The first 8 o’clock sunset of the year is here.
The time stamp on the photo says it was taken at 8.02 pm.
Tuesday/ sunset now at eight 🌇
The time stamp on the photo says it was taken at 8.02 pm.
The time stamp on the photo says it was taken at 8.02 pm.
Monday/ stamps from Japan 🇯🇵
I bought these sheets of stamps at the post office museum shop high up in Skytree tower in Tokyo in 2018.
These pages will go into my ‘World Travels’ stamp album.
Sunday/ U-district 🌇
It was time for a jaunt to U-district on the light rail today.
The books are from Magus second-hand bookstore and the other pictures are all from around University Way NE.
Saturday/ a white one ⚪
Here’s the new Tesla Model Y, a pearl white one that I spotted on the Denny Way overpass over I-5 today.
I was on the sidewalk and I should have swung around to take a picture of the rear end of the vehicle as well— but I didn’t.
Tesla’s website says these are ‘Available Today’. It will set you back $50,630 ($43,130 if you are eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles).
Meanwhile, Tesla’s website in China no longer offers the Model S and Model X (imports from the USA), after Beijing raised tariffs on U.S. imports in response to President Trump’s levies against the country.
The Model S and Model X are expensive cars and not big sellers in China, though. Even so— China’s tariffs on US goods are now at 125%*, after President Donald Trump’s decision to hike duties on Chinese goods to 145%.
*Observers say China does not need to raise tariffs any higher than this. This is effectively an embargo against imports from America.
Friday/ a book on railway stamps 🤗
Although stamps for railway parcels and newspapers have been in use in this country for over a century, they have received scant attention from philatelists.
— From the preface to the book ‘Railway Stamps of South Africa’, published by The Philatelic Federation of Southern Africa in 1985.
My spectacular* book about South Africa’s railway stamps arrived today (from South Africa, of course).
*Spectacular, because almost none of the information in it is available online, nor in any of the standard stamp catalogues.
The Central South African Railways (CSAR) was (from 1902 to 1910) the operator of public railways in the Transvaal Colony and Orange River Colony.
At unification of the four colonies into the Union of South Africa in 1910, the unified rail network was named and operated as South African Railways.
The ‘Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatskappij’ (South African Railway Company) was established in 1887. The company was based in Amsterdam and Pretoria, and operated in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (South African Republic) during the late 19th century.
Abbreviations on the stamps:
C.T.R.—Cape Town Railways;
N.G.R.—Natal Government Railways;
C.G.R.—Cape Government Railways;
S.A.R.—South African Railways;
Z.A.S.M.—Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatskappij.
The first bilingual stamp sheets were printed in 1929 with alternate Afrikaans stamps (S.A.S. for Suid-Afrikaanse Spoorweë) and English stamps (S.A.R.).
Middle of the page: the pair of bright turquoise stamps are “bantam” stamps: half-sized stamps printed during World War II, when paper supplies were limited.
Bottom row: In Feb. 1961, the South African rand was introduced as currency (one hundred cents to a rand). The denominations on the post-1961 stamps were no longer part of the main design of the stamp, but overprinted in black ink.
Sweet! No more blood, sweat and tears for me to figure out the station names for the abbreviations printed on the stamps.
Thursday/ greening up 🌳
Lots of green meets the eye, looking down Capitol Hill’s 19th Avenue by Stevens Elementary School.
Wednesday/ a reality check 😵
LONDON, April 9, 3:16 AM PDT (Reuters) – Global markets took a beating again on Wednesday as U.S. President Donald Trump’s eye-watering 104% tariffs on China took effect, and a savage selloff in U.S. bonds sparked fears that foreign funds were fleeing U.S. assets.
So what happened today is that the US bond market started to melt down early this morning New York time. (If you don’t know what that means: investors around the world started to question the global safe-haven status of the United States by dumping their US Treasury bonds. Do we really want a start another 2008-style global financial crisis?).
Trump backed down (some) from the tariffs, and the day ended with the Dow Jones up 7.8%, S&P 500 up 9.5%, Nasdaq up 12.16% today.
What’s not to like about that? Let me tell you.
The original Trump Tariff Tantrum that started all this turmoil is only on a 90-day timeout.
The 10% tariff that remains in place right now with US trading partners, is far, far higher than for any other OECD country.
