It’s cold outside (44°F / 6°C)— and here’s my car chiding me for pulling up at the Ellensburg supercharger station without giving it a heads up.
The message on the screen says ‘Next Time – Navigate to Supercharger: Battery will precondition for faster charging’. Precondition simply means the battery is warmed up to the ideal temperature for faster charging.
Charging at 79 kW, well below what the supercharger is capable of with a warmer battery, but that’s OK. I was only adding 50 miles or so to the 180 miles I still had on the battery. The 90% charge limit on the battery (by the green line on the display) is what I had charged the battery to last night, which got me to about 320 miles. For everyday use I put the charge limit down to just 60%, about 200 miles. I don’t need more than that for driving around the city in one day. Then at night, the charger at home put the miles I had used, back.
In a 79-page filing, Smith’s team articulated its clearest case yet for Trump’s prosecution, repeatedly characterizing Trump’s false claims of election fraud as knowing lies aimed at defrauding election officials — from secretaries of state and governors to his own vice president, Mike Pence. Smith also indicated he intends to introduce evidence in Trump’s March trial that Trump stoked the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and then used it to further his effort to derail Congress’ proceedings that day. Prosecutors say they will rely on Trump’s promise to pardon many of the rioters, his description of Jan. 6 as a “beautiful day” and his decision to record a song with some of the violent offenders imprisoned in the Washington, D.C., jail.
-Kyle Cheney reporting for Politico on Mon 11/6
Trump had one of his stupid ‘campaign’ rallies during last night’s Republican debate (one photo shows a large section of the stands at his rally that is almost empty).
If one reads just the index of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s now-published rebuttal of the motions made by Trump’s legal team to get the Jan. 6 allegations dismissed against him, it’s very hard to imagine Trump is going to survive all of this to stand as the 2024 Republican candidate for president. This trial is set to start in March 2024. Yes, it will go on for several months while the presidential primary elections happen. The images and evidence of the Jan. 6 violence will again be front and center on televisions with Trump in court, accused— with hard evidence to back it up— of being the instigator, turning a blind eye when the assault on the Capitol started, and in fact, trying to go there.
Tonight, the night after the 2023 elections in which the Republicans had lost most of the races that had drawn national interest*, there was another (mostly pointless) Republican Party presidential debate.
Two highlights: Nikki Haley called Ron DeSantis ‘scum’ after he called out her daughter for being on TikTok. (TikTok is owned by a Chinese company and some worry it will use sensitive data from its user, such as location data, for nefarious purposes). Tim Scott’s girlfriend Mindy Noce (of a year or so) made her first public appearance on stage after the debate.
*Lost Ohio Issue 1: Right to Abortion
Lost Ohio Issue 2: Legalize Marijuana
Lost Kentucky Governor’s Race
Won Mississippi Governor’s Race
Lost Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Race
Lost Virginia State Legislature, both houses
A New York Magazine cover from October. (Seems to me the chase is over even though the primary elections have not even started .. but the guy with the red tie is in serious legal trouble, of course). From left to right, the little people are Ron DeSantis (governor of Florida), Tim Scott (US senator for South Carolina), Nikki Haley (ex-governor of South Carolina), Vivek Ramaswamy (billionaire), Mike Pence (Trump’s vice president) and Chris Christie (ex-governor of New Jersey). Mike Pence dropped out of the race a few weeks ago and was not on the debate stage.
Euclid is a wide-angle space telescope with a 600-megapixel camera to record visible light, a near-infrared spectrometer, and photometer, to determine the redshift of detected galaxies. It was developed by the European Space Agency and the Euclid Consortium, and was launched on 1 July 2023.
– Wikipedia
Today, the European Space Agency shared the first images obtained from the telescope.
One thousand galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster with more than 100,000 additional galaxies visible farther away. Each can contain up to hundreds of billions of stars. [Courtesy European Space Agency/Euclid Consortium/NASA; image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi]The spiral galaxy IC 342, an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis, located relatively close to our own Milky Way galaxy. Radius 35,000 light years | discovered 1892 | distance from Earth 10.76 million light years. [Courtesy the European Space Agency/Euclid Consortium/NASA; image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi]The Horsehead Nebula is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion (in the Milky Way galaxy). Radius 3.5 light years | discovered 1888 | distance from Earth 1,500 light years. [Courtesy of the European Space Agency/Euclid Consortium/NASA; image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi]Irregular galaxy NGC 6822. Discovered 1884 | distance from Earth 1.6 million light years. [Courtesy the European Space Agency/Euclid Consortium/NASA; image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi]A full view of the globular cluster NGC 6397 in constellation Ara in the Milky Way. Radius 34 light years | distance from Earth 7,800 light years. [Courtesy the European Space Agency/Euclid Consortium/NASA; image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi]
So, with the first of the 2024 primary elections two months away, that Twice-Impeached-Four-Times-Indicted-Conman seems to have the Republican primary all but in his pocket.
