 Project.
‘Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.
Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on non-white people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above’.
Here is the result of another experiment to make artwork with my Wild Gears.
• Draw a wheel-in-a-wheel-in-a-ring pattern with a black needlepoint pen on white paper.
• Scan to create a .jpg picture (I used my document scanner).
• Color electronically with a basic editing utility such as Windows Paint 3D. (Yes, hand-coloring it would look more authentic .. but man! that’s a lot more work. Maybe next time).
My iPhone (not even a year old, Xs) died all of a sudden today, even though it was about 75% charged.
I finally revived it by trying the Device Firmware Update button sequence several times:
Press & release Volume Up button;
Press & release Volume Down button;
Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button ..
.. and then the Apple logo came on and it came back to life.
Who knows what constellation of firmware, software and hardware settings was to blame for the system ‘s black-out .. but from now on, I’m going to close all open screens and turn the phone completely off & on again, at least once a week.
Wow .. it is Tuesday in Hong Kong and protesters are again flooding into Hong Kong airport. (The airport was brought to a standstill on Monday).
Who will ultimately win the public’s support, and will it matter once the Chinese army moves in? Hong Kong law states that the People’s Liberation Army (the Chinese armed forces) stationed in the Hong Kong region cannot interfere in local affairs, but the law does allow for their deployment at the request of the Hong Kong government to ‘maintain public order’.
What started as protests against changes to Hong Kong’s extradition laws to China, have now morphed into protests against police brutality (against the protestors), and against the Hong Kong government and Chief Executive Carrie Lam in general.
My Sunday afternoon walk in the Denny Triangle was thwarted a little by a rain shower. I did get a few pictures of the newest Amazon buildings that are almost completed, though.
We are getting new disabled accessible ramps on the pavements here at Republican Street and 16th Avenue .. but at the price of two big trees that have been taken out.
There was a bunch of little bushtits in the camelia in front of my house this morning, and I took a few pictures.
Here’s one more spiro-graphy twirl, for now.
The design took several attempts to get a clean drawing without any slip-ups. It was done with repeated wheel-in-a-wheel-in-a-ring runs.
I bought another fistful of Sakura Gelly Roll® pens at the Blick Art store as I walked by it on Broadway, today .. and came home to realize that I had bought some duplicates (of course).
So! Time for a phone picture that I can have handy next time, to make sure I know which colors I already have.
Here are my first colored spirals with the Wild Gears. I’m still getting used to the gears. They are a little harder to use than Spirograph, but they can produce very different results.
Smooth-finished, heavy paper (card stock) works best, and I have discovered Sakura Gelly Roll® pens which even come in metallic colors.
Trump read something from the teleprompter today as a response to the mass shootings. I turned the TV off as soon as he came on.
Afterwards, I saw on Twitter that he couldn’t even read his fake speech right – a speech in which he blamed video games & mental illness for the shootings, and said nothing about any new legislation that could make a difference.
We got up to 89°F/ 32°C today.
So: toasty, and about as warm as we get here in the city.
(Ten years ago on July 29, 2009, though, Seattle saw a high of 103°F/ 39.5°C, but so far, we have been spared from a repeat of that).