The trade war that Trump had started with China has arrived at a stunning 125% for imports from China and a stunning 84% export tariff to China. (In reality: a trade embargo between the countries with far and away the world’s two largest economies).
The American consumer is going to get killed.
Apple’s, Walmart’s and the profits of countless other companies big and small, in America and in China, will be obliterated.
Millions of Americans are going to lose their jobs.
The only question to ask is when the 2025 Trump Recession will start.
Or has it started already, because nobody has any confidence that this clown’s show 🤡 will ever end?
Jim Cramer on ‘What we’ve learned from the tariff turmoil’:
1. Nobody Ever Made a Dime Panicking. (Do not make investments, or get out of investments because of rash, fearful or irrational emotions.)
2. Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered. (Don’t be greedy. If you had taken an investment position and made a reasonable profit on it, be happy and stay put. Or sell it, and don’t regret later that you did not make even more money.)
3. The President Likes Drama — You Won’t Get Certainty. (Translation: The President that had run casinos into the ground as a “businessman”, likes to gamble with your life savings and your retirement money on the world’s financial markets.)
4. Don’t Bet Against Good Companies. (Companies like Apple and Microsoft and Walmart have been around a very long time and have weathered many storms. They will find a way around the tariffs, or become profitable again after taking a hit.)
5. Staying The Course In The Markets Is Always The Winning Strategy. (There are huge down days and huge up days in the market, which cannot be predicted. So do not try to ‘time the market’ and to miss the down days and catch the up days.)
[Screenshot from CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer’]
Tuesday/ shades of pink 🌺
The rhododendron flowers are out here on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
The flowers are gorgeous, but in some parts of the world (such as in Ireland) these plants are considered an invasive species that upset the local ecosystems.
Monday/ the rout continues 📉
The uncertainty and the global stock market rout continued today, as reported by Deutsche Welle.
It’s going to be a long week on Wall Street for those traders on the floor .. and for all of us.
Sunday/ rain ☔
We had showers this morning here in Rain City, and a steady rain was sifting down all afternoon and into the evening.
When I ventured out with my umbrella, it felt a little colder than the 57°F (14°C) shown on my weather app.
Saturday/ the cold open leaves me cold 🙄
Singapore must brace itself for more shocks to come, said Prime Minister Lawrence Wong in a recorded video on Friday (Apr 4), warning that the global calm and stability that once existed “will not return anytime soon”.
– Summary of a video posted on YouTube* by Mediacorp, a Singaporean public broadcast service.
*Look up “PM Lawrence Wong on implications of US tariffs for Singapore | Full video” on YouTube. It’s just 5 minutes— but it’s also a 5-bell fire alarm.
So .. I really did not find tonight’s Saturday Night Live cold open skit with James Austin Johnson as Trump unveiling his tariffs, funny.
Maybe the US stock market indexes need to sink another 5% on Monday, and then 5% more on Tuesday.
Will enough Republican senators and Republican House members then stand up and do something?
[Still from tonight’s Saturday Night Live cold open]
Friday/ where will this end? 😱
It was hard for me all morning, not to mull over all the turmoil in the US financial markets, and to wonder how this man-made descent into insanity will end.
What the hell? Apple will suddenly start building iPhone factories in the United States— so that Americans will gleefully pay $3,500 for an iPhone?
A good March US jobs report (+ 228,000 jobs, unemployment 4.2%) was eclipsed by ..
.. Dow Jones down another 5.5%, S&P 500 down another 6%, Nasdaq down another 6% today.
At this rate, it has to be 100% certain that there will be a recession in the United States later this year (and sooner than anyone had thought).
In case it’s not easy to tell, let me tell you: these are all very bad headlines.
Tesla (TSLA) is down another 10.5% for the day. ‘Unprecedented brand damage’ (by Elon Musk) writes JPMorgan Chase & Co analyst Ryan Brinkman in his downgrade of the stock.
Bigger picture, I would say America is suffering (another) round of ‘unprecedented brand damage’ around the world.
Thursday/ the disaster in the markets 😵💫
So .. Dow Jones down 4%, S&P 500 down 5%, Nasdaq down 6% today.
One would think there was another 9/11 or October 7 terrorist attack somewhere in the world, or a new and frightful pandemic breaking out.
But no, it’s just the President of the United States— foisting his kindergartner-level understanding of tariffs and international trade, on America’s financial markets, and the world at large.
