Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell fielded a lot of questions today after the announcement that the Federal funds rate will be cut by 25 basis points to a target rate of 2.00 – 2.25%. He characterized the cut as a mid-cycle ‘adjustment of policy’ — and that it is a way to brace against downside risks. (Um, another way to ‘brace against downside risks’ would be for the Trump Administration to stop the never-ending tariff wars with China and others).
That means savers will earn even less money on their savings. Borrowers for say home loans, may get a little relief from lower borrowing rates .. but 0.25% will barely make a difference on an 18% annual rate on a credit card!
Steve Liesman from CNBC talking about the rate cut. The US dollar is the strongest it has been in two years. The immediate reaction from the US stock market was negative, probably because the comments from Federal Reserve Board chairman Jay Powell were less dovish than expected.
CNN is hosting the second round of Democratic candidate debates this week. I played tennis and could not watch last night, but I saw the highlights. The lowlights would be Trump’s Twitter responses that continued into Wednesday.
Here’s the dumbest man on television, commenting on the debates via his classic Twitter style: go for 4th grader insults that use ‘the worst’, ‘the dumbest’ .. and throw in distortions and lies. Side Note: New polls show that 51% of all Americans say that Trump is a racist. A shockingly high 46% say he is not.
The Washington State Open tennis tournament started at the Seattle Tennis Club today— for the week, and I went out today to go and take a look. The facility is not even 2 miles from my house, but I have never been there. All other times of the year it is members only and very exclusive.
It was $30,000 to join the Club in 2015 (a figure almost certainly higher by now), plus annual dues. The wait list time is said to be 8 years or so. Rumor has it that Bill Gates wanted to become a member, but now has to wait his turn, as well.
The Seattle Tennis Club on the shore of Lake Washington. That’s the city of Bellevue in the distance. There are 19 tennis courts on the roughly 8 acres of real estate. As it turned out, the guy in red is the No 5 seed in the Men’s Open section, and I watched him play a match just a little later.A little bit of history, from a banner put up on one of the fences. The first tournament here, was held in 1890, only 13 years after London hosted its first Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1877.The Washington State Open logo, done in flowers and greenery.Here’s No 5 seed Riley Smith (22 yrs old, from Long Beach, California). He’s 6’7″ tall, and makes full use of it to smack his serves down into the opposite court. Bam!His opponent was Jesse Schouten from Mill Creek WA (north of Seattle). Shouten is a good player, but lost in straight sets against Smith.
I encountered a small group of ‘very fine’* Trump supporters on Broadway today, flanked by a large contingent of police officers (to protect them from a much larger group of protesters, I suppose).
From where I was standing, a much larger group of people followed along on the opposite sidewalk, all the time yelling loudly ‘FASCISTS, GO HOME! FASCISTS, GO HOME!
*Trump’s characterization of the Charlottesville white nationalist protesters, made when he talked to the press on Aug. 15, 2017.
The little group of ‘very fine’ Trump supporters were all of 7 or 8 people. That’s the yellow Gadsden flag with the rattlesnake on, and the words ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ (so are you all snakes?). Two Trumpsters carried Stars & Stripes flags, and two had Trump flags.
The construction crews are making good progress on the three new apartment buildings by the Capitol Hill train station.
The three new buildings called A, B and C, from a draft proposal that I found online. The buildings are 7 stories tall and will offer a total of some new 350 apartments. I believe the assumption is that these apartment dwellers will NOT own cars. They have trains and buses (and Uber drivers) on their doorstep to take them anywhere in the city, after all.The view from Denny Way, looking northeast. This is as tall as the new apartment buildings will go. The open space between the A building (left edge of the picture) and the B buildings (right) will be a public plaza.This is a late afternoon picture, looking north on 10th Avenue with the B buildings on the left. The homeowners on the right are getting some shade from the warm sun in summer, but they have lost a lot of sunlight that they used to have in winter!
I discovered a manufacturer of Spirograph-like gears online, and ordered a few sets of gears. It started out as a Kickstarter (publicly funded) project in 2013, based in Vancouver. The gears are laser-cut from acrylic.
So! I’m just getting started, and I will have to pick a few of my favorite patterns and add colors in and embellish them.
