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Monday/ a buzz cut 💇

Erling Haaland, Samson, and whether elite sports stars lose their powers when they shave their heads

(Amelie Claydon writing for The Athletic in The New York Times .. it’s a mixed bag and several sports stars had great success after cutting their long hair)
Erling Haaland has cut off the hair that Zlatan Ibrahimovic warned was the source of his strength.

Erling Haaland’s post on Instagram.

The former Sweden striker gave him that advice during the 2026 World Cup and on Sunday, Haaland failed to score in the first game he has played without the long blond hair that had become his trademark.

The 26-year-old Manchester City striker went for a buzzcut before his side’s opener against Bournemouth, then went goalless despite having five shots in a 2-1 victory. Before Sunday, he had scored in every Premier League opener he had played (seven goals in four games).
..
In 1995, a 24-year-old Andre Agassi arrived at the Australian Open with his head shaved, having spent the early part of his career with long hair that became central to his public image.
He later revealed he had worn a hairpiece due to his receding hairline, but became so anxious about it coming loose that it distracted him during matches. Once rid of the hairpiece, Agassi produced the most successful season of his career.
..
Carlos Alcaraz was 22 when his brother made a mistake with the clippers before the 2025 U.S. Open, leaving him with little choice but to shave most of his hair off. Alcaraz joked that he was “faster” without it and reached the final without dropping a set before beating Jannik Sinner in four to win his sixth Grand Slam and take the world No 1 ranking from the Italian.

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Sunday/ the run-up to the last Grand Slam of 2026 🎾

2026 Cincinnati Open concluded at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Mason, Ohio, today.
Coco Gauff (22, 🇺🇸)won the women’s title and Arthur Fils (22, 🇫🇷) captured his first ATP Masters 1000 crown.

The start of the 2026 US Open is a week away.
Carlos Alcaraz (23,  🇪🇸) confirmed that he is making his comeback after four months away from the circuit due to a wrist injury.
Unfortunately Jannik Sinner (25, 🇮🇹) is out of the US Open due to a knee injury.

That’s Arthur Fils in the foreground, playing in the final today against France ‘Big Foe’ Tiafoe (28, 🇺🇸). Fils is sporting a pair of pink ASICS GEL-Resolution tennis shoes to go with his powder blue Lacoste shirt. He plays with the intensity of Carlos Alcaraz, and the two of them may well meet up in the later rounds of the US Open. Fils is on a roll, though, and Alcaraz has not played an ATP match in four months.
[Still image from Tennis TV streaming channel].
Fils pumping himself up and looking at his support team.
[Still image from Tennis TV streaming channel].

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Saturday/ golden flowers 🏵️

It felt like fall this morning, with a few raindrops that came down.
Later on the sun came out and the high reached 74°F (23 °C) here in the city.

I found these chrysanthemums here on Capitol Hill today.
The name “chrysanthemum” is derived from the Ancient Greek: χρυσός chrysos (gold) and ἄνθεμον anthemon (flower).

These are garden mums (Chrysanthemum), one of the classic bicolor varieties that shift from yellow to deep bronze-red as the petals age — giving that layered, sunset-like look. They’re a fall staple, usually planted in September/October when they hit peak bloom.
[As reported by my AI chatbot Claude when I uploaded the picture]
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Thursday/ action on Lake Union ⛵

I took these pictures at the south end of Lake Union this afternoon.
We have had a long stretch of tranquil summer weather here in the city and school is still out.
So there were paddle boards, kayaks, sailboats, motor boats and float planes out and about on the water.

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Wednesday/ the treasure chest has landed 📦

A big carton box from buyee.co.jp landed on my porch this morning, full of stamp albums and sets of stamps and books that I had bought from sellers in Japan over the course of a month.

The package followed a circuitous route to make it to Seattle from Kawaguchi, Japan:
Trucked from Kawaguchi to Narita Airport,
flown from Narita Airport to FedEx hub in Anchorage AK,
flown from Anchorage AK to FedEx hub in Newark NJ,
flown from Newark NJ to FedEx hub in Memphis TN,
flown from Memphis TN to local FedEx facility in Auburn WA,
trucked from Auburn WA to Willem’s porch in Seattle WA.

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Tuesday/ the flowers on Rosie’s jacket 💐

Rosie O’Donnell mocks but barely mentions Trump in talk show return

The comedian is filling in as guest host for Jimmy Kimmel, another comedian who has attracted the president’s ire.

