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Wednesday/ Dow 15,000 .. where to next?

The ‘crisis’ in the Dow Jones pre-crisis and post-crisis the the Wall Street Journal refers to in its front page article about the DJIA reaching 15,000 for the first time on Tuesday, is the Lehman Brothers/ World Financial/ Great Recession crisis of 2008, of course.  But there are other crises that have certainly not played themselves out fully – such as the European debt crisis, the repeated US debt-ceiling wrangles in Congress and the US unemployment crisis.  And the USA is still awash in cheap money with the Federal funds rate sitting at zero almost 5 years after 2008.

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From the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal
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Here’s a better view of what’s really going on .. the historic average P/E ratio of the S&P 500. The ‘now’ referred to in ‘is falling sharply now’ is Aug 2010. (I couldn’t find an up-to-date graph).  The average S&P 500 P/E ratio today is about 15 or 16 – so it has stabilized (or is heading up again?) and sits at about at the long term average.
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Tuesday/ ABBA’s museum opens

The ABBA museum has opened in Stockholm. (Yes, yes. I’m an ABBA fan. Is there anyone that is not?).  There’s a red telephone in the museum for visitors, and supposedly ‘only four people in the world has the number’ (named Agnetha, Björn, Bennie and Anni-Frid).  Hmm.  So if it rings, pick it up, says the website (can I wrestle it away from the person that dared get there ahead of me?).   Björn Ulvaeus was very modest when Natalie from the Today show (morning TV show in the USA) interviewed him, saying that their timing was right and for some reason many, many people around the world just liked the music that they produced.  He also said that it was ‘a little weird’ to play such a big part in creating a museum for oneself — but the city of Stockholm had been asking them for many  years to do that, and they obliged.

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Here’s a picture from a Swedish newspaper DN’s website. Björn Ulvaeus is being interviewed inside the museum.  That’s a much younger Björn behind him in the famous park bench photo shot for the cover of the first ABBA’s Greatest Hits album.  That’s Agnetha on the left; they were married at the time – but later divorced.  The album (in vinyl of course) was one of the very, very first music albums I bought.  I loved every song on it.
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Monday/ 87 ºF a record high

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Temperatures reported by Kin5 TV on Monday. Monday’s high was 87 ºF (30.6 ºC) and the previous record high from 1957 is 79 ºF (26.1 ºC).

 

I thought it was warm on Monday – but didn’t realize until the evening news that the 87 ºF (30.6 ºC) we had in the city was quite an aberration.  It was the highest May 6 temperature on record, and by a wide margin.

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Sunday/ Madison ‘Beach’

So .. does a beach have to have sand?  Madison Beach here alongside Lake Washington does not really have sand, and the water is not salty. We have to make do with what we have since it’s a heck of a drive out to the open ocean’s beaches here from the city !

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The scene at Madison Beach park at 5 pm on Sunday afternoon.   The water is still cold, so only the bravest souls venture in this early in the season. 
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It is 2.2 miles from where I live (A) to Madison ‘beach’ on Lake Washington (B).  I walked out there; it’s downhill most of the way.  And then I cheated and caught the No 11 bus to bring me back three-quarters of the way.
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Saturday/ here’s the Tokyo dog truck

It feels like summer here in Seattle with the warm temperatures lingering into the evening after sunset. Saturday was also the official opening of Seattle’s boating season, and so the summery weather is a happy coincidence to that.

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I spotted this ‘Tokyo dog’ truck here on 15th Ave on Capitol Hill. If I find it again I will try their Shinjuku veggie dog : apple sauce sausage with butter teriyaki onions, wasabi mayo and nori (seaweed).
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And here is a t-shirt that’s for sale from their website. Looks to me like a play on Godzilla – that gargantuan ‘dog’ stalking the Space Needle.
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Friday/ blue sky

We have a high-pressure cell hovering over us this weekend – keeping the clouds of the jet-stream away, and giving us a beautiful clear blue sky* and warmer temperatures (70’s º F/ 20’s ºC).

*And just why is the sky blue? Because of Rayleigh scattering.  In plain English, the molecules of the earth’s atmosphere scatter the shorter wavelengths of light from the sun more than the longer ones, and the human eye sees the blue.  If our eyes were more sensitive to violet light, the sky would have been violet.  When the sun sets, the scattering of the red color wavelengths become more predominant, and we see red and pink).

