Month: January 2021

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Sunday/ the 1920’s and the electric home

There were no cars in front of The Parkhurst apartment building on 14th Avenue, as I walked by, just before dark.
So I snapped a picture, to check up on its history at home.
Here is what I found.

The Parkhurst apartment building on 14th Ave. It was built in 1929 by builder & developer Gardner J. Gwinn (inset picture). A native from Nova Scotia, Canada, he moved to Seattle in 1909 at the age of 21. At the time the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition (a world’s fair) was underway (on the site now occupied by the University of Washington), and the city was booming.
Gwinn was a prolific home builder, and was selected by the Electric Club of Seattle to promote and market ‘Electric Homes’. In the very beginning, homes were wired with only the basics for electric lighting. ‘Electric homes’ had electric outlets & more extensive wiring for electric appliances in the kitchen and elsewhere in the house. [From the Seattle Times Archives, Sept. 24, 1922].
It’s 97 years later, but both of the homes pictured above in the 1924 Seattle Times, are still standing. This picture of the top one is from Google Streetview.
From the same Seattle Times supplement from 1924, an article that promotes the ‘modern home’ that has electricity. Vacuum cleaner, washing machine, 6-pound flat iron, toaster, percolator, stove, sewing machine .. who could resist? The nationwide electrical grid was still under construction, though. In 1925, only about half of homes in the US had access to electricity at all.
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Saturday/ come as you are

Hundreds of people lined up for Covid-19 vaccines at Seattle University and other clinics after a refrigerator broke at a nearby hospital, meaning nurses had to quickly give out 1,600 doses of the vaccine or throw them away. The call went out at 11.00 pm and by 3.30 am all 1,600 doses had been administered. [Photo: David Ryder/Getty Images]
From the New York Times, Sat. Jan. 30:
Wearing bathrobes, pajamas or whatever else they could quickly throw on, hundreds of people flocked to get Covid vaccines in Seattle on Thursday night after a refrigerator that was chilling 1,600 doses broke down, leading to a frenzied overnight inoculation drive.
The impromptu vaccinations began after a refrigerator malfunctioned at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Seattle, meaning the Moderna vaccines inside had to be quickly injected or they would become less effective and need to be thrown away. Health officials reached out to two other hospital systems in the city, and an urgent call was issued around 11 p.m., alerting residents that they had a rare chance to get vaccines if they could come right away.

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Friday/ the South African variant is here

Two patients in South Carolina with no connection to each other, and with no history of travel, have been found to be infected with the South African variant, 501Y.V2.  Then there is the United Kingdom variant, also known as B117, which could be dominant in the United States by March, say Dr Fauci and others.

In spite of this, Seattle, with surrounding King County, is once again allowed to loosen restrictions from Monday (25% indoor dining, 25% gym capacity, 5 persons from two households, blah blah blah).  Small businesses want to reopen, and people need to work.

None of this makes any difference to my daily routine. I’m not going anywhere.
When will I get my vaccine? is all I want to know.
Shots are in very short supply — and I don’t qualify for one at this point, anyway.

‘There you go! The rest comes later!’ At this point there is not enough vaccine to go around — does not matter where in the world. 
[Cartoon by Klaus Stuttmann in German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel]
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Thursday/ the GameStop shares frenzy

This is gambling, not investing.

– Brett Arends in an opinion piece on MarketWatch called ‘An open letter to the GameStop army on Reddit’

There has been a ferocious tug-of-war happening on the US stock market with the shares of a company called GameStop.

Let’s set the scene first.

GameStop is an American video game, consumer electronics & gaming merchandise retailer. They closed 1,000 stores last year and seems destined to go out of business altogether in a year or two.  (Computer games are, in general, no longer sold as physical items that can be resold second-hand. Game players buy & download their games from the web).

Hedge funds are for billionaires and wealthy investors, and their managers like to use derivative instruments to make ungodly sums of money for their clients (and sometimes ungodly losses).  One such instrument is short selling. The investor (hedge fund) borrows shares from a broker, sells it into the market. The investor has to buy back these shares at a future date. So the investor hopes/ believes the share price will fall. (That way the investor pockets the difference). If the share price ends up higher at the future date, the investor will be forced to buy it back at the higher price, and lose money/ lose a LOT of money.

