My mission for the afternoon was to get a few pictures of the Space Needle. It is again painted in galaxy gold for its 60th anniversary— the way it had been for its debut at the Seattle World’s Fair in April 1962.
I even drove up Queen Anne Hill to Kerry Park, to get the classic skyline-with-Space Needle picture.
The Davenport Apartments building is posted here as a ‘Find the Space Needle’ puzzle. (Part of the Space Needle appears in the picture). The Davenport was designed by architect Herbert Bittman in 1925, and has an unusual courtyard entrance to its 14-car garage.
These pictures are from my walk back home from the Bartell pharmacy on First Hill.
This is Hofius House at 1104 Spring Street, First Hill. Designed by German-born architects Spalding and Umbrecht and constructed in 1902. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese began housing the Seattle Archbishop in this residence in 1920.The Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church at Harvard and Howell held a last service in June 2018, and then closed its doors for good, it seems. The church was built just about 100 years ago, in 1923.Hey! The tourists are back, even if just a handful. I waved at them. (Maybe I shouldn’t have. I could the city’s reputation for stand-offishness to neighbors and visitors alike, called ‘The Seattle Freeze’).Spring leaves on the trees by Seattle Central College on Broadway.I hate graffiti, but hey— if the graffiti complements me, it makes it a little better. Maybe.
I have had my Instant Pot pressure cooker for a week now, and I’m still learning to use it —but I like it a lot.
So far I have cooked regular oats, steel-cut oats, rice, Brussels sprouts, asparagus and sweet potato in it. Asparagus is ready in an instant with an official cooking time of 0 minutes. You put them in, and they’re done. Howzat! 😂
Let me explain. The laws of physics still apply. Even if you put the water and asparagus in the cooker and tell it to cook for 0 minutes, it will still take 5-10 mins to get to the operating temperature and pressure inside. During that time it already cooks the food inside. Something as delicate as asparagus is then cooked already. Voila.
I put this sweet potato in for 20 minutes and it came out perfectly cooked. (I let the pressure go down by itself for another 10 mins or so). I used to bake these root vegetables in the oven: a 45-minute endeavor with tin foil, and then the sugar sometimes oozes out of the venting holes I made into the skin with a fork, and bake into black, as well.Water, the versatile substance of life, comes in three phases, depending on its temperature— and the pressure it is under. Liquid water under a higher pressure cooks (turns into steam) at a higher temperature. A pressure cooker operates at roughly 2 atmospheres of pressure —12 to 15 pounds per square inch (psi) above atmospheric pressure (which is roughly 15 psi). At 12 psi above sea level pressure, pressure water boils at 117 °C (243 °F). Yes, that sounds like a modest temperature elevation compared to an oven, but the steam sealed in the cooker has an enormous capacity for carrying and transmitting heat to the food to cook it. Just as an interesting aside: the triple point of water occurs at 0.01 °C in a near-vacuum. That point at the upper right called the critical point is where water vapor (steam) is warm enough so that no amount of pressure brought to bear on it, will liquefy it.
Poster for the band Wallows and their album Tell Me That It’s Over .. sure sounds like a reference to the pandemic. Dr. Fauci says it is .. kind of: the US is ‘out of the full-blown COVID-19 pandemic phase’. We still lose 300 people every day, far more than in a very bad flu season, but down from three thousand a day at the height of the pandemic.
I knew the word wallow, but when I saw the poster of the band Wallows that had been here in Seattle, I wanted to look up the word nonetheless. Check it out below.
wal·low
/ˈwälō/
verb 1. (chiefly of large mammals) roll about or lie relaxed in mud or water, especially to keep cool, avoid biting insects, or spread scent.
“watering places where buffalo liked to wallow”
Similar:
loll around
lie around
tumble around
splash around
slosh
wade
paddle
slop
squelch
welter
splosh
2. (of a person) indulge in an unrestrained way in (something that creates a pleasurable sensation).