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The Seaboard building with Friday’s blue sky behind it. Constructed in 1910 as offices, the upper floors have now been turned into condominiums for people that like to live right in the city.
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Here’s a Google street view photo (same building on the left). After work I walked up Pike St (center of the picture) to catch one of the buses on the right that stopped by the white arches of the Convention Center in the distance, to take me to my home on Capitol Hill.
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Thursday/ the new US$100 bill

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The new ‘Franklin’, due out in October 2013.

Speaking of capitalism (Wednesday’s post), I will have to wait until October before I can get my grubby fingers on the new US$100 bill.  The first $100 bills were issued in 1862 .. and by the end of 2010, a total of 7 billion hundred dollar notes were in circulation according to the Federal Reserve (more than two-thirds of these overseas).  Of course the new note has several new security features – to make it harder for counterfeiters such as North Korea that is known in particular for producing extremely high-quality but fake $100 bills. My favorite security features from what I read on-line are the blue 3D ribbon woven into the note’s fabric, and the micro-printing reading “The United States of America” on Ben’s collar.

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Wednesday/ Mayday mayhem

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This sticker on the back of a parking sign here on 15th Ave in Seattle promotes the anarchists’ point of view (the faq stands for Frequently Asked Questions).

With Wednesday being May 1, there were street marches for workers’ rights and immigration reform here in Seattle.  Everything went OK but after 6 pm things turned ugly in downtown Seattle. Most of the marchers had dispersed by then, but a small group of self-described ‘anarchists’ started confronting the police, and damaged cars and windows by throwing rocks.  So some 17 people were arrested, and 8 police officers hurt – but mostly bumps and bruises.   My take? Hey, you’re not going to get an argument from me that we’re doing just fine with capitalism in the USA.  Capitalism is killing our morals and our future, argues Paul Farrell on the Wall Street Journal’s website Marketwatch : http://www.marketwatch.com/story/capitalism-is-killing-our-morals-our-future-2013-04-27?link=kiosk.  We cannot put everything up for sale. The examples he mentions : “for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons/ outsourcing war to private contractors/ police forces by private guards, almost twice the number of public police officers/ drug companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice prohibited in most other countries.”   But to think we can live in a society with almost no government, no laws and no police (libertarian socialism, which seems to me pretty close to what anarchists stand for) – that is just a pipe-dream.

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Tuesday/ a long business day

I had to get up with the birds on Tuesday – at 5 am, to make sure I was ready for an important 6 am conference call.  But what was that noise outside? Light pellets of hail like we had the other day.  Amazing.  Anyway, let me jump in the shower and wash my face, I thought. The directors I talked to were in Chicago, I only had a 5-minute slot with prepared remarks, and I did not want to sound like I just rolled out of bed!  Conference call over with, I went back to catch another 30 minutes of sleep.  My stomach was still a little queasy from something I ate the night before,  but I had to head out to the Red Lion hotel in downtown Seattle.  It was the location of a rare event : my firm had most of the 400 or so of the Seattle team attend a whole afternoon workshop.  So I wanted to attend and see all the faces and meet lots of new people.  Done with the workshop, we could get refreshments and socialize, which I did as well.  To socialize is hard work for me, since it does not come quite naturally the way it does for that ‘business pro’ guy in the National Car commercial that mixes business with .. business.  Then it was time to catch the bus up the hill to kick back and make some dinner.  Yay!  I made it to the end of the day.

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Monday/ beer with no pong

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Kirin beer is named after the ‘Qilin’, a mythical hooved Chinese chimerical creature. This little Kirin is alcohol-free, not ‘for-nothing’ free ! (It was $1.65).
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The Wall Street Journal explains how the popular college game beer pong works.

I like Kirin beer and when I saw an alcohol-free version of it in the Uwajimaja grocery store that carries products from Asia, I thought .. hmm, let me try it.  It’s no Moose Drool, but drinkable.  Kirin says it’s made from ‘an unprecedented new recipe containing barley malt and hops just like regular beer’.  It has only 37 calories in the 11.3 oz (334ml) bottle that it comes in.    I read on-line that earlier methods of making alcohol-free beer involved evaporating the alcohol from it, but tended to leave it with an ‘industrial’ taste.

There’s definitely a market for alcohol-free beers (pregnant women, beer-lovers on medication) .. but the market probably excludes college students out to getting their throats wet with the real stuff while they play beer pong!

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Sunday/ King Street Station is new again

I had time on Sunday to swing by King Street station just south of downtown Seattle.  The station was originally constructed in 1906 but recently renovated inside and out.  Wikipedia says it has Italianate architecture and Beaux-Arts architecture (OK! so now I know what that looks like as well).  The station is a stop on the Amtrak Cascades route that runs along the Cascade Mountains on its east, up from Eugene, Oregon to Vancouver in Canada.

