Here are a few pictures from my neighborhood walk last around Capitol Hill on Friday night. The streak of summery weather is coming to an end with rain in the forecast for Sunday.
Saturday/ walking around Capitol Hill
Friday/ Facebook’s flat IPO
Alright, I confess : I watched CNBC-That-Wall-Street-Cheerleader-Channel for coverage of the Facebook open and for the close. The close turned out to be more exciting than the open. It would have been bad if the stock price had not stayed above its initial offering price of $38 on its very first day .. but then again, that $38 share price is stratospherically expensive.
Here are the rounded price-per-sales ratios for
Facebook Google Microsoft Apple
25 5 3.5 3.5
Yikes. So now the 8 year-old Facebook public company is worth $105 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s share of that is $19 billion.
Thursday/ dry cucumber soda
I have been battling a sore throat all week but felt well enough tonight to meet my friends for our weekly beer-and-a-bite at The Elysian Alehouse here on Capitol Hill. No beer for me tonight, though – so I chose a cucumber flavored ‘dry’ soda (=has very little sugar) from Seattle-based DRY Soda Co. It was quite nice! And my dinner was curry chicken stew with cauliflower, rice and pita bread.
Tuesday/ Solar Eclipse due on Sunday
There is a annular (ring-shaped) solar eclipse due on Sunday that will start in southern China, be visible over Japan, and then over parts of the western USA as well.
We may even see a partial eclipse in Seattle but I’m not counting on it : there is rain in the forecast for Sunday! (But don’t feel too sorry for us .. we have had spectacularly sunny weather for the last several weekends here in Seattle). Below are some cool pictures I found on-line that shows what’s going to happen.
The NASA picture is at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/ASE2012/ASE2012.html
P.S. The answers for Monday’s Mazda picture : 1. Guy with Bugs Bunny tie has ‘big hair’; 2. Hot dog eater gets ‘stabbed’ with beach umbrella anchor; 3. Shark ‘eats’ surfer; 4. Guy ‘grabs’ black bikini gal’s – um – top; 5. The Titanic ‘sails again’. Yes, it wasn’t too difficult, but it was fun, right?
Monday/ Mazda print ad from 2005
Check out this old but cool Mazda print ad from a South African magazine that I found in my study while cleaning out some boxes with magazines today. ‘Spot 5 things that are not what they seem’ says the ad, and enter the answers on-line to win the Mazda. (Ignore the green line in the middle – it’s where the pages from the print ad meet). I will give the answers tomorrow.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Happy Mother’s Day to all moms!
It was a perfect weather day here in Seattle. The blossoms are from close to my house.
Friday/ very very blue trees
I found these very very blue trees today in downtown Seattle, across from Westlake Center. The blue was applied by Australian artist Konstantin Dimopoulos and is a mixture of powdered azurite (a vibrant blue copper mineral rock) and water. The big chess game took place close by.
Thursday/ drink the Kool-Aid?
I had to drink a lot of yucky electrolyte before going to the clinic here in Seattle for a routine check-up today. The pharmacist suggested that I could flavor the stuff with Kool-Aid if I wanted to. So I bought some ‘Lemonade’ .. but the electrolyte on its own was not that awful and I didn’t need to flavor it after all. But it made me look up where the phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ came from.
‘He drank the Kool-Aid’ suggests that the person has mindlessly adopted the dogma of a group or leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications (from Wikipedia). And so it turns out the phrase refers to the infamous 1978 Jonestown Massacre where religious cult leader Jim Jones’ followers followed him to death in a mass suicide. A shocking 909 people died in Jamestown that day. All the Peoples Temple members drank from a metal vat containing a mixture of Kool-Aid (that some say was actually a different brand called Flavor Aid), cyanide, and prescription drugs Valium, Phenergan, and chloral hydrate.
Wednesday/ Wall Street does not ‘like’ hoodies
Here’s Mark Zuckerberg making quite a fashion statement at his arrival in New York City on Monday to meet with investors : wearing his hoodie and sneakers. Wow! Where’s your suit, dude? Zuckerberg notes on his Facebook Timeline (of course) that he wore a tie every day in 2009 to show everyone that was an important year (after the 2008 financial crisis). And as Doug Gross notes in the CNN story : ‘Maybe Zuckerberg, sitting on the verge of a blockbuster stock offering, no longer feels the need to prove himself’.