Robinhood is a financial services start-up with an app that makes it super-easy for individual investors to buy and sell shares, at zero commissions (free).  Critics charge that they make transacting too easy, and that they lure young and first-time investors into day-trading, instead of long-term investing.

Enter social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website Reddit.
The community members from reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ want to flip off the hedge fund managers and help the little guy to make money. One of the ways to do this recently, has been to pile into GameStop shares. If large enough numbers of investors (‘investors’?) ignore the sage advice from Yahoo Finance that a stock is overvalued, and buy it anyway, things start to happen.

GameStop was sort of left for dead by July 2020 ($4), but then came Jan 1, 2021 ($18), and when more short-sellers had to jump in this week and start to buy GameStop in a classic ‘short squeeze’. The demand pushed the price up to $468 at 9.45am this morning. That’s a 100-fold increase from six months ago. 

By today, hedge funds are said to have lost at least US$5bn. On the other side are people such as a Texas fifth-grader that cashed in the 10 GameStop shares his mom gave him for Kwanzaa, on Wednesday — for almost $3,200. She had bought them for $6 apiece as a holiday gift in 2019.

Robinhood jumped in and blocked its investors from buying GameStop today. I’d say that is interfering with the free market.  Google removed over 100,000 one-star reviews of the Robinhood app on Google’s Play Store, to restore its 4-star rating. I’d say that is interfering of some kind. Billionaire Leon Cooperman was on CNBC again today, saying he doesn’t fault the wallstreetbets investors, but that this would end in tears. (Yes, it would for some, but not for everyone). Cooperman reiterated his position that rich people shouldn’t pay more taxes.

All this is happening against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic, that has devastated the economy & magnified inequalities ten-fold. The federal government is pushing trillions of dollars of stimulus into the economy, with hundreds of billions going to undeserving companies and individuals.

So exactly how free is this economy, this market, and who on Wall Street, is manipulating whom?

Today’s panel for GameStop shares from Yahoo Finance. Volatile! 44% down in one session, and then 61% up after hours. Look at the belated ‘Overvalued’ marker at the bottom left. One-year target estimate $13.44.
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Wednesday/ Holocaust Memorial Day

It is Holocaust Memorial Day. I took this picture when I was in Berlin in the summer of 2015.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial is a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000-square-metre (200,000 sq ft) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. An attached underground “Place of Information” (German: Ort der Information) holds the names of approx. 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem. [Source: Wikipedia]
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Tuesday/ ‘two masks are the new masks’

Well, I played tennis last night with my mask on, as mandated by the Amy Yee Tennis Center. My mask had three layers of cotton fabric. It got a little ugly at times.

As you huff & puff after a long rally — through the mask — your panicked brain roars ‘MORE OX-Y-GEN ..NOW! MORE OX-Y-GEN ..NOW! .. and it makes you want to yank the suffocating $@#! thing right off your face.

So! I’m definitely going to have to try a few more different masks.

From the New York Times. I suppose this works if you are a body at rest (as they say in Physics), silently observing what’s going on. (One could just stay home, of course, and not attend these public events). Pete Buttigieg is President Biden’s Secretary of Transportation nominee, and did very well at his Jan. 21 nomination hearing. The vote for his confirmation is still pending.
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Monday/ tropical storm Eloise

I’ve been following tropical storm Eloise for a few days now. There has not been large loss of life (official death toll in Mozambique: 12), but some 5,000 homes in Mozambique were destroyed or badly flooded.

I believe the Kruger National Park, the national parks in Zimbabwe, and the Moremi Game Reserve on the eastern side of Botswana’s Okavango Delta* will be OK. Some areas are getting soaked with 5 or 6 inches of rain, and this summer’s corn harvest is going to be damaged badly.

*This is the time of year that the enormous and very shallow bowl of the Okavango Delta fills up with about 2.6 cubic miles (11 cubic km) of water, spread over as much as 5,800 square miles (15,000 km2).

Tropical storm Eloise brought heavy rains over the south of Mozambique, the little land-locked country Eswatini, and the north and east of South Africa. [Infographic by Theuns Kruger/ Grafika24 for Beeld newspaper]
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Sunday/ getting colder

These penguins at the South Pole are playing a version of pin the tail on the donkey. 
‘Cold, cold, colder, much colder, mu-uch colder!‘ say the ones observing the efforts of the blindfolded one.
[Cartoonist: Gernot Gunga from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany]
The lowlands might see a few snowflakes tomorrow, say the weather people.

