So! These are the biscuits that came out of the Especially Thick Biscuit box. The biscuits are in the mold of ‘rich tea’ or Marie biscuits. They are good and ‘super big’, but not thick in dimension. It turns out the thickness refers to the consistency of the biscuit.
Tuesday/ especially thick biscuit
Monday/ rain
Sunday/ sea turtle floatie
Saturday/ The Three Kingdoms
I found this picture on a side door of a restaurant I walked by here in Dameisha on Saturday night on the way to dinner. The warriors are from the Three Kingdoms period, the period 220 A.D. to 280 A.D. immediately following the loss of the Han Dynasty rulers. The red in the picture may well symbolize blood, as the Three Kingdoms period was one of the bloodiest in Chinese history. Still : books, television dramas, films, cartoons, anime, games, and music on the topic are still regularly produced in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and Japan. [Information from Wikipedia].
Friday/ yáng méi 杨梅
Thursday/ arrival in Dameisha, China
We flew across Japan and approached Seoul from the south this time. The connection time there was just right : stretched my legs, brushed my teeth and then boarded Asiana’s Boeing 747 that took us to Hong Kong.
It was only three hours to Hong Kong, and we arrived there at 10.30pm Thu night. That made for my usual midnight border crossing into mainland China.
Wednesday/ at Sea-Tac airport
I made it to the airport with two hours to spare before the flight to Seoul departs. I usually try for three for an international flight. I had e-mails to send off and I almost left my electric toothbrush in the bathroom – not a calamity to leave it behind, but still. And as always : don’t forget the charger. Below is my flight from Flight Aware .. the usual trek across the Pacific to Seoul, and then down to Hong Kong for a late Thursday night arrival.
Tuesday/ packing up
Sunday/ salmon from the Copper River
The limited catch of wild salmon from the Copper River in Alaska arrived in Seattle on Friday. ‘Copper River’ salmon is not a species .. the salmon from there could be King, Sockeye or Coho, as explained on the web site http://copperriversalmon.org/facts/species
And check out this picture (from Associated Press) with the Alaska Airlines crew showing off a big old salmon that has just been flown in. Makes me wonder if they had it on board inside the plane. And better watch out! those uniforms may need to be sent to the cleaners immediately!
Saturday/ walking around Capitol Hill
Here are a few pictures from my neighborhood walk last around Capitol Hill on Friday night. The streak of summery weather is coming to an end with rain in the forecast for Sunday.
Friday/ Facebook’s flat IPO
Alright, I confess : I watched CNBC-That-Wall-Street-Cheerleader-Channel for coverage of the Facebook open and for the close. The close turned out to be more exciting than the open. It would have been bad if the stock price had not stayed above its initial offering price of $38 on its very first day .. but then again, that $38 share price is stratospherically expensive.
Here are the rounded price-per-sales ratios for
Facebook Google Microsoft Apple
25 5 3.5 3.5
Yikes. So now the 8 year-old Facebook public company is worth $105 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s share of that is $19 billion.
Thursday/ dry cucumber soda
I have been battling a sore throat all week but felt well enough tonight to meet my friends for our weekly beer-and-a-bite at The Elysian Alehouse here on Capitol Hill. No beer for me tonight, though – so I chose a cucumber flavored ‘dry’ soda (=has very little sugar) from Seattle-based DRY Soda Co. It was quite nice! And my dinner was curry chicken stew with cauliflower, rice and pita bread.
Tuesday/ Solar Eclipse due on Sunday
There is a annular (ring-shaped) solar eclipse due on Sunday that will start in southern China, be visible over Japan, and then over parts of the western USA as well.
We may even see a partial eclipse in Seattle but I’m not counting on it : there is rain in the forecast for Sunday! (But don’t feel too sorry for us .. we have had spectacularly sunny weather for the last several weekends here in Seattle). Below are some cool pictures I found on-line that shows what’s going to happen.
The NASA picture is at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/ASE2012/ASE2012.html
P.S. The answers for Monday’s Mazda picture : 1. Guy with Bugs Bunny tie has ‘big hair’; 2. Hot dog eater gets ‘stabbed’ with beach umbrella anchor; 3. Shark ‘eats’ surfer; 4. Guy ‘grabs’ black bikini gal’s – um – top; 5. The Titanic ‘sails again’. Yes, it wasn’t too difficult, but it was fun, right?
Monday/ Mazda print ad from 2005
Check out this old but cool Mazda print ad from a South African magazine that I found in my study while cleaning out some boxes with magazines today. ‘Spot 5 things that are not what they seem’ says the ad, and enter the answers on-line to win the Mazda. (Ignore the green line in the middle – it’s where the pages from the print ad meet). I will give the answers tomorrow.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Friday/ very very blue trees
Thursday/ drink the Kool-Aid?
I had to drink a lot of yucky electrolyte before going to the clinic here in Seattle for a routine check-up today. The pharmacist suggested that I could flavor the stuff with Kool-Aid if I wanted to. So I bought some ‘Lemonade’ .. but the electrolyte on its own was not that awful and I didn’t need to flavor it after all. But it made me look up where the phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ came from.
‘He drank the Kool-Aid’ suggests that the person has mindlessly adopted the dogma of a group or leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications (from Wikipedia). And so it turns out the phrase refers to the infamous 1978 Jonestown Massacre where religious cult leader Jim Jones’ followers followed him to death in a mass suicide. A shocking 909 people died in Jamestown that day. All the Peoples Temple members drank from a metal vat containing a mixture of Kool-Aid (that some say was actually a different brand called Flavor Aid), cyanide, and prescription drugs Valium, Phenergan, and chloral hydrate.
Wednesday/ Wall Street does not ‘like’ hoodies
Here’s Mark Zuckerberg making quite a fashion statement at his arrival in New York City on Monday to meet with investors : wearing his hoodie and sneakers. Wow! Where’s your suit, dude? Zuckerberg notes on his Facebook Timeline (of course) that he wore a tie every day in 2009 to show everyone that was an important year (after the 2008 financial crisis). And as Doug Gross notes in the CNN story : ‘Maybe Zuckerberg, sitting on the verge of a blockbuster stock offering, no longer feels the need to prove himself’.
Monday/ the Facebook IPO
Social media giant Facebook is set to go public in the next few weeks, possibly as early as May 18, initially priced at between $28 and $35 a share. Mark Koba from CNBC says the IPO is ‘set to raise the roof off Wall Street’. The valuation may go as high as $100 billion (which most analysts deem extravagant; by most measures it should be closer to $50 billion).
The list of risk factors noted in the Facebook prospectus is sobering and in some ways I think I am Exhibit A for the risks. I have a Facebook profile with 40-some ‘friends’ but I have stopped making posts there. I don’t message my ‘friends’ or ‘poke’ them, or spam them with silly game requests (think Farmville) or with quizzes. I don’t like that Facebook mines information I write about to send me and my friends marketing messages. And finally – I don’t like every one of my ‘friends’ (the non-friends ‘friends’) to know every thing about me.
But hey – maybe I am old and cranky (non-social?) and there is a return on an investment to be made if one lets the dust settle and see where the stock is a week or two from the IPO.