a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Meteorologist Ryan Maue reported about the warm weather prevailing all other the continental United States, in a tweet. Some meteorologists use the term ‘heat dome’ : a stationary mass of high-pressure air that is not getting dissipated as usual by the continental jet-stream.
Elsewhere on the planet, the hottest temperatures on record outside of Death Valley, California, have been recorded : 129 ºF (54ºC) in Kuwait and in Iraq.
The New York Times reports that just a few miles from the Cleveland downtown, recently getting a $50 million make-over, hundreds of dilapidated homes are getting torn down. The long shadow of the predatory lending of in the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis resulted in blighted neighborhoods. The number of residents in the Cleveland metro area is down from 1 million to about 400,000. Check out all the red dots I got from real estate site zillow.com.
‘The Northern Mariana Islands cast 9 votes for Donald J. Trump!‘ yelled their representative on the floor of the convention center today, during the official count of the votes that saw Trump be officially nominated as the 2016 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. ‘How bizarre, I thought‘, and where in the world is this speck of island anyway?. (It’s in the north Pacific, close to Guam). And if I were king for a day I would terminate their ‘United States Commonwealth’ status immediately (as punishment for voting for Trump, of course).
Wow. I followed today’s Republican National Convention speeches on and off, and happened to see the speech Mrs.Trump (Melania) made. Kudos to her, she did well, was the immediate consensus from the panel of pundits, but a little later, a bombshell. There is no question that key parts of the speech were plagiarized. Says Ezra Klein on vox.com : For one thing, she or her speechwriter appear to have cribbed a whole paragraph from Michelle Obama’s Democratic Convention speech in 2008. For another, she and/ or her speechwriter included a full-on Rickroll. What is a Rickroll, I wondered? Well, Wikipedia to the rescue. ‘Rickrolling is a prank and an Internet meme involving an unexpected appearance of the music video or lyrics for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
Melania’s speech had the words in ‘he will never, ever give up and most importantly, he will never ever let you down’. The Trump campaign surely has some damage control to do – and a speech writer to fire.
Cleveland, Ohio is hosting the Republican National Convention this week. Ohio is an ‘Open Carry’ state, which means guns can be carried openly on one’s person. The law that allows that come with lots of caveats – don’t point the gun at someone, loaded or not. Firearms may not be taken into courtrooms, jails, schools, bars or parts of airports. And not inside the Convention Center in Cleveland. With 3 more police offers murdered just this morning in Baton Rouge, the Police Union petitioned Ohio Governor* John Kasich to suspend the Open Carry permission in the security zone. No can do, came the reply : he does not have legal authority to do that (a bill eh signed into law. Does that make sense?). Does it make sense that the list of 72 items prohibited in in the ‘event zone’ include umbrellas with metal tips and tennis balls, but not guns? Of course not. Can I bring a gun that shoots tennis balls? wondered Stephen Colbert out loud on his Late Show on Friday night.
*Kasich, a former 2016 Republican candidate for President, is unlikely to appear at the Convention, even though it is in his home state! He not supporting Donald Trump.
Is this from Russia?* 
inquired the postman as he handed me a heavy package .. no, no – South Africa – I replied, recognizing the book I had shipped (that is, put on a ship) to Seattle when I was in South Africa in April.
It’s a one-of-a-kind book: about a heat transfer experiment that I had documented as a student (dare i say it? the year was 1983).
The experiment was about measuring heat transfer with a laboratory model set up to simulate the conditions found in a dry-cooled power stations. At the time, South Africa’s electric utility was constructing the world’s largest dry-cooled power station. The name of it is Matimba, and it has with six 665 MW turbo-generator units. Yes, it is coal-fired, but at least it is using way, way less water than a traditional power station with vast amounts of water that is evaporated to cool it down before it is heated up again in the boilers. (These cooling systems have lower efficiency and higher energy consumption, though – to drive cooling fans, compared to a typical wet, evaporative cooling tower).
I read the about the IPO of the Japanese tech company Line with some interest. Its main offering is a messaging app for smartphones, with cure emoticons and stickers to add to messages, and boasts some 300 million users in Japan and Southeast Asia. Man! I thought .. should I download it? How many messaging and mailing apps does humanity need? I already have and use two personal e-mail accounts, three e-mail accounts for work (one Lotus Notes, one Google Mail, one Outlook for my client work), text messaging, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts and Facebook on my phone. Of course : last but not least, there is the phone itself, and voice mail.
Check out this interesting diagram from Bloomberg Businessweek, showing how over-simplified the absolute black-and-white choice of Exit! or Remain! for the voters in the Brexit referendum actually was. I guess ‘Remain’ would have meant the black box with U.K. stays where is .. but what exactly does “Exit’ mean? Bloomberg offers four models, and there may be more.
Hmm .. I see there is a new polymer £5 note out in Great Britain : the first non-paper currency issued by the Bank of England in its 320-year history. So I have got to get me one of those! (only US$6.61 at the current exchange rate). Angela Monaghan writes in The Guardian of the picture of Winston Churchill : ‘The image of Churchill on the new plastic fiver is taken from a portrait captured by Yousuf Karsh in Ottawa, Canada, in December 1941. ‘The famous glower of the war-time hero prompted, in this case, by the photographer’s decision to take Churchill’s cigar away from him’ said Mark Carney of the Bank of England.
We need a new Prime Minister, new Top Gear presenter, new England football manager and Wales are losing. How does it feel to be the nation’s last hope? .. asked a BBC reporter of tennis player Andy Murray at Wimbledon, three days ago. (Wales lost to Portugal in soccer’s EuroCup 2016). ‘Is it really that bad?’ was his response. And win Murray did, coming away today with the 2016 Wimbledon Mens Singles title, his second. He beat Canadian Milos Raonic* in straight sets : 6-4, 7-6 (3), 7-6 (2), so two tie-breakers, though.
