a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
We have had the warmest April on record, and some unseasonably warm weather here in Seattle for May so far as well. Some 20 degrees above average/ 11 degrees Celsius. So we will have to wait and see how high the peaks of the summer days will be, and if we are going to reach up into the 90s or even 100. (The hottest temperature recorded here ever, was in the summer of 2009, on July 29, when the mercury hit 103 °F/ 39.4 °C).
I thought the report of a power outage of many thousands of Seattle area homes early this morning was odd – given the perfect sunny weather we had today here. It turned out it caused by a raccoon breaking into a substation, creating several system circuit outages. The raccoon did not survive.
I’ve known about West Virginia since I was very young, thanks to John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ .. but I’ve never been there, actually. So with yesterday’s Presidential primary elections there, I had to take a look at the map. West Virginia is coal country, and candidate Clinton got in hot water for being too candid about the prospects of the coal mines, and jobs in the coal industry. (It is probably one of the reasons that Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton there).
Those coal mining jobs have been disappearing for many years – for decades – and they will not come back. The US government has put a freeze on issuing new leases for coal mining on public lands this January. There are cheaper and cleaner alternatives such as natural gas, available. And finally, the coal industry itself has been mechanizing the mining of coal, so an entire mountain top can be mined with a handful of operators.
But never mind all this : a few days ago Donald Trump had a big ostentatious rally with coal miner hard hat and all, pantomiming a coal miner shoveling coal, and declaring : we will get those jobs back. And this tweet : Obama’s war on coal is killing American jobs, making us more energy dependent on our enemies & creating a great business disadvantage. Well. If only the world were that simple.
Technically speaking, there was a solar eclipse of sorts going on today .. but since Mercury is just a dot when seen against the sun, it is called a traversal of Mercury across the sun. Since I did not have a special telescope with a dark lens, it was good enough for me to check the accelerated video clip from NASA. For me, the sun is the amazing thing in the clip. Such a giant ball of hydrogen fusion – has been at it for 4.5 billion years, and will be around for another estimated 6 billion years. Will Earth still have humans on, then? And hopefully the humans would have found another Earth to inhabit by then, because the sun will become a red giant, cast off its lighter elements in a planetary nebula, and end up as a white dwarf.
A happy Mother’s Day to all the moms!
Below is a pictures that I took today of Amazon’s biospheres, showing the progress that has been made in their construction. Here are more pictures and a report from the Seattle Times.
Here is a picture from the Flickr photo stream of Masashi Wakui .. I wish I could take pictures like these ! Sharp detail, amazing colors, rain-in-the-city-at-night atmosphere.
We went to Columbia City on Wednesday night for a beer and a bite, and lucked out with the last parking spot in the lot across from our regular ‘watering hole’. I love that lot’s parking fee ‘machine’ .. hanging in there, defiant, retro and analog, with no such fancy tech as accepting payment by mobile phone or debit card. Paper money and coins, stuffed into a slot !
So it’s official (per Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus) : the Republican Party will nominate Donald Trump as their party’s candidate for the 2016 US Presidential Election. Trump won the Indiana Republican Primary Election easily today, forcing main rival Ted Cruz to drop out of the race. The result : we have an egotistical-billionaire-reality-TV host, with no political experience whatsoever, who is really not even a Republican, as the Republican Party’s nominee! That’s why the New York Daily News cover of Wednesday announces that the Republican Party as we have known it thus far, is dead. Also check out this analysis that Ezra Klein from explain-the-news web site vox.com offers.
I don’t follow any of the soccer leagues closely, but there were several articles in the news lately, describing the against-all-odds run of the Leicester* City soccer team in the Premier League this past season. (They have just won it, with the outcome of a match between Tottenham and Chelsea making Leicester City end at the top of the league, and by a wide margin).
Sports commentators describe it as the greatest season in sports history. The full story in the New York Times reports that the Leicester team’s payroll is roughly a quarter of Chelsea’s when it won the 2014-15 title, and that they finished 14th last season, and that their escape from relegation is a story (and a soccer miracle) all its own.