-Headlines from the Washington Post

Rosie O’Donnell wore this pink suit last night.
I’m pretty sure those are South African proteas— the large flowers embroidered on her jacket. To be exact, they look like Protea repens, which also goes by the name sugarbush in South Africa.
There is even an Afrikaans folk song that invokes the sugarbush as a metaphor for a sweet love obsession:
Suikerbossie,’k wil jou hê (3x)
Wat sal jou mamma daarvan sê?
Dan loop ons so onderdeur die maan (3x)
Ek en my Suikerbossie saam.
Translation: Sugarbush, I want you so (3x) | Wat will your mama say about that? | Then we’ll walk beneath the moon (3x) | My Sugarbush and I, together.
[Still image of Rosie O’Donnell from ABC/ The Jimmy Kimmel Show]
Protea repens, the sugarbush. These are from the Flora Grubb Gardens plant store in San Francisco.  The climate in San Francisco is similar to that of Cape Town, South Africa, where the proteas are. 
[Image of Protea ‘Pink Ice’/ Protea repens hybrid, from the website of Flora Grubb Gardens plant store in San Francisco]

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Monday/ the ‘eclipse of the century’ ☀️

Danielle Dowling writes for the New York Times:
If you missed this summer’s eclipse, don’t worry.
There are still a handful of opportunities to catch the “eclipse of the century” next year.
Imagine standing beneath a blackened sun among the ancient Egyptian tombs in the Valley of the Kings or overlooking the Nile at the Hatshepsut Temple. The eerie darkness might fill you with a primeval mix of terror, awe and wonder. In other words, perfection.
In the midmorning and afternoon of Aug. 2, 2027, ten countries (and a few territories) on the Mediterranean Sea and in the Middle East and Africa will find themselves in the 160-mile-wide, nearly 9,500-mile-long zone.
In some places, darkness will last as long as an incredible six minutes and 23 seconds.

Danielle Dowling also offers this cruise ship information in the NYT article:
If you wish to combine travel around Spain and other nearby destinations with a cruise on the Mediterranean, where totality will last up to five minutes, you have options. Celebrity is offering two cruises: an 11-night Italy and Spain trip, with the eclipse falling on Day 8 (from $3,121 per person), and a seven-night Spain and Morocco journey, with the eclipse on Day 3 (from $4,883 per person). And there are still a few rooms left aboard VACAYA LGBTQ+ Vacations’ 10-day eclipse cruise (from $18,963 double occupancy), which sails from Trieste, Italy, to Barcelona.
Aerial view during sunrise of the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Luxor, Egypt.
The mortuary temple built during the reign of Pharaoh Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The temple is considered to be a masterpiece of ancient architecture. Its three massive terraces rise above the desert floor and into the cliffs of Deir el-Bahari. Her tomb, KV20, lies inside the same massif capped by El Qurn, a pyramid for her mortuary complex. Across the river Nile, the whole structure points towards the monumental Eighth Pylon, Hatshepsut’s most recognizable addition to the Temple of Karnak and the site from which the procession of the Beautiful Festival of the Valley departed.
Image by Diego Delso/ Wikipedia
CC BY-SA 4.0
File:Templo funerario de Hatshepsut, Luxor, Egipto, 2022-04-03, DD 13.jpg
Created: 3 Apr. 2022
Uploaded: 27 Nov. 2022
Location: 25° 44′ 17.66″ N, 32° 36′ 23.94″ E
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Sunday/ long in the making 🌇

The construction of the twin apartment towers with the wavy outlines at 1200 Stewart St in the Denny Triangle neighborhood started in May 2018.
So it will be 9 years when the 45-story towers with 927 apartments finally open in 2027—six years later than the original timeline had called for.

That’s a decommissioned United Airlines Boeing 747-400 fuselage mounted 14 feet (4.3 m) above the walkway between the towers.
It will house a little office space for Westbank, the project’s developer.
The fuselage was purchased from a scrapyard in Victorville, California, cut into 39 sections, and trucked up to Seattle.

It’s Tesla-Tesla-Tesla in the sunset photo that I took from the Melrose Avenue overlook.

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Caturday/ sticky stamps 😼

I have a few hundred of these self-adhesive Japanese stamps on that are still on paper. My usual technique of dunking them into water to get the stamps to peel off is not going to work with these.

The proper method is to spray the back of the envelope paper with isopropyl alcohol. The liquid soaks through the paper in about 30 to 60 seconds, dissolves the acrylic adhesive, and then the stamp can carefully be peeled off.

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Friday/ smoke, high up 🌄

Happy Friday.
The smoke has returned here, to the west of the Cascade Mountains, but the worst of it lies at 5,000 ft or higher.
The day-time highs here in the city have been right around the average for August this week: high 70s with 80°F (27°C) today.