“I was wallowing in the luxury of the hotel”
proper noun 3. Wallows is an American alternative rock band based in Los Angeles composed of Dylan Minnette, Braeden Lemasters, and Cole Preston.
The band began releasing songs independently in April 2017 starting with “Pleaser”, which reached number two on the Spotify Global Viral 50 chart.
Thanos is a supervillain, and first appeared in 1973 in The Invincible Iron Man #55 by the Marvel Comics Group. (A little irony here: Musk is hailed by his hard-core supporters as a real-life Iron Man). Thanos (Musk) is wearing his Infinity Gauntlet, with the Infinity Gems he had collected, making himself omnipotent. [Cartoon by Michael de Adder, editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, under the heading ‘Elon is inevitable’]
Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter sent shockwaves through the Twitterverse and beyond.
Co-founder Jack Dorsey professes to be very happy, though. From the tweets below: ‘It (Twitter) wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company’. It’s a statement that sounds stunningly naive to me— given all the evil in the world that social media had been exploited for.
Prof. Scott Galloway is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business says on Twitter this is a lot of yogababble : nonsensical or esoteric thinking (unconventional; understood only by a chosen group). I agree. And then there’s technobabble in here as well. What precisely does ‘protocol level’ mean? Application layer? Transport layer? Network layer? The internet protocol?Twitter was founded 16 years ago, in March of 2006. As a social media company it has not enjoyed nearly the same success as Facebook (one tenth the valuation of FB, the value of which is down by 50% the last 6 months, to some $500 billion). Bloomberg Businessweek noted in 2012 with this cover that the company had survived in spite of its efforts to ‘kill itself’. Nine years later, the board of directors finally killed off Twitter the public company by selling it to a billionaire.
France and Germany are Europe’s pillars, and policymakers in capitals across the continent had been watching the election with anxiety.
-The Washington Post
Macron won 59% of the vote, and Le Pen just 41% (I’m using round numbers), quite a bigger margin than the 10-12% that polls had suggested.
It’s a decisive win, given the stark political divides in liberal democracies around the world.
Abstention figures around the country were at their highest of any second-round vote in France since 1969, though .. and almost 9% of voters that did show up, cast a blank vote, or invalidated their ballots (by crossing out both candidates, for example).
Macron has won, but faces big challenges. The parliamentary elections take place in June, and Macron’s La Republique en Marche (LaREM) and allies need a majority of 289 MPs in the 577-seat lower house. There’s also a cost-of-living crisis in France for poor people, and Macron has not implemented the pension reforms he had promised for his first term— the foremost of which is to raise the retirement age to 65 by 2031 (for those not working hard physical jobs).
An Athina sofa in Very Peri from the KK by Koket collection. I looked up the price: $5,000. Interior designers caution to use the color sparingly.
Pantone Color Institute’s pick for its 2022 color of the year is an intense purple called Very Peri. The ‘new’ color is said to have been developed from scratch (instead of being plucked out of an existing color catalog).
The color is not universally acclaimed. New York-based interior designer Brock Forsblom warned that too much of the color could give off a “‘My Little Pony’ alternate universe” vibe, or “Princess Jasmine out for a hot night” attitude.
Mariette (looking at a picture of a tree) : What’s that? ‘K’ (the Blade Runner) : A tree. Mariette : I’ve never seen a tree. It’s pretty.
– from the 2017 movie about a dystopian Earth, ‘Blade Runner 2049’
The Prez was here in Seattle today. He talked about legislation to help the U.S. Forest Service plant 1.2 billion trees on national forest lands.
These pansies (genus Viola) are in the flower beds by the greenhouse in Volunteer Park.Here is President Biden, speaking in Seward Park. Writes Katie Rogers for the NYT: ‘He unveiled a plan to restore national forests devastated by wildfires. He promoted a climate agenda that has largely gone unfulfilled. .. The trip granted him a bit of a respite from Washington and returned him to the campaign-trail style of schmoozing that energizes him. In Seattle, Mr. Biden appeared before a group of big-ticket donors that included Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft.