*Say LESS-ter
The elevated stretch of waterfront highway called the Alaskan Way Viaduct closed on Thursday night, for two weeks. It is as a precaution for the digging of the new tunnel for State Route 99 that goes under the Viaduct at this point. (When the tunnel has been completed, the Alaskan Way Viaduct will be demolished). On a typical weekday some 90,000 drivers used the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and for the next two weeks there will be a lot of extra traffic using the downtown Seattle streets. For those that can : use the bus, use the light rail, bike, walk. Driving around in a car in downtown Seattle should only be done if there is no other option.
Here are some of my mementos from my trip. I love foreign coins and banknotes, and foreign stamps as well.
I’m home! The travelers from Frankfurt arrived into Seattle shortly after noon Pacific Time. I sat next to the window, and looked out at just the right time to see a beautiful view of the Columbia river as we crossed it in Canada, right after the British Columbia border.
I made it to Frankfurt .. Next stop Seattle.
[From Wikipedia] 
Hamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, is connected to the North Sea by the Elbe River. It’s crossed by hundreds of canals, and also contains large areas of parkland. Its central Jungfernstieg boulevard connects the Altstadt (old town) and the Neustadt, passing Binnenalster lake, dotted with boats and surrounded by cafes and restaurants. Oysters and traditional Aalsuppe (soup) are local specialties.
I did the best I could with the day-and-a-half and rain/ freezing rain at times in Hamburg! I will have to try to come back in summer some time, when the weather is warmer. The HafenCity* area’s development continues, even after 15 years since it had started, and I would love to spend more time there when it had been completed.
*HafenCity is an urban center with many shops, restaurants, hotels and cultural venues as well as rising visitor numbers. More than 2,000 people now live in HafenCity as a whole; there are more than 5,000 students at the various academic institutions; upwards of 10,000 employees work in more than 500 businesses. It aspires to generate and use clean energy and be a model for the new cities that will have to be built around the world this century.
I learned on Monday night that Wednesday – the day of my scheduled departure from Frankfurt to Seattle – is going to be an ugly day at Frankfurt airport. A massive service workers’ union strike forced Lufthansa to cancel 350 flights at Frankfurt, including the one I had to get there for the Frankfurt to Seattle flight. So I pushed out my return by a day .. and thought to squeeze in one more train trip : one from Copenhagen to Hamburg. (I plan to fly early Thursday from Hamburg to Frankfurt). The train ride was quite something. When Deutsche Bahn engineers design and build tracks for their trains, they stop at almost nothing. The train track runs across bridges to cross rivers and narrow channels, and into tunnels to go through hills, or underground. And for a ferry crossing, such as the one between Denmark and Germany that crosses the Fehmarn Belt Strait, they built a train track right on the ferry’s deck, to ferry the whole freaking train across the strait. Or at least half the train. At our final station in Denmark (Roedby), the front four cars were disconnected from the rest of the train. As we reached the ferry, the train cars were run onto the ferry, passengers and all. Then we were shooed off the train (the train is locked for the ferry crossing) to go onto the ferry itself during the crossing, and we boarded the train again before the ferry docked. And the train ran off the ferry onto the track and into Puttgarden station. ‘Welcome to Germany’ announced the conductor.
I could see a bridge far away from my hotel room and discovered that it is the Øresund Bridge to Malmö in Sweden : a combined railway and motorway bridge across the Øresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. The bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres from the Swedish coast to the artificial island of Peberholm in the middle of the strait. So! I have to go, I thought, and besides, my feet and legs needed a break from walking all over the city of Copenhagen in between bus rides and train rides. I literally just had time to make the ride out there, look around the Central Station for 15 minutes, and then catch the train back again.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Yes, the Danes are very friendly and laid-back, and they speak good English. Watch out for bicycles : they go fast, so do not step into the bike lane or cross it before looking both ways! The public transport is top notch. Even the buses have display screens for the routes, and the connections at the next stop.
I am spending a few days in Copenhagen* before heading west, home. The flight from Frankfurt to Copenhagen this morning was just an hour, but it took a while to get here : there was trouble with the on-board computer of the incoming plane, and another one had to be found.
*I thought I would check up on ‘The World’s Happiest Country’ .. as Denmark is frequently referred to when ‘happiness indexes’ are compiled.
I made it into Frankfurt. We left Cape Town more than an hour late, after midnight.
We arrived into Paris some 11 hours later, shortly after noon on Friday. From there, the Hop! Embraer 190 commuter jet took us to Frankfurt.