We again played tennis outside yesterday (officially 43 °F/ 6 °C).  It was OK, but at times the cold numbed my fingers around the racquet handle.

Fortunately, Amy Yee Tennis Center has again opened up its indoor courts.

We have to wear masks while we play, though, so that will be interesting .. a little harder to yell out the score before you serve, for one thing.

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Saturday/ cleaned out

Superb Cleaners dry cleaners on 15th Avenue has gone out of business.
No wonder, right?
In a stay-home-pandemic, people do not need much dry cleaning — not for business trips, not for the opera, and not for a Saturday night dinner party at a fancy friend’s house.

2021: Permanently closed, Superb Cleaners on 15th Avenue. Time will tell if another dry cleaning business will be operated in that space, or if another kind of business altogether will set up shop.
1955: The Hill Top Cafe, Philco Radio & TV shop, and Superb Cleaners with its original scaffolded sign. ‘Complete Plant’ simply means the dry cleaning is done right there on site, and not sent out somewhere else for cleaning. 
P.S. That stylish wagon with its white-wall tires and wood trim is a 1955 Ford Country Squire Station Wagon. 
[Source: Seattle Before and After at http://octopup.org/]
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Friday/ Volunteer Park’s ducks

We had a lot of sun today.
It’s January, though – the doldrums of winter – and the day’s highs only made it to 45 °F (7 °C).
These pictures are from Monday.

Here’s the Volunteer Park reservoir, here on Capitol Hill in the city. Its water is not considered usable for drinking water (the city has already covered several other reservoirs with lids, but not this one). The Cedar River’s water filled the 22 million-gallon reservoir for the first time in January 1901. The chlorophyll in the moss on the parapet (low wall) around the reservoir, is glowing neon green in the sunlight.
Here’s a female mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), at one of the two duck ponds near the reservoir.
The male with its glossy green head, doing the duck thing, paddling in the water. Mallards are dabbling ducks: freshwater ducks that feed in shallow water by dabbling and upending as they look for food.
This species is the main ancestor of most breeds of domesticated ducks (the white ones that are kept for their meat, eggs and down). Mallard ducks were first domesticated in Southeast Asia, at least 4,000 years ago. [Source: Wikipedia]
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Thursday/ time is fleeting

Art is long, and Time is fleeting ..
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from his poem ‘A Psalm of Life’ (1839)

iPhone home screen from Twitter, showing 21:21 on Jan 21.

I know that our Gregorian calendar and Arabic numerals, used for date & time notation, is a completely man-made construct.

Even so: the clock here on the Pacific coast is about to run into a cascade of 21s, the way it has all over the world today.

At 9.21:21 pm tonight it will be the ..
21st second into the
21st minute into the
21st hour into the
21st day into the
21st year into the
21st century.

In Earth’s geological timeframe of 4.6 billion years, humans find themselves in the Halocene epoch of the Quarternary Period.  The Halocene epoch started some 11,650 years ago. I love the pictures of the dinosaurs and animals. That must be a Neanderthal man, and hey, a space shuttle right at the end. Last space shuttle flight was in 2011, but that’s OK. That was just a moment ago. [Source: A blog called NaturPhilosophie, run out of Glasgow, Scotland]
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Wednesday/ The Biden has landed

‘The new dawn blooms as we free it,
There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to see it.
There is always light –
Only if we are brave enough to be it.’

— National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman (22), delivering a poem at President Biden’s inauguration

It’s been a wonderful day here in the United States.
We now have President Joe Biden and Madam Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Before they were both sworn in, Lady Gaga sang The Star-Spangled Banner in her Schiaparelli scarlet & black couture, and wearing the largest golden peace dove brooch I had ever seen.
She made me cry (but Garth Brooks did not).