The setting sun turns the smoky skies pink behind Miller Playfield’s trees here on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
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Thursday/ inflation eases, slightly 📉

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.1 percent in July from a month earlier, the Labor Department reported Wednesday, and 3.4 percent from the previous year on a seasonally adjusted basis.
Stripping out volatile food and energy prices, prices rose 2.5 percent over the year.
– Lydia DePillis writing for the New York Times

Yes, inflation overall has eased but several big items that affect everyone’s budget is way, way up year over year. How about: Gasoline (all types) +24.6%, electricity +4.2%, fruit & vegetables +5.1%, airline fares +25.5%, motor vehicle maintenance & repair +6.6%.
[Headlines and graphic from The New York Times]
Wage growth has fallen below inflation again, and nobody has to tell workers that commute by car that they are paying a lot more for gas. They know the pain at the pump  all too well.
[Graphic from The New York Times]

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Wednesday/ Europe’s total solar eclipse ☀️

The first total solar eclipse in decades in Europe swept across the continent on Wednesday, turning day to dark across several countries as crowds watched from hilltops, coastlines and other open spaces.

The coincidence of Earth, the moon and the sun falling into perfect alignment — a fleeting celestial event known as totality — created a frenzy across the region. People paid exorbitant hotel rates to be in the inner part, or umbra, of the lunar shadow. Along that path, where the sky was clear, the sun became a black disk ensconced in a hazy corona, surrounded by planets and stars.
– Jason Horowitz reporting for the New York Times from Castrillo de la Reina, Spain

The sun is completely obscured by the moon. A view of the eclipse from Castrillo de la Reine in the north of Spain.
The total solar eclipse was visible in parts of Siberia, Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. Some Icelanders saw the total eclipse, and other did not, because of clouds overhead.
[Graphic by Adine Renner/ The New York Times]
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Tuesday/ at the bookstore 📙

I was at the Magus Books used book store in University Village today.

I had to ask AI who this person in the photo on the wall was.
It is the English poet, artist, designer and socialist William Morris (1834-1896), famous for his leadership in the British Arts and Crafts Movement.
This is an iconic 1884 portrait of him taken by photographer Frederick Hollyer.
(And what was the British Arts and Crafts Movement about? It was an influential design movement that emerged in Britain around 1880 and lasted through the 1920s as a response to the Industrial Revolution. It rejected mass factory production in favor of handmade quality, original materials and traditional craftsmanship.)
Among my favorite shelves in the bookstore are the ones with dictionaries, and the one with the graphic comic books in foreign languages.
This beautiful and enormous old Chinese-English dictionary was $120, maybe just a little bit too expensive for an impulse buy.
In the top left corner of this page, we can learn how to write ‘China’ in Chinese: 中国 (pronounce zhōng guó).
The characters stand for ‘Middle Kingdom’, a term that dates back to many centuries before BCE. It reflects the belief that China was situated at the center of a vast square Earth, surrounded by the Four Seas, beyond which lay islands inhabited by barbarians.
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Monday/ earthquake in Colombia 🌎

A powerful earthquake struck western Colombia on Monday morning, rattling much of the country, killing more than 100 people and sending residents fleeing from swaying and crumbling buildings in multiple major cities. As rescuers searched the rubble of damaged buildings and officials warned of possible aftershocks, the death toll appeared likely to rise.

The 7.4 magnitude earthquake occurred at 7:34 a.m. local time, according to the United States Geological Survey and Colombia’s geological service, with the epicenter roughly three miles east of San José del Palmar, a town of some 5,000 people in a rural part of the Chocó region, where officials reported significant damage. Videos showed collapsed and partially collapsed buildings in the major cities of Pereira, Manizales and Cali.
– Genevieve Glatsky and Julie Turkewitz reporting for the New York Times from Bogotá, Colombia

This one in Colombia occurred seven weeks after the devastating 7.5 magnitude earthquake in Venezuela, and does not appear to be related to it.
The epicenters are some 800 miles (1,200 km) apart and on different plates.

There are 15 to 20 earthquakes of this magnitude or greater every year around the world.

A constellation of cities in the foothills of the Andes sustained heavy damage from a major earthquake that struck western Colombia on Monday morning, photos and videos show.
Residents of Colombia’s largest cities, Bogotá and Medellín, reported intense shaking, but both appear to have been spared the worst of the damage.
[Reporting and map from the New York Times] 
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Sunday/ a spider web 🕸

Watch out, insects.
This little backyard spider is going to snare you in its web.
(I see the new “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” movie is breaking box office records, but I don’t think I am up for seeing it in the theater.)

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Saturday/ mail from Ukraine 🇺🇦

One would think everything is at a standstill in Ukraine because of the war, but no— my purchase of Japanese stamps from an Ebay seller in Kyiv arrived in the mail today, courtesy of Ukrposhta (Ukraine’s postal service).

These stamps were on the outside envelope.