Here is my picture of tonight’s rainbow that was visible just before sunset, now at 8.08 pm.
Rainbows are optical illusions: reflected sunlight that is scattered by suspended drops of moisture in the atmosphere. Moreover, the multicolored band with ‘seven’ colors is an artefact of human color vision. There is no banding in a black-and-white photo of a rainbow, only a smooth gradation of intensity to a maximum, then fading again towards the other side. – Paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry for Rainbow.
Three of the five amigos (two are out of town) had beers and a bite at Union. We liked the ambiance inside. The food was decent. Maybe the volume for the music videos on screens around the place was turned up a trifle too high— or maybe I’m not as young as I used to be.
One of us had to surrender a credit card as collateral, as soon as we ordered our beers. Say wha-aat? I thought. (It’s the first time in a very long time that we had been at a place that required that). They worry that unscrupulous clientele might vanish after a second or third round of expensive cocktails, of course.
I just happened to take this picture of Union’s entrance last week while on a walkabout. ‘Airy bar & eatery with a leafy patio, serving cocktails alongside hearty comfort food & happy hours’, says the online description. The bar used to be located at 14th & Union some three blocks away, but the building there had caught fire in April 2019. It all ended up in a relocation and reopening here in March 2021. (Side note: very nice to see the sidewalk and street free of trash).
I forgot to post this picture on Sunday. It’s a peek at the inside of Seattle City Light’s Denny Substation (through a clear glass panel in the stainless steel perimeter wall that runs along Denny Way). It’s clean and tidy inside.
The former Greyhound bus garage that had been here is now long gone (demolished 2012-14). This substation was completed in 2018, the first new substation built by Seattle City Light in 30 years at a cost of $210m. It has lots of capacity for future expansion.
So a Trump-appointed judge in Florida overrules the national mask mandate for airplane travel and throws the CDC’s recommendation out the window .. and then the Biden administration promptly announces that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will no longer enforce it.
Nice try, United. I will be the dinosaur with the mask, but this cutesy tweet does not work for me, because it should not be about comfort. You would have done so much better reiterating that airline cabin air is completely changed every three minutes through HEPA filters, and all that. What was also completely unacceptable on Monday: for pilots from several airlines to announce midair that the mask mandate is gone, and that it’s OK for everyone on board to take their masks off.
This afternoon, I walked down to the 45-story apartment towers on Denny Way (official address: 1200 Stewart Street) to see how the construction is coming along.
I paused at the Melrose Avenue overlook as usual, to peer out at the Space Needle. The Needle is 60 years old this week, on April 21. Surely the owners will put a flag up, to celebrate the milestone? The Brothers (a pair of prominent peaks in the Olympic Mountains near Hood Canal) are to the right of the bare flagpole on the right.Here’s the 3-story podium of flanked by Denny Way an Minor Ave. The 45-story tower is hiding its twin right behind it. That’s the Seattle City Light Denny Substation with its Frankenstein tree (my name for it) art installation, on the left.The podium wraps around towards Stewart Street. The installation of the window panes on each floor is slowly progressing.Here’s a reflection of the two towers off the Building Cure (opened 2019) belonging to Seattle Children’s Hospital. I see I caught a sun halo of sorts from the sun behind the building on my picture. I couldn’t really see it with the naked eye. (Sun halos can appear when sunlight interacts with ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere).
I ran into this 2018 set of Ukrainian stamps while researching the stamp with the Russian warship on (Thursday’s post).
The characters are too cute for words (but each has a letter, and a word, nonetheless).
I compiled the table below with a little help from Google Translate. ЕНЕЛЯТКО stumped it, though : a word that has to be Ukrainian for alien or extraterrestrial. ҐАВА was also a problem; must be raven, I thought— but another online translator indicated it is crow. ПИРОГИ looked like hats in the tree, but turned out to be pyroghie pies, in fact.
UKRANIAN ALPHABET, says the lettering at the top. The modern Ukrainian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The set of letters is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script.