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Amtrak’s Cascades route is named for the mountain range on its east (when the train runs northbound).
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King Street Station with the Amtrak track that brings the trains to it. Downtown Seattle is in the background.
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A closer look. I love the copper trim on the awning.
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This ceiling is upstairs, when one has entered through the main doors on Jackson street.
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The main waiting room. The Amtrak train has actually just arrived from the south. It stops only for a few minutes, so I was too late to run outside and catch a better glimpse of it!
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A beautiful inside corner with doors going to the streets and taxi stand.
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A close look at the lamp fixtures and little mosaic tile trim on the wall.
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This is the pedestrian overpass with the Amtrak track coming in from the south. Century Link field is home to the Seahawks (football team).
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More plate cut-out artwork on the pedestrian overpass, showing the connection Seattle has with Japan.

 

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Saturday/ moose drool

‘I will have a moose drool, please’ said I on Wednesday at a ‘connectivity event’ after work.  Moose Drool is a brown ale made by the Big Sky Brewery in Montana.   And so I had to look up if we actually have moose in Washington State (we do, in the northeast).  The creatures are roaming all over Canada and Alaska.

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Here’s the packaging from a Moose Drool six-pack.  Yes. the moose is really drooling!
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Here’s a map (from Wikipedia) showing the moose distribution in North America. The four shades of colors are sub-species. There’s probably 300,000 in the USA with double that number in Canada. 
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Friday/ Amazon Fresh in Jet City

Here are two pictures from Friday.  I took the bus the the gym and back late afternoon (nice not to deal with the crush of traffic downtown).  There was still some sun left after that, and so I walked down to Broadway (the main out-and-about street here in Capital Hill) to see what’s going on there.

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Here’s the opposite direction No 43 bus across from where I was waiting. Jet City on the sign is Seattle (Boeing being the ‘jet’), and seeing ‘Johannesburg’ jolted my memory of all the times our family would drive out there to visit my grandparents. The town where I grew up is just about an hour’s drive from Johannesburg.
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And here’s an ‘amazon fresh’ truck that I walked by. They are still not a very common sight, and offer service only in limited areas in Seattle. One can order groceries as well as complete meals from restaurants.
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Thursday/ the 97-month car loan

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I’m a pedestrian on the Olive Way overpass of highway I-5 late Thu afternoon, looking north. It’s 5 pm, so northbound traffic is slowing down.

 

 

So with the economy slowly improving, car sales are back, and so are traffic jams on the freeways around the major cities in the country.  On average, there is an uptick of 4% in congestion so far this year, after a 22% drop in congestion from 2011 to 2012.  These are numbers from the INRIX traffic score card, here http://scorecard.inrix.com/scorecard/. As for car sales, there are now car loans available for an astonishing 97 months.  Better take a hard look at a cheap used car, the bus, the train, car pooling, making do with one family car, before signing up for that loan!

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This photo illustration from the weekend’s Wall Street Journal. The $31, 032 is the average price of a car and the $460 a month is what the buyer will pay for each of 97 months. So let’s see. 97 times $460 comes to $44, 620 : the buyer will pay some $13,000 in interest. And it will be a long time before the buyer comes in for another car!

 

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Wednesday/ on Apple watch

No – I wasn’t really watching the Apple stock price as the Q2 earnings figures were announced on Wednesday.  Since my iPhone 4 is now long in the tooth, I was hoping there would be hints about when the new iPhone, widely referred to as the 5S, would become available.  Of course there were not! .. but it seems clear now that the estimated  June/ July availability of the 5S will be pushed back to September, at least.   One article points to fingerprint sensor issues (picture).   In the meantime, arch rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 phone is now out.  The company took out no less than eight full pages of ad space in the USA Today of Wednesday.   Here is the USA Today review of the Galaxy S4 http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2013/04/24/samsung-galaxy-s4-review/2104959/.

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Tuesday/ the Czech Republic and Chechnya

Here’s funnyman Jon Stewart reporting on ‘The Daily Show’ on Monday night that the Czech Embassy felt compelled to issue a statement in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks to clarify that the two suspects actually traced their roots to Chechnya, and not the Czech Republic.  (Expletive-filled anti-Czech remarks permeated Facebook and Twitter postings).  Asked Jon S. only half-jokingly : ‘Do they (the Czechs) really think the US would invade a country that had nothing to do with the attacks?’.