2017 Definitive Series – Coats of Arms
Issued Jun. 13, 2017
Perf. 14 x 13½ | Design: Natalia Andreichenko | Offset Litho. | No watermark
1656 BFO Domestic Postal Rate H | Multicolored | Coat of Arms of Marynyn
Notes:
The Ukrainian trident (tryzub) appears in a small shield at the top left
Marynyn (Маринин) is a village located in Rivine Oblast (Рівненська обл.), as noted in the small text near the bottom
[Sources: stampworld.com, Claude AI]
2011 Household Items – One of a set of 4 stamps
Issued Jun. 7, 2011
Perf. 13¾ | Design: Ekaterina Shtanko | Offset Litho. | No watermark
1191 ANW ₴ 6.00 | Multicolored | Bandura (Бандура)
Notes:
The Ukranian monetary unit is the hryvnia (symbol ₴).
A bandura is a pear-shaped, multi-stringed plucked instrument unique to Ukrainian folk music. The image shows the instrument’s rounded wooden body, long fretted neck, elaborately carved scroll/ pegbox, and the many strings (both the neck strings and the shorter sympathetic strings stretched across the soundboard) that give the bandura its distinctive harp-like sound. A decorative rosette surrounds the sound hole.
[Sources: stampworld.com, Claude AI]
2023 Definitive Series – Pysanky Decorated Easter Eggs
Issued Apr. 21, 2023
Perf. 13 | Design: Natalia Andriichenko | Engraving: Integrated Printing Plant Ukraina For Securities | Offset Litho. | No watermark
2096 BWQ Domestic Postal Rate T | Multicolored | Pysanky Decorated Egg from the Hutsul ethnocultural region
Notes:
About pysanky: These eggs are decorated using a wax-resist (“batik”) method, where designs are drawn in hot wax before dyeing in successive colors, with the wax removed at the end to reveal the multicolor pattern. Each region of Ukraine has traditionally developed its own distinct motifs and color palettes, and Hutsul pysanky are especially prized for their intricate geometric symbolism.
Region label: “ГУЦУЛЬЩИНА” (Hutsulshchyna) in small text at the top — indicating this pysanka pattern comes from the Hutsul ethnocultural region, an area in the Carpathian Mountains (spanning parts of Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, and Zakarpattia oblasts) renowned for its distinctive folk art
Design: An elaborately patterned egg rendered in the traditional pysanka wax-resist dyeing technique, featuring a black background with a central stylized fish motif (a common Christian symbol) in green, yellow, and white, surrounded by geometric bands of triangles, stars, and wave/comb patterns in yellow, green, black, and white — colors and motifs characteristic of Hutsul pysanky
[Sources: stampworld.com, Claude AI]

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Friday/ sunset 🌇

Happy Friday.
It was a warm-ish day (83°F/ 28°C) here in the city, but there was a breeze around this morning and tonight.
The smoky air has cleared somewhat.

A hazy sunset with the warm colors washing out the blues in the cloudless sky.
Sunset is now at 8.34 pm.
The Space Needle hoisted a commemorative flag honoring the YMCA’s 150th anniversary today.
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Thursday/ the atomic bomb stamp that was never issued 📮

In 1995— as part of a series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II— the postal service designed a stamp with a painting of a mushroom cloud captioned “Atomic bombs hasten war’s end, August 1945.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Japanese government, peace activists, and many others were offended by a stamp that appeared to celebrate a terrifying weapon that multiple countries now possessed and occasionally threatened to use.
After the intervention of then-President Bill Clinton, postal officials reconsidered the matter and the stamp was never released (although a prototype for it, showing “00” where the stamp’s denomination would have appeared, is easily found online).
In its place, the post office substituted an image of President Harry Truman announcing Japan’s surrender on August 14, 1945. (The stamp in the middle at the bottom of the souvenir sheet below).
– From a discussion of the most controversial stamps in the history of the United States on history.com

1995 World War II Souvenir Sheet
Fifth and last souvenir sheet issued to commemorate the 50th anniversary of World War II
Includes 10 stamps plus a world map
Stamp Category: Commemorative
Series: World War II
Value: 32¢ (Denomination of each individual stamp)
First Day of Issue: September 2, 1995
First Day City: Honolulu, Hawaii
Quantity Issued (if known): 100,000,000
Printed by: Bureau of Engraving and Printing
Printing Method: Offset, Intaglio
Format: Sheetlets of 10 (arranged in 2 strips of 5, one across the top and one across the bottom of the sheetlet, with world map in between)
Perforations: 11.1 (Eureka off-line perforator)
Tagging: Overall, large block covering stamps and part of selvage
Why the stamp was issued: This souvenir sheet was issued to commemorate the 50th anniversary of World War II. It was the last in a series of five that were issued over the course of five years.
[Source: mysticstamp.com]