Kamala Harris is sworn in as vice president by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, as Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, holds the Bible. Harris’ purple coat was designed by rising-star designer Christopher John Rogers. [Photo by Andrew Harnik / Pool via Getty Images]
Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th President of the United States on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., just before noon Eastern Standard Time.  His wife, Dr. Jill Biden, is holding a hefty Bible, accented with a Celtic cross, that has been in his family since 1893. [Picture by REUTERS/ Kevin Lamarque]
President Obama looked impeccable as always. As a Twitter fan noted, about ‘Forever First Lady’ Michele Obama: she did not come to play. She came to slay, with a burgundy-shaded jacket & matching turtleneck sweater and wide-leg trousers. The designer is Sergio Hudson, a Black designer from South Carolina. She completed her chic outfit with an oversized gold belt buckle, black leather gloves, simple black mask; her hair down in bouncy curls. [Picture by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post]

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Tuesday/ more than 400,000 lives lost

Exactly one year ago on Jan. 19, 2020, a 35-year-old man checked into an urgent-care clinic in Snohomish County, Washington, with a 4-day history of cough & fever. He had arrived at Seattle-Tacoma airport on Jan. 15, after traveling back from visiting family in Wuhan, China, for three months.

The next day, the CDC confirmed that the patient’s nose and throat swabs had tested positive for 2019-nCoV, in a PCR test. He was the first known case of Covid-19 in the States. The patient got worse before he got better, but by Feb. 3, he was well enough to go home.

There must already have been many other unknown carriers of the virus in the Seattle area, though. The Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, was the first Covid-19 hotspot in the US. In February and March, 46 people lost their lives there.

By Jan. 19, 2021, the virus had made it into every county in the entire United States, and had killed 400,000 people.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. with his wife, Jill Biden, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. Today, Mr. Biden paid tribute to the victims of the pandemic, the same day that the death toll in the United States topped a staggering 400,000.

[caption from the New York Times/ Photo by Doug Mills/ NYT]

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Monday/ it’s Martin Luther King Day

[Photo credit: Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]
Here is Dr Martin Luther King Jr, speaking on the Mall in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, after a civil rights march. This is where he delivered his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.

Fast forward some 57 years, and in that time the United States had  inaugurated its first black president — twice.

In 2016, though, the archaic electoral college system, and vast social media disinformation campaigns, resulted in the first white supremacist president to be elected.

In 2021, that Capitol building in the distance would be overrun by violent white supremacists, seeking to overturn the free & fair* election results of 2020.
So now there is a vast amount of work to do, to eradicate a pandemic of lies about the election, along with the pandemic of the Covid-19 virus.

*A generous characterization? .. given the voter suppression, the non-stop gaslighting of voters by the sitting president and his allies, and the damage done to the US Postal service, in order to interfere with mail-in ballots and mail-in votes.

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Sunday/ the Mall is closed

The long, grassy National Mall in Washington DC is home to the Lincoln Memorial and the equally iconic Washington Monument. It fills up with people during the inauguration of a newly elected American president. That will not happen this year with Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday.

The Capitol building, and a large area around it, is patrolled and filled to the hilt with National Guardsmen, US Capitol Police, Washington DC police, the Secret Service – you name it.

I guess it is all a fitting end to the unmitigated disaster that was the Trump presidency.  The FBI published dozens of ‘FBI Seeking Information’ posters with pictures of the Jan 6. attackers. Several characters been marked ‘ARRESTED’ (dude with feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk; dude with horns & furs, and megaphone; ‘Baked Alaska’, a right-wing social media personality that live-streamed the scene from inside the Capitol with more than 5,100 viewers watching).

Trump is said to entertain the pardoning of at least 100 more criminals, in the final hours of his presidency. One wonders if any of those already arrested by the FBI, will get a pardon. I would hazard a guess and say they will not.    

That non-scalable fence is 8 ft high, but even so, razor wire is also being installed along its top. [Picture from Sunday taken by Evelyn Hockstein/for The Washington Post]
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Saturday/ winter tennis

My social tennis club organized a special winter session for us: outdoors at the courts at Lower Woodland Park by Green Lake.
The sun did not really shine (48 °F/ 9 °C), and the courts were not completely dry – but hey, we got to play some tennis.

The sports fields at Lower Woodland Park by Green Lake. Is that thing the sun? Why yes, it is.
A company called Curative operates this Covid-19 testing kiosk at Lower Woodland Park. One collects one’s own sample by swabbing a Q-tip inside each cheek, upper and lower gums, underneath and top of the tongue, and the roof of the mouth. Results in 48 hours, by text & e-mail. The test is 90% accurate. Cost is $325 and per Curative’s website ‘COVID-19 testing could be reimbursed by your health plan or the government’. So that’s a definite maybe.
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Thursday/ my new animals

My shipment from Amazon Japan* has arrived: a chess set, which I will show later, and three animal figures to add to my collection.

