Category: General

We had blue sky and balmy weather (63 °F/ 17 °C) here in Seattle today.  Unusual, because it normally gets cold when we have no cloud cover.   Meanwhile there is a massive Northeaster blizzard bearing down on New York City and Boston, projected to easily dump 24 inches and possibly as much as 36 inches (yes, three feet) of snow there from Monday to Wednesday.  I am sure they are ‘battening down the hatches’ and stocking up on food !

 

We watched ‘Gone Girl’ (2014) last night.  The plot from WIkipedia : The day of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne returns home to find that his wife Amy is missing. Her disappearance receives heavy press coverage, as Amy was the inspiration for her parents’ popular Amazing Amy children’s books. Suspicions arise that Nick murdered her, and his awkward behavior is interpreted by the media as characteristic of a sociopath.

So here are my own notes .. the movie is a blend of say, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and the American media* covering a sensational murder (such as the Scott Peterson case; Scott is on death row in California convicted of murdering his wife Laci, and their unborn son in 2002).  But back to the movie.  After several twists and turns, it turns out there is no ending, really.   The real ‘ending’ happened some time before the end!  The movie examines what love and hate is (two sides of the same coin, right?) and how bizarrely twisted and dysfunctional a marriage can become.

*As frequently happens with mass media, missing the truth by a mile.

President Obama delivered a feisty and upbeat speech in his state of the union address.  I only saw parts of it but watched an extensive discussion afterwards.  The economy’s improvement got a lot of attention, as well as a proposed capital gains tax to pay for tax cuts for the middle class and several other proposals such as free community college tuition for deserving students for two years. The administration’s foreign policy and all the problems in the Middle East and Syria did not get a lot of airtime at all.  And with Republicans now in charge of both the House and the Senate, I think none of us that follow politics, is too optimistic that anything big will get done in the next two years.

 

 

It was Martin Luther King Day here in the United States today – a federal holiday, but we traveled out to the project site anyway and made it a workday.   It was quiet at Seattle airport this morning, but the airplane was full as usual.

 

I saw an amazing clip on TV today of a hippo chasing a boat with tourists in Zambia.  I found it on the Huffington Post Live’s website, here. The hippo is Africa’s most dangerous animal : more so than lions, leopards and crocodiles.

 

 

My other on-line quest was to find the singer of an ’80s song called ‘Everything is Coming Up Roses’.  A brand-new song on iTunes with the same name triggered the memory.  Nah, I don’t like this new one, I thought.  But who sang that song that I remember? Can I buy it? Turned out no – the 1987 version sung by ‘Black’ (Colin Vearncombe) is not for sale on iTunes, nor on Amazon Music.  But I did find it on YouTube, as a music video, and I would have to listen to it that way.

There were shock waves in the international currency markets today with the news that the Swiss National Bank had abandoned the cap they had placed on the swiss franc since Sept 2011.

The Bank had aggressively intervened since then to keep the franc ‘pegged’ at 1.2 Euro. Today they threw in the towel, and the franc shot up 15% against most major currencies. Why? Well, since the 2008 crisis everyone with money had gone to Swiss banks with it.

The situation today though, may make the Swiss, or those with Swiss bank accounts, feel ‘richer’,but the move is universally bad for business and tourism in Switzerland.  Food giant Nestle’s stock is down by 15%.   As one analyst noted, it’s as if the state of Virginia here in the USA has a dollar that’s worth 15% more than anywhere else in the country.   Would people travel there, or buy goods and services there – that’s 15% more expensive across the board?  Not if they had other choices, or if they are on a budget.

Best wishes and a happy New Year, everyone!  It’s hard to believe, but 2015 is here.

 

There it is! .. the year that was, on its way out for us in the Westernmost parts of the world as well.  I think I will celebrate the arrival of 2015 on the shores of the United States in New York City with the drop of the crystal ball in Times Square (that would be 9 pm Pacific Time), and then call it quits soon after that.

I have a little road trip to start on early Thursday morning, to friends in Oregon.   There will be plenty of time to celebrate 2015.  It is brand new and will stay for at least a little while !

I couldn’t resist this ‘Sport Solar Analog Display Japanese Quartz Silver Watch’, and so I ordered it from Amazon on Sunday night.  No, I do not really need another watch, but hey – it’s not expensive, and I love the bold, sporty 3, 6, 9 and 12.

So no fancy Swiss or French watch with a tourbillon* for me!  It’s got to be a Seiko.  I think my first watch ever was a Seiko and that’s where it comes from.

*From Wikipedia : In horology, a tourbillon (French: “whirlwind”) is an addition to the mechanics of a watch escapement. Developed around 1795 and patented by the French-Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet on June 26, 1801, a tourbillon aims to counter the effects of gravity by mounting the escapement and balance wheel in a rotating cage, to negate the effect of gravity when the timepiece (thus the escapement) is stuck in a certain position.

I was about to retire to bed on Saturday when the news came in of the missing AirAsia flight.   The airline is a low-cost carrier based in Malaysia, and I have actually flown on it once, in 2010 : from Shenzhen to Bangkok and back, documented here.   The map is from the New York Times newspaper’s on-line edition.

 

Ek wens almal ‘n Geseënde Kersfeers toe.   I wish everyone a blessed Christmas.

 

I waited until Monday to run out the department stores here in downtown Seattle – not for Christmas shopping, really. Just stuff.  What was on my shopping list?  Two new pairs of dress pants for work, as well as a winter jacket.  A new suitcase.  And one never knows, whatever catches my fancy .. but no on-the-spot impulse buying of any one item more than $100 is allowed in the Willem shopping modus operandi (method of operating).