Here is the ‘unboxing’ moment. The gears are still clad in brown paper sheets stuck onto them (to protect them from scratches and to make for easy shipping). I bought two large sets and two small sets.Here is the set called Hoops. So this provides a large number of different sizes of rings for all kinds of patterns on their inside, or outside, or both.This is called the Encyclopedic Set, because it has gears with 12, 13, 14 .. all the way up to 30 teeth. The smallest Spirograph wheel has 24 teeth. Just for fun, I ran the 12 gear in all the holes in the main sheet after I took the geared wheels out.This is a special 120 tooth gear with odd geometric shapes to experiment with.The tiny 12 tooth gear. I will have to find a needle point pen to use in the tiny holes.A few doodles with the odd shapes gear.
The buzz on the cable news programs about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s un-spectacular testimony on Capitol Hill (about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, continued on Thursday.
No question: Trump is 100%guilty of welcoming the help of the Russians, of then obstructing the investigation into it, and of repeatedly lying about it. But his Attorney-General and the Republicans under Senate Leader McConnell do not care, and are completely supporting Trump.
What will the Democrats do next? I say start impeachment hearings. I’m with Charles Blow that writes in the New York Times:
People were told that opening an impeachment inquiry would be a mistake because that’s what Trump wants to energize his base — particularly a failure to convict in the Senate — and that it would virtually guarantee his re-election.
None of this washes with me. While Democrats worry about tearing the country apart, Trump is doing just that in real time. His base doesn’t need further energizing; they’re juiced up on sexism, xenophobia, racism and nationalism.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow to Adam Schiff, chairman of House Committee on Intelligence : ‘He (Mueller) persistently seemed – um – old’. Aw. (He’s 74). I have to agree, though. He looked worn out, and looked like a reluctant witness. Many of his answers were just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘that is correct’. But he did say working with the Russians was ‘a crime’ .
Hmm.. is that a legitimate word: cenosillicaphobia? I wondered, as I looked at the letter board sign behind the bar counter in the Elysian Capitol Hill Brewery tonight.
Well, kind of. It looks like it was invented some 10 years ago. It is listed by Urban Dictionary, but not by Merriam-Webster (the gold standard for online dictionaries).
Ceno means empty, such as in cenotaph (a tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person, or group of persons, whose remains are elsewhere), sillica would be the glass and phobia (of course), the irrational fear.
No reason to suffer from cenosillicaphobia when the bartender is right there, though – unless you have had several too many, already.
There it is: Boris Johnson is the new Prime Minister of the United Kingston (per Ivanka Trump).
Can Johnson pull a rabbit out of the hat and deliver an orderly Brexit by Oct. 31?
Writes Roger Cohen in an opinion piece in the New York Times: Johnson has played with his country, treating it like one of his many dalliances, with a sloppiness and fecklessness no wit or charm can excuse. He backed a British exit from the European Union on a whim — in the expectation it would be rejected — and has since become a pawn of the Brexit ultras, the crazed little-England monomaniacs who have now delivered him to 10 Downing Street.
The sidewalk on the left is the one that I always take to walk to the grocery store, and there is a really bad tree root bump in it.
One of the city’s transportation crews has dug into the soil today. An arborist will advise if the trees can survive, once the troublesome roots had been taken out. I hope the trees will be OK! I guess I will soon find out.
This is on Republican Street, between 16th & 17th Avenue.
The walkways around the Denny Substation opened yesterday, and I went to take a look today.
The view at the top of the walkway at Denny Substation. This is at a 2nd floor elevation, and close to the corner of Denny Way & Stewart St.One can now stand under the ‘Transforest’ artwork and, um, learn to appreciate it a little more!Here’s a view from Stewart Street towards the Space Needle. The site in the middle of the picture is under construction (1200 Stewart St), and this current view will change dramatically over the next 18 months or so. Two 45-story towers on a 3-story podium will be constructed with some 1,050 apartments and retail space. (Whoah). The new building partially fitted with its glass windows is 1120 Denny Way: a complex of two 41-story apartments buildings. Upon completion, it will be the largest apartment building in the city’s history with 1,179 apartments.The construction of the new ‘Building Cure‘ for Seattle Children’s Research Hospital is about to be completed. I love the mirror finish on the lettering. This is on Terry Avenue.Also by the Building Cure are these colorful sidewalk chairs that can swivel.A giant astronaut in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, promoting an exhibit of the 1969 moon landing in Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
July 20, 1969: Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the Moon. Neil Armstrong was first to step out of Apollo 11’s Eagle landing module, though – leaving the first human footprints on the moon.
