Willem's Planet

I watched the USA-Portugal game this afternoon, played in the city of Manaus in the middle of the Amazon in a controversial $300 million stadium.  (The city has no top-flight professional sports team, and Manaus is 4 hours’ flying from any other city).  

Anyway, as everyone was watching the clock run out on the match with the USA at 2-1, Ronaldo made a perfect cross-kick in literally the final minute. His teammate Varela scored a goal with a dive header to make it a 2-2 draw. Man!

Saturday marked the summer solstice for us here in the northern hemisphere of our spinning blue planet.

Here in Seattle it was sunny, but temperatures were still mild, barely making it to 70 °F/21°C.   Bryan, Gary and I sat outside soaking up a little sun, and Gary made a banana vanilla ice cream shake for us in his new blender.  

Here’s a little video clip as well .. Blend It!

So with the Dow Jones Industrial Average approaching 17,000 here in the USA, the questions for all of us (millionaires or not) about a pull-back – or worse – in the stock market remain.  Our Vampire Squid Investment Bank* wrote to its clients that it expects a ‘10% pull-back’.  Some analysts are pointing out though, that such a prediction really says nothing, since a 10% pull-back is quite possible – and even expected in a long bull-market. And are stock valuations ‘lofty by any measure’?  Well, the S&P 500’s price-earnings ratio is admittedly high historically.  But then we have the super long-term view from Richard Ross, Global Technical Strategist at Auerbach Grayson, shown on CNBC that says we may very well be breaking out of a 13-year sideways band and still go up, up, up. (Whoah). Fortune 500 companies sit on tons of cash, the Fed is not about to raise interest rates drastically, the economy is supposed to grow 3% this year, and demographics favor the USA (compared to other stock markets).   But then we have a student loan bubble here in the USA, and as always the peace in the Middle East is tenuous, or is it unraveling and turning into a full-blown crisis?   Better not to put all one’s retirement eggs in the stock market basket.  As always.  That has not changed.

*Referring to the famous quote about Goldman Sachs from the New York Times : ‘The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’

My scheduled flights back to Seattle are now a half hour earlier.  As I get into the taxi to get home from Seattle airport at 10 pm, there is still a band of light sky on the horizon.  (The sun sets at 9.10 pm!).

I read about the problems that national parks in the western states here in the USA are having with mountain pine beetle infestations : it’s scary.  Mountain pine beetles attack several types of pine tree, including ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, limber pine, bristlecone pine, Scotch pine and Austrian pine. Beetles seek out the oldest trees, preferring ones over 80 years old.  Thousands of years of instincts help the pine beetle locate the oldest, most stressed trees.  In the natural cycle, pine beetles are important factors in helping to maintain the health of a forest .. but this surely is too much of a good thing at work!

What can be done?  From the Colorado State University’s website : For a long-term remedy, thin susceptible stands.  Leave well-spaced, healthy trees.   For short-term controls, spray, cover, burn or peel attacked trees to kill the beetles. Preventive sprays can protect green, unattacked trees.

Train – the American pop rock band from San Francisco, that is.  They were at it, playing on a set-up stage for a street party crowd here in downtown Denver.  I stopped outside for a while, thinking I might hear them play ‘Drops of Jupiter’, but no luck.   It was late and I was tired.  Play the song on your iPad before you go to sleep, I thought. 

Here are some of my favorite lyrics from the song, about someone traveling very very far away, and the other person (a lover?) missing her.

From ‘Drops of Jupiter’ (2001) by Train
But tell me, did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded
And that heaven is overrated?

Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star–
One without a permanent scar?
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?

Now that she’s back from that soul vacation
Tracing her way through the constellation, hey, hey, hey (mmm)
She checks out Mozart while she does tae-bo
Reminds me that there’s room to grow, hey, hey, hey (yeah)

Six of us had baba ghanoush, hummus and chicken kabob for dinner tonight at the Shish Kabob Grill.  It is across from the Colorado State Capitol here in Denver.  The casual sit-down restaurant is owned by a Syrian American family. A sign by the entrance says ‘Syrian Americans for a free Syria’ and another ‘Victory is near’ (meaning victory against the Assad regime). Even if that were the case (is it?), it’s going to be a long way back with parts of the country in ruins and the economy in a shambles.

So .. the World Cup 2014 has started!  Check out the evolution of the soccer balls from the early days through today’s high-tech soccer balls, from an article in the New York Times.  (Although the Jabulani ball of 2010 was harshly criticized for its fickleness and aerodynamics, says the article). Let’s hope the 2014 ball gets better reviews from the players.

Here is the link from the New York Times.

 

Bloomberg Businessweek writes in a story in the latest issue of a Chris Dancy here in Denver that collects information about himself : what he sees, what he does, what he thinks, what he eats eats .. from 10 devices he wears or carries, and 13 more in his home and car.  He started five years ago by archiving his tweets, so that he could search them (at the time Twitter did not allow searches); did the same with his Facebook posts, and eventually ended up funneling all his data in his Google calendar, the world’s most thorough, searchable diary.  (Hmm. Maybe I should zap my blog entries into a Google calendar?). According to Dancy, the proliferating array of information is full of unexpected correlations, such as measuring exactly how much TV and when one has watched it, monitoring and changing one’s diet – and so on.  Chris managed to lose 100 lbs as his first self-improvement project.  He left his job as IT director at a software company earlier this year to make full-time presentations about ‘data-assisted living’.

Today was the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France.

I finished reading my book about another war, last night on the flight home : the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa.  The fictional story revolves around a New Zealander called Gideon Lancaster that joins the British forces in the Boer War, and becomes a spy.  Soon, ‘the enemy’ and ‘betrayal’ became impossible to pin down in his mind.   Legendary Boer general Christiaan de Wet, and scheming to capture him, is also part of the story. (The general never was captured.  But his brother Piet de Wet who was also a successful Boer general, was captured by the British toward the end of the war.  He then became a member of the National Scouts – Boers serving with the British forces!).

It was madness (OK, all wars are madness) for the Boers to take up arms against the British Empire, of course.   We learned of Lord Kitchener’s ‘scorched earth’ policy in school : burning down farmsteads and slaughtering all the live-stock.  And during the later stages of the war, the British rounded up and isolated the civilian Boer population in concentration camps, one of the earliest uses of this method by modern powers.  To this day the United States Army uses case studies from the Boer War to teach ethics in combat.