a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I broke one of my Noritake (Japanese porcelain) dinner plates last week in spectacular fashion: I made it explode on my gas cooktop with a loud bang!
(I accidentally turned on the gas burner underneath the plate for a few minutes).
Lucky for me, there were no flying pieces of porcelain, just the broken pieces on the cooktop to clean up.
I’m still waiting for my LEGO bricks from overseas to complete my Doon Drive House, but that did not stop me from ordering one more batch of bricks.
This batch was from Wisconsin (a seller on the bricklink store), and arrived at my door today.
Happy Earth Day!
Denis Hayes, who coordinated the first Earth Day 50 years ago, April 22, 1970, was a graduate student at Harvard at the time. These days he is president and C.E.O. of the Bullitt Foundation, wdenbis hayes hich funds environmental causes in Seattle. He is chairman emeritus of Earth Day 2020.
Hayes wrote in an essay in the Seattle Times, saying that ‘Covid-19 robbed us of Earth Day this year. So let’s make Election Day Earth Day.’ He wants his readers to participate in the ‘The Most Important Election of Your Lifetime’. ‘This November 3,’ he wrote, ‘vote for the Earth.’
More robin pictures. I took these on Sunday, and the tree is the Douglas fir in my backyard.
I spotted two little rabbits here on 17th Ave tonight. Below is a picture of one of them.
Can rabbit populations grow exponentially, as well? Yes, sure can. A female rabbit can give birth to several litters in one year, with up to 12 baby rabbits per litter. Yikes.
The world is awash in oil, with the recent ‘demand destruction’ as the pundits call it. (The world still uses 75 million barrels a day, down from 100 million). Oil producers have not been able or willing to cut production, though. It takes a lot of money to close down an oil well, and even more to reopen it.
What’s going to happen is that a lot of oil producers in Texas are going to go bust. I’ll have to look, but I believe many of the tar sands producers and the frackers are long gone (they needed a price of $60 a barrel to stay afloat).
People filling up their car tanks, and airlines filling up airplanes with jet fuel, will continue to pay lower prices. It’s just that there is nowhere to go, really. The world has closed down.
An article in the New York Times by Donald G. McNeil Jr. paints a bleak picture, ‘a doleful future’, for the year or two ahead, for life in the times of the SARS-CoV-2 (corona) virus.
Yes, we have reached the peak of this first outbreak in New York City, and several other States, but right now we should test at least three times more people daily, to assess if a community is safe enough for people to come out of their homes. There are still not enough test kits available. (Trump and Pence seem to lie about this every day at the press briefings).
The experts agree that 12 to 18 months for a vaccine is optimistic. The ‘world record’ time for developing a vaccine, was for the one for mumps (4 years, start to finish in 1967). Check out the struggle for the polio vaccine before the success of Dr. Jonas Salk in 1955.
Once we have a vaccine, we will need 300 million doses — and 600 million if two shots are needed. We will probably have to rely on China to help manufacture those!
In the interim, it will be impossible to keep paying the economic cost of keeping people at home. There will be fits and starts, as the lockdowns get lifted, and reinstituted if too many people fall ill in certain communities. People that have become immune, may get special privileges (to work, to travel), and people that are not immune, may be discriminated against.
The article does end with an optimistic note:
‘In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder* noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.
If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change, experts said.
The blue skies that have shone above American cities during this lockdown era could even become permanent’.
*Nicholas Mulder, an economic historian at Cornell University.
There was a little rain this morning — just a sprinkle.
This afternoon Mr Robin came by (American robin, Turdus migratorius). He sat still on the fence for just long enough so that I could snap him.
South Africa is under national lockdown orders, as is much of the world.
This pride of lions is enjoying the warmth of the quiet tar road just outside of Orpen Rest Camp. These ones are resident on neighboring Kempiana Contractual Park, and wandered over to Kruger National Park.
Pictures were taken by Section Ranger Richard Sowry, and tweeted from Kruger National Park@SANParksKNP.
We have had an unusual stretch of sunny days. The daytime high reached 70 °F (21 °C) today, a first for the year.
I don’t wear a mask when I go for a walk. Maybe I should, to get used to having the thing on my face!
There were three woodpeckers (Northern flickers/ Colaptes auratus) in the alley, at the back of my house, at dusk tonight.
One was looking for bugs in the wooden utility pole — and found one.
Nearby on the overhead power lines, a male was courting a female.
Be careful, I thought : don’t let the sparks fly between you two.
Stockholm is near the top of my list, for when we can travel again.
I want to go to the ABBA museum, and I want to stop at each and every one of the subway stations that David Alrath had photographed for Wired magazine. I copied the captions for the photos from the Wired article, as well.
Volunteer Park is closed for picnics and group gatherings, but it is still OK to walk through (while steering clear of others, of course).
It would be impossible for bugs and butterflies to miss the flaming orange tulips, by the Asian Art Museum.
This is somewhere in Amsterdam on Sunday — a picture posted on Twitter by Maria@kalltvatten.
She points out in her tweet that she was the not the one that reported the rooftop party. She also noted that the police are at the right door (the rooftop is accessed from the building on the left).
Here are the ring-tailed lemurs at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, enjoying their Easter treats (strawberries .. and ‘Was that all?’ they seem to ask).
Lemurs are classified as neither monkeys, nor apes: they belong to a group called prosimian primates. Prosimians have moist noses, and rely on their sense of smell to determine what is safe to eat — and to distinguish between individuals in their social groups.
Well, the 2020 Easter weekend turned out to be one with no packed church services, nor extended family brunches or shared meals.
Puzzles are reportedly selling better across the world than they do at Christmas time.
They are made by pasting images onto cardboard (images that evoke a sense of ‘coziness’ are always popular).
An elaborate cookie-cutter machine then applies 1,000 metric tonnes of pressure to cut the pieces.
The cutting tool for a 1,000-piece puzzle uses up to 230 feet of steel.
The edges of the tool dull eventually, and can be sharpened once before it has to be discarded.
[Information obtained from the New York Times].
Check out the amazing one-color puzzle below, though – from Japan.
The Japanese name for it translates to Pure White Hell Daio.
I have decided to improve my cryptic crossword skills, and so I printed out a few that I had found in online issues of The Irish Times.
I am not allowed to use Google too directly. (Shockingly, many of the clue phrases and their solutions can be found online).
I do use Google to look up synonyms, or the odd word or phrases that I do not understand.
Example: I think you need to be an Irishman or a Brit, to know that C of E stands for Church of England.
Here’s my blurry photo of the full moon. It’s the pink moon, and it’s a supermoon*.
*A full moon closer than usual to Earth, so it looks a little larger. It’s called pink, because of the bloom of ground phlox this time of year (a pink flower common in North America).
‘But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement’.
– trump, at a rally in South Carolina, Feb 28
By late Monday night the number of deaths in the United States from the coronavirus approached 11,000. This number of reported deaths has doubled every 3 or 4 days since mid-March. At this rate, the 100,000 mark will be reached by the end of April.
There are signs in New York City that the peak of the epidemic there has been reached, though. Some models now predict a lower number than the estimated range of 100k- 240k total deaths in the USA by August range (80k or so).
Check out this stunning picture Miguel David De Leon for the Robert S. Kennedy Bird Conservancy, in a forest in the .
The little birds are just about impossible to catch sitting still, and it took three years of patience and trying to get a picture of the bird.
