a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
These Jimi Hendrix posters that are getting touched up lend a little color to the plywood partition that they are pasted on (and to the drab grey environment). Seattle’s ‘Experience Music Project’ museum has a large collection of Jimi Hendrix artifacts.
Jimi Hendrix is widely considered to be one of the best electric guitar players ever. He was just 27 when he died of drug-related asphyxiation in Kensington, London in 1970.
*It’s quite possible that another food company will buy the brand from Hostess.
As for who is to blame for the bankruptcy, here is business magazine Forbes’ take – http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/11/18/hostess-twinkie-defense-is-a-management-failure/ Forbes also mentions the 1978 ‘Twinkie Defense’ incident where Dan White killed San Francisco‘s mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk. The press labeled his defense the ‘Twinkie Defense’ because he claimed eating sugary junk food – like Twinkies – caused diminished capacity. Amazingly the jury bought it, and convicted him of manslaughter instead of murder saying he really wasn’t responsible for his own actions. An outraged city rioted.
I live in the wettest part of the lower 48 states (number of days with precipitation), and the last two weeks of November is the wettest part of the year. It looks like this year is no exception! The 24-hour totals at Bremerton west of Seattle is at about 4 inches, and one place on the Olympic peninsula had 6 inches of rain.
Here’s a little public ‘sticker art’ I found, drawn on a US Postal Service priority label and pasted onto a street sign in downtown Seattle. I’m done with my workout at the gym and standing at the traffic light. It’s only 5.20 pm but the sunlight is long gone. The sun sets at about 4.30 pm, and the days will grow even shorter for the next month or so.
My flight into Seattle from Salt Lake City late Thu night was fine and without incident (the way all travelers like it). It’s just two hours. Friday’s Wall Street Journal had an interesting write-up about Delta’s fleet. It is very large, but older than most airline fleets, and made up of many different types of aircraft – 10 different models and some 750 planes altogether. The airline has been profitable for the third year running last year, but spent $12 billion on jet fuel : its biggest expense. So recently it made a bold move. In September it plonked down $150 million for an idled Conoco refinery, as a way to manage high jet fuel costs.
I am at Salt Lake City airport waiting for my late night flight back to Seattle. I saw this eye-catching ‘Union Station’ neon sign close to our hotel in Ogden on Tuesday night. The station is now a museum with restaurants. I had time to stop by tonight on the way to the airport to take a few pictures, and here they are.
There is no cafeteria here on site, so for those that did not pack lunch for work (me), the Mexican lunch truck (the ‘roach coach’ as we call it affectionately), shows up at noon. It’s a big truck outfitted with a mobile kitchen, a food serving window and an icebox (for the mango flavored soda with real sugar). Jarritos (‘little jars’) is a popular brand of soft drink in Mexico. The business was started by Don Francisco ‘El Güero’ Hill in 1950.
Our lunch truck driver is actually from El Salvador, but his wife is from Mexico. Is the drug/ gang violence in Mexico getting any better? I asked. No – if anything it’s getting worse, he told me.
Ogden lies at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, about 10 miles east of the Great Salt Lake and 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. I still have to go and look for the newly renovated Ogden Utah Temple of the Latter Day Saints and of course, take a closer look at the Great Lake.
We are staying in the town of Ogden north of Salt Lake City, close to our project location. After work today, we stopped by the Shooting Star Saloon. It is located in a little town called Huntsville (no, not Huntsville, Alabama!). It’s a beer-and-burgers-only place that we were told is the oldest operational saloon west of the Mississippi, complete with Wild West shoot-outs and connections to Al Capone (he stored bootleg liquor in the basement during Prohibition).
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.
I ran out to Macy’s in downtown Seattle to get a replacement battery for my Seiko watch ($10.95 for battery and labor, a bargain). My stop at Nordstrom’s was considerably more expensive, since I got away with a short and two pairs of pants. At least I did not buy the really classy indigo brushed-cashmere coat/jacket with a removable inner lining that the assistant brought me to try on. It was $1,400! Whoah, did you know it was this expensive? I asked her. (And thinking -Man! I’m not Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller*!). Seems it was just a simple mistake, though. She didn’t look at the price before she brought it to me.
*Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was an American businessman, philanthropist, public servant, and politician. He served as the 41st Vice President of the United States, serving under President Gerald Ford, and as the 49th Governor of New York. He inherited a vast family fortune and a family image that he had to live down in order to achieve his political ambitions.
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.
*David Gottlob Jüngling was German (of course), and anglicized his name after coming to the USA. [Picture posted by cbobcat49 on a message board http://www.nyfalls.com]
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.
I am in Pittsburgh, with a stop in Denver this time. The flight for Denver left Seattle at 5.20am this morning .. uff. The TSA security check point opened at 4 am, but the special short line for Mr Very Important Frequent Flier (me) was not open that early, so I had to wait in the ‘long’ security line with everyone else.
.. which we are very thankful for. Stop the madness! Here is a set of pictures which I have to post today! – because who knows for sure what will happen tomorrow? But time will soon tell.
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’.
It is just past 11 pm on Saturday night here in Seattle. In three more hours, at 2 am, we will turn our clocks back one hour to make them Standard Time again (except the state of Arizona, since they don’t observe Daylight Savings Time). Watch out if you walk around after dark with traffic nearby! A Carnegie Mellon University study found that pedestrians are three times as likely to be hit and killed by cars in the few weeks after the time change back to Standard Time.
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.
Multiple utility companies are working around the clock to restore the damage done by the storm Sandy. The Edison Electric Institute is the association of United States shareholder-owned electric power companies. They have a web site with maps that show how the wide-spread repairs to the grid in the North-East are progressing.