The Moskva features on a recent Ukrposhta (Ukraine Post) stamp. This was artist Boris Groh’s winning entry for the Ukrposhta stamp design contest, with the theme “Russian warship go f— yourself”. (That was the defiant response of the Ukrainian defenders of Snake Island when they were asked to surrender by someone aboard one of the two Russian warships that had attacked the island on Feb. 24).
The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet has sunk in what western officials have described as a “massive blow” to the Kremlin.
Moskva, a Slava-class warship that commanded about 30 vessels in the region, is thought to be the first cruiser lost in conflict since the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands war in 1982 and the first such loss of a Russian vessel since the Second World War.
– The Times newspaper, London
Djokovic lost yesterday in the Monte Carlo Open, but so did young Carlos Alcaraz, today (against Sebastian Korda). Aw. That really hurt my interest in the tournament, but I will continue to watch.
I love this picture. Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, the 22-year old Spaniard, went for it with everything he had, against Djokovic, for the win. He took a tumble in the second set, and did not even change his shirt until much later. That red clay dust gets into everything: your shoes, your socks, your racquet, all of your kit, really. And you have to know how to slam on the brakes and slide, as Fokina does here, to scoop up a drop shot at full stretch. [Photo by Denis Balibouse/Reuters]Writes Christopher Clarey in the NYT: ‘Davidovich, 22, looks like a Viking prepared to make mayhem with his head closely shaven on the sides and his fair hair pulled back into a knot. His father Eduard Mark Davidovich, a former boxer, is originally from Sweden and his mother Tatiana Fokina from Russia. But he was born in Malaga, Spain, and raised, as his accent makes clear, in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. He started playing tennis at age 2 — even younger than Djokovic did — and has become one of the flashiest, fastest men in the game under the tutelage of his longtime coach, Jorge Aguirre’.
The watering hole called The Chieftain Irish Pub— that the amigos like to go to— seems to have survived the pandemic.
The place was busy tonight, possibly because it was Trivia Tuesday.
We don’t wear masks at the pub or restaurant anymore— almost nobody does— but I still wear my N95 mask when I go anywhere else indoors (grocery store, post office).
I have not gotten my second booster shot, and I probably should go and get it over and done with. There seems to be no downside.
‘Bustling taproom for game-viewing & happy hours, plus familiar pub grub, in dark-wood-paneled digs’, says the description for The Chieftain on 12th Avenue.
The annual Monte Carlo* Open tennis tournament has started.
It is one of the big 9 second-tier tournaments on the calendar (the big ones are the four Grand Slams: Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, US Open).
*Monte Carlo is one of the four quartiers (sections) of Monaco. It is situated on an escarpment at the base of the Maritime Alps along the French Riviera, on the Mediterranean, just northeast of Nice, France.
Novak ‘No Vax’ Djokovic will play (still unvaccinated), as will Carlos Alcaraz, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Sacha Zverev.
The courts at the Monte Carlo Country Club are red clay, same as for the French Open. Sebastian Korda (21, USA) is changing sides while playing against Botic van de Zandschulp (26, Netherlands). Korda won 7-5, 6-4.These waters by Monte Carlo are called the Ligurian Sea. That’s Monte Carlo Beach on the left of the picture (a beach in name only, say I, with just pebbles and no sand). The rocky outcrop is called Pointé de la Veille. Let’s pan to the right, though. Is that a warship, the vessel in all gray?Why no, it seems to be a superyacht of some kind. (The cameraman zoomed in on the vessel, but the commentators of the tennis match were of no help. WELL. Then I will have to find out for myself, I thought).A few clicks on the icons on marinetraffic.com floating around Monaco revealed it to be the Olivia O. She is owned by Eyal Ofer (age 72), Israeli billionaire based in Monaco (of course), and active in shipping and real estate. Price tag: $200 million, with an estimated running cost of $15-20 million per year. The vessel has 7 cabins for guests and 15 cabins for the crew (not nearly as luxe as the ones for guests, I am sure).