Alas, my experiences downtown and at the Northgate shopping mall were decidedly lacking.   Nordstrom did not have my size ‘Bonobos’ (a brand name) dress pants in colors other than khaki.  I have two pairs of khaki pants already. (I should just buy it on-line). Macy’s had no jackets that I really liked (and I have bought several jackets there over the years).   Finally, when I got to the Bergman luggage store to buy a new black Samsonite 22″ suitcase for all my travels, no luck either.  They had the ugliest set of new Samsonite suitcases! Ugg-ly! They now only make shiny hard-shell ‘spinners’ .. those suitcases with the four little wheels.  I prefer the big two-wheeled design – with those you can run to the gate and not miss your flight, and they have more space inside.

Today marks the winter solstice (up here in the Northern hemi-sphere).   As it turns out, we already had our earliest sunset : on December 11.  (Check out the sunset in Fairbanks Alaska.  One’s afternoon nap might as well turn into a loong full night’s sleep!).  The reason is that there is a slight difference between the solar day (the time it takes for the sun to appear in the same position in the sky from one day to the next) and the calendar day.  Here is the rest of the explanation from the Washington Post blog (hang in there):  The Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees, and our orbit around the sun is elliptical (non-circular). In December, these two factors combine in such a way that our days are actually a few seconds longer than 24 hours – as seen by the amount of time it takes the sun to cross our local meridian (longitude) from one day to the next. In effect, this pushes the time of solar noon several minutes later during December, advancing both sunrise and sunset times even as the days continue to shorten until December 21.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[From Wikipedia]  A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally-bound system consisting of stars, stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and dark matter, an important but poorly understood component. (Our solar system’s galaxy is the Milky Way).

Guardians of the Galaxy is a 2014 super-hero film based on the Marvel comic books with the same name.  Watching it Saturday night, I tried to hang with the plot, the best part of which is the ‘Infinity Stone’ that can destroy an entire galaxy (but it’s not clear which galaxy the movie refers to, actually).   The movie is not quite Star Trek-ky (maybe more like Star Wars?) but anyway : I could not quite warm up to it.   The music in it is a throwback to the 70’s when cassette tapes were used to play the likes of BJ Thomas’s hit ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ – which I liked a lot when I played a little of it on iTunes.   But I disagree with the 90% or 4 stars out of 5 the reviewers give the flick.   I give it a 6 or a 7 out of 10.

Toyota has started selling its first commercial hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle in Japan.  These cars are not cheap (est. price $62,000) and only slated for late 2015 availability in the USA.  Outside of California and Washington State, lots of hydrogen gas stations will still have to be constructed.  Also, says Bloomberg Businessweek : ‘The auto industry has already sunk serious money into hybrids, plug-in electrics, and advanced batteries in the expectation that these technologies will dominate in the post-gasoline era, whenever that may be’.

 

We have had on and off rain here since Monday.  I read on-line that San Francisco has received 8.43 inches this month, the most for a December since December 1950 ! Hmm. And it definitely feels a little like Seattle here this week.

As we approach the winter solstice the days are getting ever shorter here in the North.  The sun now sets at 4.18 pm already .. so it was completely dark when I went for a walk.

My neighborhood of Capitol Hill does not go overboard with Christmas decorations, but I would say one in three or one in four houses has some lights up on the house, or on the fence, or in the garden.  Does my porch light count?  (No, I would say not!).  That’s all I have.  I put ‘icicles’ on my front gutter one year, but that was several years ago.

Bryan, Gary and I watched an episode of ‘Rome’ last night (an HBO TV series that aired some time ago, and is now available on Amazon Prime as streaming video).  We were not too wild about it, but it prompted us to check refresh our history knowledge : over which years did the Roman Empire exist?  We know of course, that the Romans were around at the birth of Jesus Christ in the year 0.    And certainly, before that, the Romans did not refer to the years as 100 BC, since they could not peer into the future.    It turns out the Roman empire was at its height in 117 AD.  So, after the birth of Christ.  Anno Domini means ‘In the Year of our Lord’. There is no year 0 between the years designated as 1 BC and 1 AD. The Roman Calendar was made over by Julius Caesar and became the Julian Calendar, and several centuries later the Gregorian Calendar came about.

Check out these cool maps of the Roman Empire that I found on-line, at this link.

My enthusiasm for playing Scrabble against my iPad has not waned, and shows no sign of doing that.  In fact, I discovered I can switch to German, if I ever get tired of English (sadly, there is no Afrikaans on-line version of Scrabble).   The iPad comes up with words that make one say ‘Say whaaat? Are you sure about that one?’ .. such as TEEEI.  What is that? Then you realize it is TEE EI = tea egg,  just written together.  The others are PAAREM = a couple of (PAAR = pair), ESTER-N = plural of ester (a chemical compound), and YIN of course from ‘yin and yang’.   And check the bizarre combination of tiles on my rack : Q (with a U, luckily), X and the weird A with the umlaut.

A ‘pineapple express’ from Hawaii is making its way to California, and is slated to arrive by midnight on Wednesday and continue into Thursday.  The ‘pineapple express’ is an “atmospheric river” of precipitation carried in on a jet stream from the Pacific (Hawaii). So schools are shut down and shops are barricaded.   We are all hoping it does not disrupt our travel plans for tomorrow, but we will have to wait and see !