What substantive harm has tiny, land-locked and impoverished Lesotho ever done to the United States? Its modest economy is going to be decimated (hit with 50% tariffs, see below).
31% for South Africa. 50% for Lesotho (the dark dot inside South Africa).
From Aljazeera.com:
The Trump administration has imposed a steep 50 percent tariff on Lesotho, a small, impoverished African nation of two million people – the highest tariff levied on any country. The measure delivers a severe blow to Lesotho’s economy, which relies heavily on exports for its modest $2bn gross domestic product (GDP). United States President Donald Trump, who mocked Lesotho last month as a country “nobody has ever heard of”, announced it as part of a sweeping set of “reciprocal tariffs” laid out on Thursday. Trump’s new tariffs were calculated based on the US trade deficit with each country, divided by the total value of imports from that nation. As a result, smaller economies with limited imports from the US – such as Lesotho and Madagascar – were hit hardest. Lesotho’s trade surplus with the US is largely driven by diamond and textile exports, including Levi’s jeans. In 2024, its exports to the US totalled $237m, accounting for more than 10 percent of its GDP, according to Oxford Economics.
Wednesday/ tennis in Marrakech 🎾
The clay court season (April to June) in men’s tennis has started with ATP 250 tournaments (smaller tournaments) this week in Houston, Texas, in Bucharest, Romania, and in Marrakech, Morocco.
Here is Nuno Borges (28, 🇵🇹) being interviewed after beating the Belgian Raphaël Collignon (23, 🇧🇪) in a closely fought match on the red clay in Marrakech. It ended in a third set tie-break in which Borges iced out Collignon 7-0, though.
Afterwards the announcer addressed the remaining spectators in French.
A bit of history [from Wikipedia]: The French conquest of Morocco began with the French Republic occupying the city of Oujda on 29 March 1907. The French launched campaigns against the Sultanate of Morocco which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Fes and establishment of the French Protectorate in Morocco on 30 March 1912.
There is a 1977 song by Mike Batt, The Ride to Agadir, from the album Schizophonia, about the Rif War— an armed conflict fought from 1921 to 1926 between Spain (joined by France in 1924) and the Berber (Amazigh) tribes of the mountainous Rif region of northern Morocco.
I must have played The Ride to Agadir a hundred times or more, while driving in my car in the late 80s and early 90s.
Lyrics: The Ride to Agadir
We rode in the morning
Casablanca to the west
On the Atlas mountain foothills leading down to Marrakesh
For Mohammed and Morocco
We had taken up our guns
For the ashes of our fathers and the children of our sons
For the ashes of our fathers and the children of our sons
In the dry winds of summer
We were sharpening the blades
We were riding to act upon the promise we had made
With the fist and the dagger
With the rifle and the lance
We will suffer no intrusion from the infidels of France
We will suffer no intrusion from the infidels of France
We could wait no more
In the burning sands on the ride to Agadir
Like the dogs of war
For the future of this land on the ride to Agadir
Though they were waiting
And they were fifty to our ten
They were easily outnumbered by a smaller force of men
As the darkness was falling
They were soon to realize
We were going to relieve them of their godforsaken lives
We were going to relieve them of their godforsaken lives
We could wait no more
In the burning sands on the ride to Agadir
Like the dogs of war
For the future of this land on the ride to Agadir
We rode in the morning
Casablanca to the west
On the Atlas mountain foothills leading down to Marrakesh
For Mohammed and Morocco
We had taken up our guns
For the ashes of our fathers and the children of our sons
For the ashes of our fathers and the children of our sons
Tuesday/ what an ugly picture 😵
I went to the Seattle Public Library today, which is where I found the latest issue of The Economist— the one below, with the Cybertruck bashing a bald eagle.
About Musk, the editorial inside asks ‘Is he remaking America’s government, or breaking it?’
Towards the end, the editorial concludes ‘There are three possible outcomes.
First, just as rivals laughed at Tesla and SpaceX in their early days, DOGE* will come good in time.
Second, that Mr Musk will break the government.
The third, likeliest scenario is that DOGE become snarled up in court; many good civil servants are fired or quit; fewer talented people see government as a good career; and America is left with a stronger president and a weaker Congress.’
*Dept. of Government Efficiency.
