Author: Willem

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Tuesday/ don’t lick that frog

It’s amazing what humans are willing to do to for a buzz.  I mean, we all know about drinking coffee and booze, smoking pot and bungee-jumping off bridges – but how abut licking a toad?   It’s not for nothing that the princess has to kiss the frog in the fairytale and then get rewarded with a handsome prince.  And it would make for nice Fear Factor material (the creepy NBC TV show where contestants eat worms and bugs).    Any normal person has some measure of ranidaphobia (from ranidae, the most widespread family of frogs), but a colleague this morning recalled how the drug test program at a nuclear power station found traces of a strange drug in a co-worker’s blood.    Turned out he was a frog-licker.   A what?! I said.    [What follows is from Yahoo Answers].  Yes – the slimy stuff that ‘gets you off’ is actually venom that the frog secretes when it gets agitated – such as when a predator is about to gobble it down.  The toxic stuff is bufotenine and the hallucinogen 5-MeO-DMT.  The only toad known to contain 5-MeO-DMT in its venom is Bufo Alvaris, also called the Colorado River Toad (picture).    Very nice to know – but I will leave the froggy be and get my highs in other ways !

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Monday/ Seoul connection

It is Tuesday here in China but here are pictures from my connection in Seoul.    We arrived early so I had time to admire a model Korean junk boat and Hermès scarf in the shop windows.  (For Korea the symbolism of the crane goes back to ‘crane dances’ in the courtyards of early dynasties).   Then I headed over to Gate 10 where the A380 ‘superjumbo’ was getting pulled up to the gate.    I used that upper deck jet bridge to find my seat upstairs.    The plane feels more like an airship than an airplane.   As we started to lift off, it felt as if the ground speed was still way too slow (or maybe I was tired and dreamy).     Has the A380 made some inroads into the large jet airliner segment of the market once dominated by Boeing?  It certainly has – looking at the number of airplanes ordered and delivered* by EADS.   Both EADS and Boeing claimed victory after several rulings by the World Trade Organization in recent years in the world’s largest trade dispute.

*As of February 2011 there were 244 orders for the A380-800. The break-even for the A380 was initially supposed to be reached at 270 units, but due to the delays and the falling exchange rate of the US dollar, it increased to 420 units.  In 2010, EADS CFO Hans Peter Ring said that break-even (on the aircraft that are delivered) could be achieved by 2015, despite the delays; there should be around 200 deliveries by that time, on current projections.    As of March 2010 the average list price of an A380 was US$ 375.3 million (about €261 million or £229 million), depending on equipment installed.

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Sunday/ Korean Air to Hong Kong

I made it through the gauntlet of security hurdles at Seattle-Tacoma airport.   Out of the backpack and into the tray goes the PC, the iPad, the liquids, the cell phone, the jacket, the shoes .. still not good enough; off with the belt as well that the full-body scanner could clear me.   I hate that scanner!  but at least the TSA personnel put in an effort to be nice and not bark orders at the passengers.   It’s the first time I will fly in one of the turquoise airplanes of Korean Air.  It’s 10 hrs in an Airbus 330-200 to Incheon airport in Seoul, and then 4 hrs in the double-decker wide-body A380 (the world’s largest passenger airplane) to Hong Kong.     

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Saturday/ Seattle Car Show 2011

I am packing up for traveling out tomorrow but still made it to the Seattle Car Show for a quick look-around with some friends.   There was a new Beetle, and the Fiat 500s caught my eye for their nice styling, as did the Mitsubishi electric car.   The white 2012 Chevy Volt was just parked among all the other Chevys and could almost be mistaken for a Chevy Cruze.  CODA is a Southern California car company and its car is all-electric, charges up quickly and can go 150 miles on a single charge.  Not cheap at about $45,000, though.    One more red car to end with : the Audi R8 Spyder.  The price tag for this one is $179,000.

