Category: General

(Late post). South African President Jacob Zuma is facing a challenge for leadership of his party (the African National Congress) at the ANC conference that is currently underway.  He has come under fire for his leadership as President – or the lack thereof – in the face of challenges such as the slowing economy, joblessness and spiraling corruption and waste in the South African government.  The picture from the Financial Mail is from an event in November at his home in Nkandla, a village in rural KwaZulu-Natal.   Mr Zuma will nonetheless probably be re-elected ANC party leader, virtually assuring him of another term as the country’s president from 2014, due to the ANC’s overwhelming political dominance.

P.S. The internet problem here has been solved. (Yay!). The visitors here at the family residence with all their wi-fi devices gobbled up all of the monthly data allotment from the internet service provider in one week (of course).

The Life of Pi is showing in the USA and a group of us went to see it in 3-D here in Seattle. (For the mathematicians : yes, Pi as in the mathematical constant.  I loved the scene where the boy writes out Pi to hundreds of decimal places from memory. Maybe a nod to India’s proud history in contributing to mathematics?).  It’s a spectacular film, and I liked it a lot.  If one didn’t know, one would never say the tiger is almost all ultra high-tech computer graphics technology.  (In only a very few scenes – such as the tiger swimming in the water – was a real tiger used).  The Pacific Ocean is a terrifying tsunami-wave storm at times, and has a sheer mirror-pond surface at others. The story is full of metaphors and layers.  I would say it asks of the reader or the movie-goer ‘What is your story?’ ‘What do you believe?’ ‘What lets you survive?’.

Yes, the USA Today’s front page showing the $500 million Powerball lottery prize is already up to $550 million before the drawing tonight.  (It is the second largest lottery jackpot in United States history. In March, the Mega Millions prize was $656 million).  Here’s how Powerball works.  5 numbers are drawn from one drum with 59 white balls.  A 6th number is drawn from a separate drum with 39 red balls.  So what are the odds of your lottery ticket winning?  Well – it is 1/[(59x58x57x56x55/5!)x39] = 1 in 195,249,054.    The sale of lottery tickets is banned in the state of Utah, so we cannot join the frenzy and buy tickets here. Aww. Still, it’s nice to fantasize about winning and what one would do with more than half a billion dollars.  (Well, if Uncle Sam will get say, 50% in taxes.  Then taking the lump sum might reduce the remaining $250 million to say, $100 million.  Even so – a fortune by any measure).

With Black Friday* the silly shopping season has started here in the USA. I really did not feel the urge to join the stampede at the shopping mall, and besides : I had to work! And of course there is the option of buying stuff on-line. Amazon had a whole black Friday week with discounts.

*The retailers supposedly go from red to ‘black’ (meaning they show a profit for the year).

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  It’s 9 am here in Seattle, and here is the start of Macy’s (dept. store) 86th Thanksgiving parade in New York City (I have the TV on downstairs and go look when a new balloon in the parade is announced).  The mayor’s office – and several other organizations – were planning to distribute 26,500 holiday meals in the neighborhoods still affected by hurricane Sandy.

I am in Salt Lake City*, took the non-stop Delta flight out here (about 2 hrs).  I have no ‘status’ on Delta so I had to pay money to check my bag ($25), and I paid extra for an Economy+ seat with more leg room ($39).  You can even buy priority boarding for $9 (why? -to get your carry-on luggage into the overhead bins before they are full! ) and once on board and at 10,000 ft you can get wi-fi internet access for $4.50 per each 30 mins.

*it’s the same project as the one I traveled to the client’s Pittsburgh headquarters for.  The facility where we will do the project is out here in the Salt Lake City area.

These page size posters are still up on lamp posts and public message boards here in Seattle. (Vote – as long as you vote Obama? For an excellent analysis of the 2012 election results, check out http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president).   So now the ‘fiscal cliff’ is approaching as we race toward the end of the year (never mind the Mayan calendar that predicts the end of the world on Dec 21!).  Several tax breaks expire, and some new ones are kicking in.  For the newly-elected President : to make a deal or not with the intransigent Republicans?  In particular, they want the Bush tax cuts of 2001 that will expire the end of this year, to be extended for the wealthy even though there is a yawning deficit between the government’s income and expenditures.  Well. Let’s not make a deal, says economist Paul Krugman – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/opinion/krugman-lets-not-make-a-deal.html.

