Willem's Planet

So the poor Brazilian soccer team made World Cup history today, and not in a good way, by losing in an eye-popping score of 1-7 to the German soccer machine in the semi-final match.

Sofrimento, frustração e perplexidade (Suffering, frustration and bewilderment) said a Brazilian newspaper – and kühl, nüchtern, effizient (translates to cool, sober and efficient, or would that be German for ‘cool, calm and collected’?), was the way a German newspaper summed up the German team’s efforts.

Well.  I hope the Brazilian coach, and the team will be OK.  Tennis player Boris Becker once said (he won Wimbledon at only 17 yrs old in 1985) : ‘When you are a young man, you are looking for your own identity, and winning is a way of expressing yourself. When I lost, I wanted to die. And because I thought in victory I became somebody, in defeat, it followed, I was nobody.’

I have a little break from the travel to Denver this week, and so I could go for a walk after my work was done today.  It was a beautiful summer day (79 °F/ 26°C) and I ended up at Volunteer Park at sunset.   I believe (I’m a music barbarian!) the group of musicians I found there was a wind quintet.   From Wikipedia :  a wind quintet, also sometimes known as a woodwind quintet, is a group of five wind players (most commonly flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon).  The term also applies to a composition for such a group.
Unlike the string quartet with its homogeneous blend of color, the instruments in a wind quintet differ from each other considerably in technique, idiom, and timbre.

I decided to take a Sunday afternoon drive today to the ‘east side’: the east side of Lake Washington, that is.  That is where the cities of Bellevue and Redmond, the home of Microsoft, are.  My timing was bad – or good – depending how one looks at it. As I approached the bridge, a warning sign said to prepare to stop.  The bridge had closed for some 30 mins due to allow for a draw span opening to let through sailboats and other vessels.  It’s the first time I actually stopped on the bridge – and it is definitely floating. While sitting in the car, one feels the small shifts that the pontoon underneath the road surface makes as it floats on the water.

Meanwhile, right next to the bridge to its north, a massive construction project is on-going. Two cantilevered piers have been completed on the east side, and there is one more to go.   This is to connect a new, replacement floating bridge, to the shore.  The new bridge will accommodate road traffic as well as a light rail line.

Here is an extract from the Declaration of Independence, signed by representatives of all thirteen founding states of the nation on July 4, 1776 :   .. we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. …  

I bought a Spirograph set last weekend and finally had some time to play with it today.  It brings back happy Spirograph memories!  I do have a few quibbles with this so-called ‘original’ Spirograph .. the original had 17 wheels (this one has 15) and two toothed racks (this one has one).  Yes, they threw in three additional geared shapes, but I don’t care too much for those. Finally, the felt-tip pens are terrible. I made the drawing below with a Parker Pen with a roller ball tip : much better.

We were supported to ‘boycott’ Belgian waffles* here in the USA today – a call also made by the premier purveyor of waffles here in the USA, the ‘Waffle House’ franchise.

*Because of the USA-Belgium soccer match – but per Wikipedia : What is known in North America as the ‘Belgian waffle’ does not exist in Belgium.  No single type of waffle is identified as a ‘Belgian waffle’ within Belgium itself, where there are a number of different varieties, including the Brussels waffle and the Liège waffle.

I did go down to the lobby to watch some of the USA-Belgium soccer match, then was stuck in a meeting when the three goals in extra time happened!  Belgium 2-1.  The USA played well, but the best team won, says people that know soccer.   Now can we go and have a waffle at a Waffle House?  I want one right now!

So here it is, the midpoint of 2014.   My firm’s ‘FY15’ (Fiscal year 2015) starts tomorrow! It’s warm and sunny in Denver.   Here’s a picture of the Brown Palace Hotel close to our office, and two graphics from Monday’s Wall Street Journal that I liked.

My neighbor has sold his house and is moving south to California.
It was raining now and again on Friday, but not so much that it interfered with filling up the ‘U-haul’ storage/moving boxes.

It’s the Big Day for the USA in the World Cup : we’re up against Germany, and we need at least a draw to go through to the next round.   What will German-born USA team coach Jürgen Klinsmann do?  ‘I will sing the German anthem because I am German, and the US anthem because it is beautiful’ he told a reporter.    Check out the flowchart below that showed up in my Twitter feed, credit due to Faux Pelini.