*German international courier DHL picked the package up in Tokyo, flew it to their hub in Cincinnati, and then on to Seattle where it was put on the delivery truck. Yes, I know, I am a bad person. I should not burn fossil fuels to buy a product that is made from fossil fuels (plastic). Sorry.

I had to get the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), because I had one in my hand in the Yodobashi store in Tokyo, and put it back on the shelf. There are fewer than 2,000 pandas left in the wild. An additional 400 are in captivity, most of those in China. Pandas play an enormous role as ambassadors for China, and to generate goodwill towards the country around the world. (Model is Schleich 14772 Giant Panda, Male. Introduced 2017).
The gray wolf (Canis lupus), a native Washington State species, nearly became extinct in the state in the early 1900s. The Washington Dept. of Fish & Wildlife reported in 2019 that there were at least 145 wolves living in 26 packs in the state. (They are elusive and hard to count). (Model is Schleich 14821 Wolf, Introduced 2019).
And my collection did not have an American bison (Bison bison) until today, so that could certainly not stand! The vast herds on the North American continent are estimated to have had 60 million animals at their peak. They were just about hunted into extinction by the animal called Homo sapiens: by 1889 there were 541 left. Recovery efforts were put in place, and today there are some 31,000 in the wild. (Schleich 14714 American Bison. Introduced 2014).
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Wednesday/ impeached, again

And there it is.

From the Washington Post, today. 
Trump’s Senate Trial will start on Jan. 19 at the earliest. Joe Biden’s inauguration is on Jan. 20, at which time Moscow Mitch also gets downgraded to minority leader in the Senate. Trump has no legal team, no credible defense, and the events of Jan. 6 looks worse every day now, as more of what happened is revealed. [Front page of the New York Times for Thu Jan 14]
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Tuesday/ welcome on board

Cabin crew dressed in personal protective equipment (PPE) await passengers before a flight from Amsterdam to China. [Photo: Justin Jin for South China Morning Post newspaper]
We still have airplane passengers here in the States that get away with wearing no mask on the airplane. Why is that? They need to be removed and added to the no-fly list for 10 years, with the rest of the FBI’s domestic terrorists.

Here are a few excerpts from photojournalist Justin Jin’s recent visit to Shanghai (to visit his cancer-stricken dad in the hospital), as described in the South China Morning Post:

To get on one of the few exorbitantly priced flights, I have to pass two Covid-19 tests. One will draw a sample from my nose and the other from my blood, with both needed to be taken within 48 hours before departure at a lab approved by the local Chinese consulate. When I get my results, I have to upload them together with a long list of personal data via a phone app to the consulate, which then activates a QR “health” code on my phone required for boarding my plane in Amsterdam.

Many of the mostly Chinese passengers come fully protected, too. Since each of us carries double-negative results to get on the flight, this cabin must be one of the safest places in Europe. The Chinese passengers also follow instructions to stay in their seats as much as possible, even avoiding the toilet during the 12-hour flight. I also avoid the bathroom, my confidence shaken by the behavior of those around me.

Upon landing, customs officers comb through the plane to see if anyone has fallen ill. Our flight gets the all-clear to disembark, and we file into a Covid-19 testing station, getting another QR code and passport check along the way. Almost everything is shielded and contactless, a precise choreography of anticipated human movement.

Even though I have by now three certified negative test results, I am still a suspect in China’s eyes. There’s always a chance of catching something on the way. And since the tests I have had are not perfect, I shall endure a 14-day strict quarantine at my own cost. (At the hotel, Justin describes the severe cleaning procedures at the hotel. The hallway is disinfected every time a person had entered it, for example).

. . .

In free and democratic Europe, people live under the repressive shadow of Covid-19. In China, the system is restrictive, but people are almost completely safe from the virus imprisoning much of the world. They are free to hug, to party and to prosper.

The same night my brother takes me to a crowded wine bar in Shanghai with friends. There are no masks, no talk of vaccines and, for a moment, no worries. It feels so 2023.