(Endorse Ron DeSantis all you want, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, but he’s polling at 16%, still some 30% behind the Conman. It’s over; has been for a while.)
Then there is the New York Times/Siena Poll of the 2024 Battleground States that came out this weekend, that shows Biden at the losing end in 5 states— and prompting David Axelrod (chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns) to publicly question if it’s ‘wise’ for Biden to stay in the race.
Say whaaaaat, David?
Who should take Biden’s place at this point?
The lamestream media* is having a field day with these poll numbers, even with the 2024 Presidential THREE-HUNDRED- AND-SIXTY-FOUR days away. *A term coined by Sarah Palin in 2008. As someone said, looking back now, she may have been something of a gateway drug for today’s MAGA Republicans that had gotten hooked onto the cult of Trump.
P.S. The fine print of these polls say ‘The New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3, 2023. When all states are joined together, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 2 percentage points for the likely electorate. The margin of sampling error for each state poll is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, plus or minus 4.5 points in Georgia, plus or minus 4.6 points in Pennsylvania and plus or minus 4.8 points in Wisconsin’. Political analyst Amy Walter sums it up thus: Trump has a ceiling problem (he’s not going to gain voters beyond what he had in 2020), and Biden has an enthusiasm problem (not everyone that came out and voted for him in 2020, may do so again in 2024).
I learned my lesson today: if you’re going to walk somewhere and want to make it home before dark, don’t wait until 3 o’clock!
Direct sunlight is now long gone by 5 (sunset is at 4.44 pm).
I spent an hour or so at the Elliott Bay Book Company (at 1521 10th Avenue on Capitol Hill, highly recommended) and then realized the light was dwindling outside— and that I need to go and pay for my book and vamoose.
It’s the end of Daylight Saving Time— we have to turn back all the clocks back by an hour.
After lots of rain and a thunderstorm this morning, the afternoon turned out to be calm and clear (61 °F/ 16° C). Here I am back from a walk down to Capitol Hill train station for a jaunt I had intended to do, up to U-District, but it was not to be. We first waited for 10 minutes on the northbound train to depart, during which the lights went out, and the ‘NORTHGATE’ display as the final destination changed to an IP address (IP.80.0.0.80 or something). Then an announcement came that there was mechanical trouble. The next northbound train will actually pick us up on the southbound track. The train that had a delayed departure had been full already, though. So when the next northbound train arrived (on the southbound track) also almost full of people, I decided the overcrowding wasn’t worth the trouble for me, and came back home. There is always tomorrow to try again.
This puzzle is a holdover from the pandemic.
The entire dining room table is full of puzzle pieces, and at this point it’s hard to believe they are all going to be squeezed in tightly into the frame!
The 1,000-piece puzzle 91130 is by Buffalo Games & Puzzles. The artwork was done by Kim Norlien, titled ‘Mountain Paradise’.Update Sat. 9.00 am: Here’s an update! The house, the mountain and the boat are much easier to build than the water and the foliage! I suspect some of the last pieces to fall in place will be the shadows on the bottom left corner.Update Mon. 5.00 pm: All done! The tree at the top right was hard to complete, for some reason, as were the waters of the lake. The last piece that went in was one of the brown ones depicting the rocks at the bottom of the lake.
I don’t always drink beer but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis
– From the Dow Equis beer commercial (and meme for it)
I don’t always bake, but when I do, I bake beskuit*
*’Rusks’ in English— made from dough, broken or cut into chunks or slices after baking, and then slowly dried in an oven.
I was tired of buying expensive biscotti at the store (for my coffee in the morning), and so I baked a batch of South African beskuit.
My ingredients for the dough: self-raising flour, buttermilk, a little whole milk, sugar (not too much), canola oil (instead of butter), eggs, a little baking powder and salt, and bran flakes (for a little fiber).The dough is baked at 350 °F for one hour, taken out, cut up in chunks and put back in for 5-6 hours at 250 °F (with the oven door left open by a crack) to dry the pieces out.
Seattle-Tacoma airport recorded 2.77 in. of rain for October— below the average of 3.46 in.
November is the wettest month of the year (usually coming in at 6.5 in), and we’re off to a good start with a forecast of 1.4 in over the next seven days.
This year’s fly agaric mushrooms in my back yard are smaller than usual (crowns of 3 to 4 inches diameter). These ‘look but don’t touch’ mushrooms (they contain toxic alkaloids).