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Friday/ the games people play now

These examples of text message ‘games’ adults play are from Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.    The Very Busy Bee sends text messages without reason (to look important and popular when out with friends), the Mystery Maker sends blank messages to see how people will respond, the Clueless Replier pretends not to recognize the sender as to appear cool and aloof, the Waiting Gamer waits hours or days to reply and the Constant Chirper has other text him (her?) when on a date so that his phone seems to be constantly buzzing !  So the technology has changed, but the game playing has been around a long time, as that 1968 song from Joe South called ‘The Games People Play’, attests :

Na na na Na na na Na na / Talkin’bout you and me, yeah /and the games people play
Oh the games people play now/ ev’ry night and ev’ry day now/ never meaning what they say, yeah/ never saying what they mean.

 

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Thursday/ when the cat’s away the squirrels play

I am checking out the cat through the closed front door, and the cat is checking me out.   The feline looks quite disinclined to make an effort to contain the squirreling going on among the leaves and maple seeds on my back deck !   That’s four days’ worth of leaves.   They were all swept up by afternoon (by me)- but it’s going to be several more weeks before the neighbor’s maple tree is bare.   Those big Canadian flag size leaves keep coming down.

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Wednesday/ little Saturday at Jamjuree

Little Saturday is a Scandinavian concept that adds Wednesday to the list of ‘drinking days’.  We use the term sometimes in South Africa as well.   Six of us went to Jamjuree, a Thai restaurant on 15th Ave.    Singha beer is served everywhere in Thailand, and we always ask for it here in Jamjuree.   I love the golden lion on the label – Singha is indeed a mystical lion, found in ancient Hindu and Thai stories.     The food was delicious : red curry and fried rice with pineapple, wide rice noodles and coconut soup with chicken and mushroom.   I had to look how Bangkok is doing with the flood water that is still everywhere, and it looks as if it hasn’t really started to recede.    Click on the map or paste the link into a browser for a version of it that can be zoomed in and out.

http://203.150.230.27/FloodMap/index.html?search=&locate=&xmin=11105110.04837066&ymin=1518928.8106264025&xmax=11303081.95162934&ymax=1639852.1893735975

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Tuesday/ Washington State icons

This little display is in the lobby downstairs in my company’s office building downtown.  (I forgot to note the artist).  The State is flanked by salmon (of course), and the Washington State Red Delicious apples*.   The trees at the top of the ‘Evergreen State’are probably Western Hemlock pine trees (the official Washington State tree).    Smith Tower (1914) is on the left, the Space Needle (1962) is on the right.  And I would hazard a guess that the little light bulbs are our volcanic mountains.

*From WIkipedia – In the 1980s, Red Delicious represented three-quarters of the harvest in Washington state.   A decade later, reliance on Red Delicious had helped to push Washington state’s apple industry to the edge.   In 2000, Congress approved and President Bill Clinton signed a bill to bail out the apple industry, after apple growers had lost $760 million since 1997.  Today the Red Delicious crop makes up only about a third of the apple production (still the largest proportion) along with other cultivars such as Cameo, Fuji and Gala.

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Monday/ plush Doraemon and Ponyo mug

I’m still unpacking some of souvenirs from my trip to Japan, so here is Doraemon the earless robotic cat from the 22nd century ‘presenting’ a Noritake porcelain coffee mug with the Ponyo character on.  Ponyo is an animated adventure centered on a 5-year-old boy and his relationship with a goldfish princess who longs to become human.   It is a product of Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki and the story was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale ‘The Little Mermaid’.    The movie came out in 2008 and I believe the ‘Ponyo on the Cliff by Blue Mug’ shortly after that.   And is that the ever-possible tsunami that is depicted on the cup?  It certainly seems like it.

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Sunday/ an iPad, finally

I finally ran out on Sunday to the Apple store to buy a black 64Gb iPad2 with wi-fi only.  Black because it’s classier than white, 64 Gb because it’s got the most storage space for my photos and music and digital content and wi-fi only with no 3G phone connectivity because I already have an iPhone.     The magnetic cover can fold up and serve as an angled stand.  It switches the pad on automatically when you pull it open, a nice touch.   Several Google applications I had on my phone got synched over through my PC and is now four times as large (Scrabble is one) – very nice, although those do not make the best use of the native iPad screen resolution.  I think it will be fixed shortly.  (I hope so).   I love the way my blog is displayed when accessed via Facebook (not that I read my own blog, but I’m sure I will in future).  The blog sits on the WordPress server ‘cloud’ and not on the iPad, a thought that is still a little unsettling to me.  Do I own the content, or does WordPress (they provide free server hosting space for the blog)?  Will they pull the plug on it some time?