President Obama won another 4 years in office.  A very low key day here at the client’s corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh.  Nary a word mentioned about the Presidential election results, but at lunch someone did tease me about the marijuana law that passed in Washington State.
So the Washington State ‘Legalize Marijuana’ proposal passed.
Looks like the Washington State Marriage Equality referendum will pass.
And Democratic candidate Jay Inslee for Washington State Governor leads by a slim margin.

The US Postal Service loves me, I’m sure.  I cannot resist buying a sheet of stamps that catches my eye when I go there for some reason.  And then I don’t use them, I file it away in a folder!  Check out these stamps, a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs and ‘Tarzan’.

We watched Hugo* last night.  In one of the boy’s nightmares, he dreams of the Oct 22, 1895 accident at the Gare Montparnasse station.  The train was fitted with the famous Westinghouse air brake but was going at too high a speed for to stop in time.

*Martin Scorcese’s 2011 movie (based on Brian Selznick’s book), set in 1930s Paris, about an orphan who lives in one in the Gare Montparnasse railway station.

Happy Halloween! A good thing I stocked up on candy to hand out, because my doorbell rang numerous times tonight with trick-and-treaters.   Lucky for them, there was a break in the rain.

I really shouldn’t have said (in yesterday’s post) ‘the worst is over’ as far as the storm goes.  As someone said tonight : with any storm there is the storm itself, there is the immediate aftermath, and then there is the long-term to consider.  The NY Times  http://www.nytimes.com/ reports that 8 million people were without power by Tuesday afternoon and that the recovery will be daunting.   The US Army Corp of Engineers has sent their ‘National Unwatering SWAT Team’ to help rid the flooded NYC subway of its water.  This team typically operates in the New Orleans area. It is the worst disaster in the 108-year old subway system’s history.

P.S. I made it as far as Chicago, and then learned that our workshops in Pittsburgh for Wednesday and Thursday had been canceled.  What to do? I could continue on to Pittsburgh (my flight was still on); or I could have stayed over in Chicago for a night or so.  But United Airlines had a Boeing 757 three gates away, scheduled to depart for Seattle in 45 minutes and with a first-class seat they could put me in for no extra fee.  So it was an easy choice, and Tuesday night found me home in Seattle, very grateful that I have a home with electricity and no flooding to deal with.

Less than two weeks, and we will know the outcome of the 2012 US Presidential election.  It is safe to say those of us that care about politics are a little on edge, given the razor-thin margins in the polls. President Obama’s stop at The Tonight Show (hosted by Jay Leno) was part of a 48 hour whistle-stop tour around the country.  (OK, so he flies on Air Force One and does not go by steam train).  He was very well received, and poked fun at Donald Trump’s supposed ‘bomb-shell’ announcement that was to upset the campaign*, and at Governor Mitt Romney forgetting his own long-held positions in the final weeks of the campaign (it is ‘Romnesia’ : a pre-existing condition and Obamacare can help out with that).

*Trump pledged $5 million to a charity of President Obama’s choice, provided the president makes public his college applications and transcripts and releases his passport history.  Trump is a ‘birther’, refusing to believe Obama is an American citizen.

The word meme (pronounce ‘meem’) was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976).  Wikipedia says a meme is ‘an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture’.  An internet meme spreads via the internet (Facebook, Twitter, blog reposts, e-mails forwarded, web sites).  So as I looked up ‘horses and bayonet’ memes from tonight’s third Presidential debate already circulating on the internet, I stumbled across the longcat meme.  I think it is very funny. Check out the pictures!

It was the second Presidential debate last night and President Obama was FIRED UP.  He won the debate, even though the Republicans say it was a ‘draw’. Uh-huh.

Asked if he would support equal pay for equal work for women, Romney didn’t really answer the question, said he had ‘binders full of women’ (their resumes, that is) when he was governor of Massachusetts.  But he didn’t solicit the resumes.  It was given to him by an equal opportunity group.  He did appoint lots of women to the state government and would have done better to just say that.   Instead the blogosphere and twitterverse lit up with the phrase ‘Binders full of women’.

• NEW: Barack Obama, Joe Biden take on Mitt Romney’s ‘binders’ comments on campaign trail; Romney responds on Twitter
• Romney’s comments on using “binders full of women” in hiring; contraception could hurt his standing with some women
• Obama and Democrats rush to paint Romney as someone who doesn’t have the best interests of women in mind
• Romney will now have to score messaging points on the economy while clarifying stance on women’s health issues