We are spared the heat wave that is gripping the Midwest and Northeast of the country.
The Seattle area may see 86°F/ 30°C by Sunday, but that is mild compared to the sizzling temperatures forecast for St. Louis, Washington DC and Boston.
The forecast for Saturday’s heat-indexed temperatures from Accuweather. Conversion: 95°F is 35°C | 100°F is 38°C | 105°F is 41°C | 110°F is 43°C.The scene tonight at Volunteer Park at 8 pm or so. A smattering of people are listening to a violinist from South India, performing on the stage. Classical music barbarian that I am, I could not really appreciate the music, and so I left after a while.
Today marks ten years since the opening of the Seattle light rail transit system. I was one of the 45,000 riders that boarded the light rail train for the first time, on July 18, 2009.
The initial line ran from downtown to Tukwila International Boulevard (close to Seattle-Tacoma airport). Four more stops have opened since then (Seattle-Tacoma airport & Angle Lake to the south, Capitol Hill and University of Washington to the north). The next extension of three more stops to the north, will open in 2021.
I made a run to the downtown station today, to buy this 10-year anniversary transit card. There’s the train in the background. There are currently 62 train cars in the system. They are made by a train car manufacturer called Kinkisharyo, in Osaka, Japan.
Trump: ‘I don’t have a racist bone in my body’.
Joe Biden, asked about it by a reporter: ‘That means he has no bones’.
It’s Wednesday, and the furor over Trump’s tweets from the weekend, urging four female members of color of the House of Representatives to ‘go back to their countries’ (all four are American citizens, of course) has not died down.
Hmm. Let’s see. The C fits Completely. The P? .. Probably, I would say. Picture tweeted by Michael James Schneider (on Twitter: Michael James Schneider@BLCKSMTHdesign).
Ai, aster, aster, vat my hand en druk my vaster, want my kop voel deurmekaar as ek na jou skoonheid staar*
*a rough translation: (young man to his girlfriend) ‘hey aster, aster, take my hand and hold me faster, for my head is humming, as you are so stunning’.
– from the 1970’s Afrikaans folk song ‘Ai, meisie, meisie’ by Jan de Wet
The aster in front of my house is flowering. Its genus is Kalimeris, from the sunflower family. It was first described in 1825 by the French botanist Alexandre Henri Gabriel de Cassini.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.
Here’s the retro packaging of Elysian Brewing Company’s Space Dust brand of beer, to commemorate the anniversary.
I went bicycling with my friends on today, and tried out an electric-assist bicycle for the first time.
The bicycle has three gears, and performed very well. As far as I could tell, the electric assist from the battery is always-on (so no way to turn it off).
On even grades, the electric assist feels a little like cheating! – but it does come in very handy on long uphill climbs.
I’m ready! I found this bike a few blocks away from my friends’ house, with the help of Uber’s app, scanned its QR code with my phone, unlocked it, and it was ready to go. JUMP is Uber’s bike-share service that competes with Lime, the other bike rental player in Seattle.Here’s Lake Washington, during a quick stop in Seward Park. It was a beautiful day (75°F/ 24°C) with sun and puffy white clouds.
The Federer-Nadal semi-final at Wimbledon produced an incredible display of tennis — nevermind that the protagonists were 33 and 37 (almost 38) years old.
They have played each other some 40 times, but last met at Wimbledon in 2008 – so this match was in the making for 11 years. In all this time, they both only got sharper, fitter and even better than they already had been at their game, so long ago.
Federer (Switzerland) celebrates after defeating Nadal (Spain) 7-6(3) 1-6 6-3 6-4 on Saturday in the Wimbledon Men’s Semi-final. It was a very memorable match to watch. I love the fan that simply waves the little Swiss flag. Picture from the official Wimbledon ‘The Championship’ website. Credit: AELTC/Thomas Lovelock.
Newspaper front page after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake.
I woke up to a shaking house at 3 a.m. this morning.
The shaking went on for only a few seconds, but I was sure it was an earthquake. It turned out there was a magnitude 3.5 quake, and the one I experienced must have been the 4.6 quake that followed just two minutes later.
The epicenter of the quake is about 26 miles from my house. No real damage or injuries in the Puget Sound area or from elsewhere, were reported.
P.S. The Nisqually earthquake of 2001 near Olympia was several orders of magnitude stronger, at 6.8. It damaged the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the dome of the State Capitol building in Olympia, and Starbucks headquarters in Seattle.