The 1Q84 book from Japanese author Haruki Murakami (translated into English, of course), a runaway hit in Japan, is my first e-book.   I like my paper books, so I will have to get used to reading like this!  Yikes.   And the Apple store does not stock many titles.   I will have to download Amazon’s little application that can allow me to buy books through them.  Even so : I don’t think the iPad color display is a match for the black and white electronic ink of the Kindles.  But my I needed my slate do a whole lot more – and does it ever.   It carries 1500 songs, a dozen or so music videos, and for now just a smattering of my favorite pictures.   It may end up carrying 1000s once I upload all my favorite pictures of the recent and distant past (scanned pictures).  It can display a map of anywhere in the world where there is a signal, many times with place markers and directions.  The mint.com financial app gives me up-to-the-minute balances and transaction detail of every one of my financial accounts : every bank account, savings account, credit card account, retirement account and even values for fixed assets.   So I can ride the roller coaster of the stock market every day.   I subscribed to free reports from the New York Times newspaper; it comes will free marketing propaganda such as ‘Explore the promise of Canadian oil sands’ (No thank you).

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Saturday/ the leaves are falling

None of the very early white stuff (snow) they have in the Northeast, to report here in the Pacific Northwest.   It is cloudy and rainy, though – so when the sun does come out, it makes the fall colors of the leaves come alive.   I took this picture here on Capitol Hill.

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Friday/ demolishing the Alaskan Way Viaduct south-end

The Alaskan Way Viaduct is Seattle’s north-south double-decker freeway that runs along the Puget Sound water’s edge by downtown.  It opened in 1953, and is now ugly and earthquake-damaged.  (The Nisqually Earthquake on Feb 28, 2001 was one of the largest recorded earthquakes in Washington state history.   The quake measured 6.8 on the MMS and lasted approximately 45 seconds).

In early 2009, the State of Washington, King County, the City of Seattle, and the Port of Seattle revealed that they had agreed to replace the viaduct with a four-lane, 2-mile (3.2 km) long underground tunnel.   The project is estimated to cost some US$4 billion.   So after a lot of soul-searching and political wrangling, construction of the tunnel has now officially started with the demolition of the south end of the Viaduct.  (Boring the tunnel will only start in early 2013.  Hitachi Zosen Corp. of Osaka, Japan will provide the 60 feet in diameter and more than 300 feet long boring machine.   The company has already supplied the tunnel-boring machine currently used in the Capitol Hill train station construction).

New on-ramps will continue to allow traffic to use the viaduct for some time.    The demolition work has drawn a lot of people, but by the time my friends and I stopped by Friday night after dinner the week’s work that started Fri Oct 21 was ahead of schedule and traffic will be allowed to start using the new on-ramp on Saturday instead of on Monday.

Map from WSDOT website

^Picture by Associated Press

^Photo by Joshua Trujillo, Seattlepi.com

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Thursday/ east west home best

I’m home!   There it is : the 787 Dreamliner that was sitting on the tarmac at Hong Kong airport.  I believe it is the one that made the world-first charter flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong on Wednesday.   The tunnel is at Tokyo’s Narita airport; the tubular lighting emitted a low but effective light.   Name the purveyor of the fine silk scarf? (Yes, ‘H’ is the clue).   From the airport’s toy store : stuffed Pokemon characters and ‘Franky’ with the killer arms (but what about his legs? those need a work-out!).   And the kaiseki  (a traditional multi-course Japanese dinner) served on the way to Tokyo was excellent.

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Thursday/ at Hong Kong airport

My beer from last night; the view of the airport as I stepped into the hotel elevator to check out; Halloween display in the airport lounge (nice Chinese lantern with the skeleton on).   I smiled when I saw the sign on the airport shuttle train bringing us to the gate, say  ‘alight here’.   Would we say that in the USA? ‘Alight here’ ?  Well, I’m going to alight in Seattle.