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Jon Stewart from the Daily Show on Monday night. The Daily Show is an American late night satirical television program. The show describes itself as a fake news program, but it makes some serious points along with the jokes.
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Monday/ an aardvark for Earth Day

Monday was Earth Day.  I took the Earth Day web site’s footprint calculator (here http://www.earthday.org/footprint-calculator) and the outcome was not good.  If everyone on the face of the earth lived as large as I did, there would have to be 7.1 earths to provide the resources needed.   (Maybe it was the 100 hrs+ of airplane flying that did me in?  At least I have not traveled much at all the last four weeks! .. I suppose the same number of planes flew anyway, though.  But hey, at least I recycle everything I can, and try hard not to waste water and electricity).   And I couldn’t resist posting the cute aardvark with its huge rabbit ears.    Aardvark is Afrikaans (or Dutch) and its direct translation is ‘hog of the earth’.

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The Foot Print Calculator on the Earth Day website says if everyone lived the way I did (house, eating habits, transport) there would have to be 7.1 planet Earths needed. Ouch.
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An aardvark.  They are still found widely in Africa and are not an endangered species. 
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Sunday/ the Bullitt is open for business

Here is one more post for the Bullitt center as a follow-up to the ones I made some six months ago when construction was underway :  Seattle’s new ultra-green building and   Bite the Bullitt.   The sleek and shiny solar-paneled building is now ready for its opening on Monday (Earth Day).

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Here’s the completed building with its fully fitted solar-paneled roof, its big windows and shiny outside cladding.  There will be a little opening ceremony on Monday (it now looks like the blue skies will hold and the white canopy will not be necessary!).  And is the white Nissan Leaf electric car on the right parked alongside by coincidence, or there to complete the picture?   There is no parking garage below the building, only some bicycle racks.
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Here is the view from the front. The little triangular park in front of it has always been there, but got a little make-over with ferns and wooden log ‘benches’. The big trees will get a lot leafier with summer approaching.
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Saturday/ the tower has the power

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The Lenovo Thinkcentre M82 is the mean machine that I ordered.

I finally took the plunge on Saturday and had to make several decisions to arrive at the point of ordering a replacement  desktop computer for my home office.
#1. Windows and not Apple (enough Apple on my iPhone and iPad).
#2. Windows 8 and not Windows 7 (got the have the newest in spite of some reports that W8 is ‘awful’. I will tweak the interface to make it work the best for me).
#3. Tower and not all-in-one or mini-tower (to keep my options open; tower offers most USB connections and a solid state boot disk with no moving parts).
#4. No touch screen for now. It’s not an iPad and I can get one later. Besides, Apple has done a ton of research on vertical touch screens, and concluded they are terrible ergonomically.
#5. Lenovo over Dell and H-P. I liked the look of the box; and I get a nice discount through my company.
This might very well be my last desktop machine I buy, but I also have some doubts. For a home office I think one needs a stationary machine with a nice big screen, with connected printers* (I have two), a document scanner and the cable modem hard-wired.   *I guess I could get wireless printers, but the ones I have are not and work perfectly fine.

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This Thinkpad is just out and my company has announced that everyone will get one of these from now on as well. I just got a new notebook computer for work, though – so I will have to be patient and wait a while before I get my grubby hands on this one.
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Friday/ one dead, one wounded in custody

(Caveat : I am not a news organization.  I am just reporting what is interesting and fascinating to me!).  So the manhunt did end on Friday night, thankfully.   Shortly after the lock-down was lifted at the end of the day with one suspect killed and the second suspect still on the loose, a resident discovered #2 in his boat in his backyard.  He was apparently badly wounded with blood on the tarp, and on him. (What a story the resident has story to tell).  The resident retreated and called 9-1-1.  Then all hell broke loose (again). A helicopter with thermal imaging showed the suspect couldn’t really move, and so the SWAT team moved in, captured him, and sent him off in an ambulance.   So all of Boston is out on the streets.  The President gave an address on TV.   But the harder questions remain : why did the two brothers do it?  Was there anyone else?  Here is an article from the Washington Post that explains some of the history of Chechnya and Dagestan where the brothers grew up before their parents brought them to the USA (they were given political asylum) :   http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/19/9-questions-about-chechnya-and-dagestan-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/

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The boat where the second suspect was hiding away, wounded, and discovered by the home owner that went outside to smoke .. and noticed something wrong on the tarp on the boat.
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Andrew Kitzenberg used his Twitter account to post an eyewitness account from what was going on outside his window on Thursday night. One post said ‘the black hawks are here’. Another showed a picture with a bullet hole in the wall and through the back of the desk chair.