Category: General

The Beach Blanket Babylon is an over-the-top, musical comedy show. Its home is the Fugazi theater in North Beach (adjacent to the Fisherman’s Wharf). We went out to our end-of-project/ end-of-year team dinner tonight, and then to the theater.

Since it is almost Christmas, they added in a Santa Claus, and Christmas tree characters to towards the end of the show.

Here’s the giant Christmas tree in the middle of Union Square, donated by Macy’s department store.   The tree is reusable (very San Francisco) and is decorated with more than 33,000 twinkling energy-efficient LED lights and 1,100 shining ornaments.

So .. President-elect Donald Trump is not the only politician tweeting (yes, he is still tweeting).   I hope he and his staff read Senator Chris Murphy’s tweets (member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).  Better yet, get briefed by the Foreign Relations Committee regarding the significance if his acceptance of a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen.

The Wikipedia entry regarding Taiwan-United States relations has already been updated: On December 2 2016, U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump accepted a congratulatory call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen in a phone call, which was the first time since 1979 that an American President or President-Elect has publicly spoken to a leader of Taiwan. PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi soon made a statement saying that China opposes any move to separate the country, without explicitly mentioning the phone call between Tsai and Trump.

Our testing is complete.  We fixed up the BAPI that gave us trouble earlier, by removing a few lines of program code that had tripped it up.   It’s a short stay for me this week, and I packed up my stuff tonight since I’m heading back home tomorrow, and not Thursday.   As I was opening my backpack, my business card case with a beautiful mother-of-pearl dragon on a black background fell out.   Wow! I thought, I forgot how beautiful it is .. bought it in Incheon airport in Seoul, South Korea, more than four years ago.  How time flies.

The nightly news here on ABC and CBS featured interviews with Cubans and Cuban Americans in Florida, following Fidel Castro’s death at 90 just yesterday.  As Pres.Obama noted : ‘History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.’ 

That impact extended all the way to South Africa when Cuba involved itself in a civil war in Angola in 1975.  By the end of that year, there were 25,000 Cuban soldiers in Angola.   South Africa and its armed forces got drawn into the conflict as well.  By the time I was conscripted in the South African Defense Force (mandatory two years of service), the war was nearing its end in 1989 – and I was not deployed to Angola or Namibia. (Thankfully).

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States today.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The stock market closed at an all-time high on Wednesday with the Dow Jones crossing 19,000 for the first time this week.  So how come the USA Today of Tuesday raises the possibility of the R word (R for recession)?  Besides, a recession may or very well may not happen the next four years, writes Barry Ritholtz in Bloomberg View column of Oct 14 – ‘The present U.S. economic cycle is a long slow recovery from a deep recession that started in December 2007 and was aggravated by the credit crisis of 2008-09. The Wall Street Journal said the expansion “has now continued for 88 months, making it the fourth-longest period of growth in records stretching to 1854.” But expansions don’t just get old and die; something fundamental has to happen to arrest the progress. And remember, records get broken all the time’.

Here is another picture from TIME, one of its list of the 25 best inventions of 2016.   It’s a levitating LED light bulb.  And does it have a battery in the base? Nope.  There’s a wire for electricity that goes into the base, but then the light emitting diode (LED) is lit up by magnetic induction.  Such a special light bulb comes at a price of course: $359.  (But I want one).

 

The moon loomed over Earth larger than it had in a long time this week.  I saw it from the airplane on Sunday evening.  TIME magazine published this beautiful picture on Friday, from a tiny town called Mexican Hat in Utah.   I have fond memories of Mexican Hat.   A friend and I stayed there overnight in a motel during a road trip in 1999.

 

To the north of San Francisco Bay, there is San Pablo Bay – with bridges connecting the communities from across the water, as well.  Check out the picture I took after our take-off from San Francisco International airport today, and the map next to it.

There is the Trump America and the Clinton America, says the New York Times.  I still cannot bring myself to watch cable news with as I did in the run-up to the election.   And I killed the CNN and Yahoo homepages in my browser that feature the latest ‘Breaking News’ of the Creatures from the Black Lagoon* that will occupy the White House once Trump has ‘drained the swamp’ (words from his campaign).