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Wednesday/ at the Sky City

My colleague and I made it to the Marriott Sky City (airport hotel) here at Hong Kong airport.    Our driver thought our destination was the Marriott in Central District on Hong Kong Island, and we had to explain nooo – the Marriott we want is the one at the airport.     But by then we were in the Harbour Tunnel on the way to Hong Kong Island, so we caught a glimpse of the buildings there before we turned around and made our way to Lantau Island where the hotel is.

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Tuesday/ starting to pack up

I have a lot of stuff to squish into my two bags!   One bag goes with me, and the other stays at the hotel.   I go home on Thursday morning.   Meanwhile there are news reports of Hong Kong airport ground personnel mulling a strike (but nothing noted on the airport’s website yet).   And I see Narita airport (my stopover to Seattle) is posting radiation measurements every day to calm public fears over radiation from Fukushima.     It is fine – there is no problem.   

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Monday/ Dapeng Fortress

The first picture of the roadside banner is mine – taken from the bus Monday morning.  It is close to where we work.  Dapeng Fortress (picture and information from Wikipedia) was built in 1394 as a military fortress against pirates.  It later developed into a town during the Ming and Qing dynasties.  In 1571, it sustained a siege of over forty days by Japanese pirates equipped with scaling ladders.  

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Sunday/ The Adventures of Tintin

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s 3D animated ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ based on Hergé’s famous cartoon character has premiered in Brussels this weekend.  It will only start showing in the USA on Dec 21.   Tintin fan that I am,  I will have to go and see it.

The Tintin books  have been translated into 60 languages.   The picture shows this week’s TIME magazine cover, and next to it the Japanese translation of ‘King Ottokar’s Sceptre’ that I bought when I was in Tokyo.   It was not easy to find the bookstore that carried it !

From the TIME article – Hergé drew his panels in an elegant, instantly recognizable style that has been so influential, it has acquired a name : ligne claire, or clear line.   Its hallmarks are steady even lines, gorgeous washes of color, precisely detailed backgrounds and stylized, cartoonish faces.

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Saturday/ day trip to Hong Kong

Here are pictures of my jaunt to Hong Kong on Saturday :

I’m sitting in the taxi on the way to Luohu train station and border crossing in Shenzhen.    Look for the signs that say ‘To Hong Kong’ and eventually you will end up at the customs check point.    For some reason an inordinate number of Mainlanders wanted to cross today, so the ‘Foreigner’ section and lanes inside were just swamped with people as well.  But an official called the few of us that were obviously foreign :  ) out to a barricaded lane they carved out for us.  ‘Thank you, thank you’ I said as he let us through.   Once on the Hong Kong side where you pick up the East Rail Line to the city, it was smooth going.   I took it down south all the way to Hung Hom station in the heart of Kowloon.   The pink mural is from there, showing the wavy roof of the station.      Of course there is a bus terminal and taxi stands outside as well.    But I took the train to Tsim Tsa Tsui from there where the people picture was taken and where I ogled some Swiss watches in the windows.   (Which one is best?  The super square design from Jaeger Le Coultre, or the one with the Salvador Dali-ish numerals from Frank Muller?).    Then I bought some newsmagazines, a math book ‘Alex’s Adventures in Numberland’ and a few grocery items before I headed back.      The Shenzhen Shangri-la with the UFO restaurant at the top (in the center of the last picture below) is my personal landmark when I arrive back at the sprawling Luoho train station.

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Friday night

The red arch advertises a boat and yacht show here in the Shenzhen marina across from the hotel.  I will try to get more pictures this weekend of the rich peoples’ toys.   Four of us from work had beers and a bite at the Sheraton.  Mine was a fancy pad thai in an egg net with shrimp (not sure how egg is used to make a net, but there it is).    Back at our own hotel I just relaxed and watched some TV.    It was not possible to escape the coverage of Gadhafi’s demise or the Greek debt crisis.   And watch out below for the space junk of a German satellite about to come down.   Looks like South Africa is safe, but Seattle and Japan might get pommeled !