Bald eagle= US government
.. and Trump and Musk are inside the Cybertruck, right?
P.S. Tesla’s 2025 Q1 delivery numbers are due out tomorrow.
Most analysts’ estimates are between 315,000-369,000, which would be well below Q1 2024’s 386,810.
Monday/ railway parcel stamps 🚂
Railway parcel stamps were used in South Africa for many decades: in the four colonies before they became the Union of South Africa in 1910, and all the way through to the early 1980s. (By the mid-1980s, commercial courier services had stepped into the parcel delivery market).
These stamps were used to record the cost of the conveyance of a letter or parcel by rail. They are only documented in specialized stamp catalogues and information about them is hard to find online. I thought I should see what the AI chatbot from Chat GPT could help me with.
The results were interesting, and shows that one should not just accept results presented by Chat GPT as fact.
Let’s start with a scan of a railway parcel stamp that I submitted to Chat GPT, and go from there.
Chat GPT does come up with the railway station names (above) for the abbreviations that I had submitted, but there is a problem ..
*This was a test for Chat GPT, or for confirming what knew for most of the abbreviations already. It took a lot of legwork to arrive at the railway station names for the abbreviations. For example, one can look at railway station maps and name lists, or look at the cancellation marks on the stamp (which could be extremely faint, and offer only tantalizing clues as to the railway station name since only a few letters or parts of letters would be visible on the stamp).
The key is the upside down cancellation in purple ink, offering clues to the railway station name at the very edges of the stamp. I am sure the letters stand for BRANDFORT, a railway station for a tiny little town in the Free State. The train station is no longer in use.
Sunday/ a printing plate flaw 🖨️
Can you spot the Cape gannet (sea bird) that looks a little different from the other seven, in the block of stamps below?
There was a flaw in the printing plate for this sheet of 5c stamps from 1974.
On one of the stamps, some of the gray and blue ink is missing.
Issued Nov. 11, 1974
Design: Ernst de Jong |Perf. 12½ |Engraving & Photolitho. |Phosphorized paper |No wmk
SA Color Catalogue #363 |5c |Multicolored |Cape gannet (Morus capensis)
Saturday/ †Johann de Lange (1959-2025)
I learned today that South African Afrikaans poet, short story writer, and critic Johann de Lange had passed away on Thursday.
I made an attempt below to translate a poem from his debut collection of poetry that appeared in 1982. It was titled ‘Akwarelle van die Dors’ (‘Watercolors of the Thirst’) and he was awarded the Ingrid Jonker prize in 1983, the first of many prizes awarded for his writing.
Aardlief
Eendag word ek wel weer joune, oerbeminde:
word my hande en my oë jòù hande en jòù oë,
gee ek die handvol geleende stof aan jou terug,
ou selfsugtig, word ek joune van kop tot tone.
– Johann de Lange, uit sy debuutbundel ‘Akwarelle van Die Dors’ (1982)
Earthly love
Surely one day, will I become yours again, primal beloved:
will my hands and my eyes become your hands and your eyes,
will I return the handful of borrowed dust to you,
old selfish one, becoming yours from head to toe.
– A rough translation into English
Friday/ the earthquake in Myanmar 🪨
After the 7.7-magnitude earthquake on Friday, the internet was filled with videos, images and social media posts documenting the damage in Thailand.
But across the border in Myanmar, where the devastating quake was centered, there has been a far murkier picture about the scale of the diaster.
Information from Myanmar has been harder to come by in part because of the country’s history of internet censorship. In recent years, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to social media, digitally isolating the country from the rest of the world.
– Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur reporting for the New York Times
Central Myanmar, the scene of a powerful earthquake on Friday, lies near the eastern end of one of the world’s most active zones of seismic activity: the Alpide Belt, which extends from the Mediterranean Sea eastward through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, then along the Himalayas to Myanmar and finally Indonesia.
The epicenter of the quake on Friday was near Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city with more than a million people. While much of Myanmar is susceptible to earthquakes, Mandalay and the surrounding towns sit right on top of one of four places in the country that are particularly prone to unusually powerful quakes, according to the United Nations Human Settlements Program. The other three places are in much less populated parts of the country.
– Keith Bradsher reporting for the New York Times
Thursday/ after the storm 🏵️
These beautiful flowers are from the streets here on Capitol Hill— I believe these are butter cup, purple rock cress and tulip.