*Raonic was born in the former Yugolavia, now known as Montenegro. (Montenegro means Black Mountain).
The voting age 
has been lowered to 18 in Japan recently, and as part of a campaign to get young citizens to participate in elections, a little rice character called Komesuke has been created, reported the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
Here’s a primer for politics in Japan: Japan has a parliamentary system of government like Britain and Canada. Unlike the Americans or the French, the Japanese do not elect a president directly. Diet members elect a prime minister from among themselves. The prime minister forms and leads the cabinet of ministers of state. Gun laws? The law basically says ‘No one shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords’ and very few exceptions are allowed. Gun deaths per year in the entire country? Zero. Or maybe two. TWO. (In the United States, the toll usually exceeds 30,000 in any given year).
P.S. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his coalition has declared victory 8 days after the national vote and a ‘long’ eight-week campaign.
It’s 10.37 pm in California, and 1.37 am in Dallas. The Dallas police chief is holding a news conference. There was a peaceful protest march in Dallas earlier today, protesting two officer-involved shootings, one in Baton Rouge and one in Minneapolis. There was a large supporting police presence. Shots rang out, some of it sounding like automatic gun-fire.
Soon after the downtown was a war zone, and at one point every available Dallas area law enforcement officer was called out, in an effort to track down and find the snipers. All public transportation – buses and trains – were halted. Some 20 police officers with guns and flashlights out, were checking every parked car in downtown.
The shocking count as of now : a total of 11 officers shot, 4 dead, 1 person in custody. One person is in a stand-off with police in a downtown Dallas garage.
The U.S. 10-Year Treasury Yield closed at a record low on Tuesday, falling below 1.4% for the first time on record. Some traders think there is room for it to fall even lower, all the way down to 1.00. So .. should I rush out and buy that new car (with borrowed money)? Should home-owners with mortgages look at refinancing? Yes. Should savers keep their money in bonds or in fixed deposits? No. Well, unless you are a millionaire, just need to preserve your wealth, and don’t really need the interest to counter inflation. Then again, inflation is going nowhere the next 10 years, is the thinking now. So! I guess it’s the stock market for all the rest of the 99 percenters. Let’s ride the rollercoaster, Brexit or whatever may come.
It’s the fourth of July here in the United States, and birthday no 240 for the nation that declared its independence of Britain in 1776 on this day (only 13 colonies at the time). I see there is a movement afoot to decree by law that Washington DC be added as the 51st state (it is not a state but its own federal district). The idea is endorsed by Pres. Obama and by Hillary Clinton, and the proposal is that the new state be called ‘New Columbia’. The name is disliked by some, though. (A reference to Christopher Columbus, nowadays more seen as a conqueror than an explorer).
Happy Canada Day! (July 1 is Canada Day). Elsewhere in the British Commonwealth, down south in Australia where it is already Saturday, the Aussies are eating sausage sizzles* and voting in their 2016 Federal Election. Australians will wake up on Sunday morning to either a re-elected Turnbull government or one of the biggest coups in federal political history, says the Sydney Morning Herald. So Malcolm Turbull’s Coalition government is expected to win over the Labor Party of Bill Shorten.
*Voting is mandated by law in Australia, and election day ‘sausage sizzles’ held at polling stations for voters is have become a tradition in Australia.
I learned of the terrorist attack in Istanbul on the radio, while driving back to the hotel. I watched a little of the reporting on TV, and then turned it off altogether. I’m going to have to read a book such as Steven Pinker’s 2012 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined – to boost my conviction that the world is still becoming a better, more civilized place (in spite of all the news to the contrary). Pinker makes the point that we have been, and still are, are actually living in an unusually peaceful time the last few decades.
We watched Hail, Caesar! (2016) last night, a Coen brothers movie – and a movie I suspect, that is liked better by film buffs and critics, than the average movie-goer. For me the highlights were : the ‘water ballet’ performed by the Aqualilies, the sailors’ dance number featuring Channing Tatum, and the Russian submarine scene. And : I know I should not romanticize war, but I love the Echelon Song that played out the movie as the credits rolled, sung by the Red Army Choir (also known as the Battle of the Red Guards, written in 1933).
Well, the votes are still being counted, but the BBC and ITV are both projecting that the LEAVE vote in the referendum in the UK will win. It’s going to be ugly in the stock markets tomorrow (it already is tomorrow)in Asia), and hey – I should plan a trip to London right away, to take advantage British Pound – US Dollar exchange rate!
P.S. Not that it matters, but I would have voted for the UK to stay in the European Union.
The Panama Canal expansion opens on Sunday June 26 amid much fanfare and one of the worst shipping industry slumps ever. Check out these two articles. This map is from an article in the Wall Street Journal.
P.S. A reader commented on one of the articles that one can actually take a cruise on a container ship through the Suez and Panama canals (these are different cruises). Maris Freight and others, have limited cabins one can reserve on their container ships, with some cruises lasting up to 180 days. Hmm. Maybe Princess Cruises is still a better bet.
The next two pictures are from a New York Times article called : The New Panama Canal – A Risky Bet, How a $3.1 Billion Expansion Collided With Reality. The final cost far exceeded $5 billion, actually. The project was awarded to a contractor of who, the other bidders said that it could not even pour the concrete for what they quoted. There are other problems, too. The new locks are not long enough for tug boats to maneuver giant modern container ships. The latest generation of these ships can carry 18,000 TEU (Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit) containers, more than 22 times the maximum capacity of the 800-TEU ships introduced in 1956 !