*with credit to a Rachel Maddow tweet, and a nod to the 1954 movie

 

It is Thursday again, and I got to go home. There are more giant mushrooms in the backyard, and I removed the big spiders by my front door that had been there since Halloween.  They had worn out their welcome.

The number of passengers on the short bus ride in to the office here in San Francisco, and on the train back to the hotel today was noticeably smaller than usual.  Maybe office workers stayed up into the wee hours the way I did and only made it in later!   I kept my head down today, working as if it was a normal day. Tonight, spontaneous protests have sprung up in several cities .. peaceful so far.  I spotted protesters with #DumpTrump and ‘Stop White Supremacy’ signs (dumping Trump is not going to happen people!; and besides all those red states voting for Trump, we can blame white women voters; turned out they voted for Trump and not for Hillary).  The results for lots of other ballot initiatives are starting to roll in.  Minimum wage increase initiatives across the country are 4 for 4 Approved; California voted to make marijuana legal as well, joining Washington State and Colorado. Looks like Seattle and its surrounding counties have also given the Yes vote to raising funds to build 62 more miles of light rail.

 

A few hours earlier, I turned the TV off here in the hotel room and went to sleep for a bit – knowing I might not wake up to good news.   And there it is, I thought, as I turned the TV on just now, and it said ‘Breaking News: Trump Elected President’.  Wow.  So the unimaginable had happened.   ‘We want our country back’ said the voters.  Back from what?  Why does it feel like a watershed event, in the same league as 9/11?   It will no doubt have far-far-reaching repercussions.   And today is just the start.  First, I’m going to try to get some sleep.

Here’s the newspaper from this morning.   It’s 6.25 pm on the West coast; I’m at the hotel and watching the election results coming in.   Many states are still too early to call or too close to call.  Florida is not looking good for Clinton.  There was a woman on the subway with a t-shirt on saying ‘the future is female’.  On election day that can only mean one thing – and I hope she is right.

The United States of America – and the world – will probably know in 48 hours who won the election.   As of right now, statistician Nate Silver of the New York Times award Clinton a winning 291.6 electoral votes (270 needed for a win), but man! there is still a 1 in 3 chance that Trump can win, according to his interpretation of the polls.  Other pundits point to the very large number of early voters, and it seems their vote favor Hillary Clinton.  The FBI announced today that its further investigation into possible improper handling of e-mails by Clinton was complete and that it yielded nothing new (so its findings of July, exonerating Clinton, stands): good news for the Clinton campaign, I suppose.  (The damage that the first announcement inflicted had been done, though).

Clockwise from the top left : Melania Trump made a rare public speech on the campaign trail, pledging to fight cyber bullying if she becomes first lady (start with your husband, please); it also turns out she worked illegally, on a tourist visa, when she first came to the USA in 1996 from Slovenia; the FBI is in the dog-box for inserting itself in the 2016 campaign with vague announcements about on-going investigations into Hillary’s e-mails; hey! I have a pot shop two blocks from my house now (Uncle Ike’s); The End is Near (Tuesday Nov 8 the world could come to an end); 160k jobs in Oct – not bad; but the Dow is jittery with The End that’s Near, has dropped 9 straight days, most days in a row since 1980.  Better to take the long view : +47% the last five years.

It’s almost Halloween (Monday Oct 31st).  The Saturday before the day, is when grown-ups have their Halloween parties .. and on then on Halloween itself, the kids will go out for tricking and treating.

Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) defined only two kingdoms for organisms in 1735 – animals and ‘vegetables’ (plants). But mushrooms are not plants : they cannot make their own food.

Soon after, the microscope ushered in discoveries that ultimately led to the six recognized kingdoms of living creatures today :
Bacteria (bacteria; their cells have no nucleus),
Protista (single-cell organisms),
Chromista (algae),
Plantae (plants, shrubs and giant Sequoia trees),
Fungi (mushrooms, yeasts, molds) and
Animalia (worms, insects, birds, fish, whales, salt-water sponges, star fish, sea cucumbers, animals and humans*).    *Yes, we are animals, every one of us!

I suppose when alien creatures from outer space land on Earth we can add a seventh kingdom !