Monday/ the Facebook IPO
Social media giant Facebook is set to go public in the next few weeks, possibly as early as May 18, initially priced at between $28 and $35 a share. Mark Koba from CNBC says the IPO is ‘set to raise the roof off Wall Street’. The valuation may go as high as $100 billion (which most analysts deem extravagant; by most measures it should be closer to $50 billion).
The list of risk factors noted in the Facebook prospectus is sobering and in some ways I think I am Exhibit A for the risks. I have a Facebook profile with 40-some ‘friends’ but I have stopped making posts there. I don’t message my ‘friends’ or ‘poke’ them, or spam them with silly game requests (think Farmville) or with quizzes. I don’t like that Facebook mines information I write about to send me and my friends marketing messages. And finally – I don’t like every one of my ‘friends’ (the non-friends ‘friends’) to know every thing about me.
But hey – maybe I am old and cranky (non-social?) and there is a return on an investment to be made if one lets the dust settle and see where the stock is a week or two from the IPO.
Sun-day
When the sun shines in Seattle, I feel I have to get out of the house. And so I did on Sunday, went out the Space Needle, walked around it and thought I could take a few pictures of its orange-golden painted dome (it is 50 years old this year). But I was too close and so I will go back another day, and go up Queen Anne hill so that I look down onto it.
Saturday/ the secret(ive) aardvark
The ‘secret aardvark’ sauce is from the Kingfish Cafe on 19th Ave here in Capitol Hill in Seattle. I had dinner there on Saturday night with my fiends Bill and Dave. Aardvarks are very special from a classification point of view : the only living species of the order Tubulidentata – and genetically speaking a living fossil! Check out the entry in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark.
Friday/ pâté, pizza and wine
I had a pizza and wine dinner Friday night with my friends Bryan, Gary and Christopher. We were very French with the pâté we had for starters (should I say hors d’œuvres? I usually think of a shrimp cocktail when hear ‘hors d’œuvres’!). The pâté was brought to us all the way from Paris, France, by Christopher. Pâté is a mixture of cooked ground meat and fat minced into a spreadable paste.
P.S. I know my readers COULD NOT WAIT for the solution to the math problem, so here it is below. I hope I got it right! It took much longer than it should have to figure it out.
Thursday/ brush up on your math with MIT
A little rusty with your mathematics from way back when? I am. I have very fond memories of math in high school. I remember thinking, this is cheating. It’s not biology or history – so you don’t even have to study! You just do the math in the test, and voila! And now it’s 2012 and the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has put all its math and calculus courses on line (at http://math.mit.edu/classes/18.01/) and I can take a look and re-try some of the basic little problems of old times.
Tuesday/ May day! we have a rampage
Since it was May 1 and International Workers Day (which is not officially observed in the USA) there were peaceful protesters marching in Seattle yesterday. They protested against broken immigration policies and income inequality. There was also a mob of anarchists (that actually sounds too philosophical, l think vandals and criminals describe them better), out to do property destruction and lash out at people on the street and reporters. Some were arrested but I have seen no reports of serious injuries.
Monday/ cherry blossoms ‘forever’
I always seem to return with a sheet of stamps after a trip to the post office. These ‘Forever’ stamps are depicting the Cherry Blossom Centennial in Washington DC. The post I made on April 6 was about these same cherry blossoms. I just didn’t realize the trees in Washington DC actually came from Japan, a gift of 3,020 trees from the city of Tokyo .. which explains the Japanese woman and child in the corner of the stamp with their kimonos and sun umbrellas. The first two cherry trees were planted on March 27, 1912.
Sunday/ Roaming Herds of Buffalo
This poster on 15th Ave here on Capitol Hill in my neighborhood is for a recording project (a music CD) of Seattle songwriter Scott Roots.
Friday/ so long, longhorn
This Texas Longhorn looked down at me as I was exiting the security clearance into the departure area at Bush Intercontinental Airport’s C Terminal to make the 4½ hr flight back to Seattle. These cattle are known for their diverse coloring and despite the fearsome and long pointed horns, generally have a gentle disposition and intelligence. The longhorn is the official animal of Fort Worth, Texas, which is therefore nicknamed ‘Cowtown’.
Thursday/ more Houston architecture
I finally had some time before the sun set on Thursday to walk around downtown Houston and snap some pictures. At the courthouse a guard chided me, said I am not allowed to take pictures (because it’s a federal building). What a sad state of affairs, I thought – if citizens cannot even take pictures of their own city’s or country’s courthouses and buildings. But then one of my colleagues pointed me to a 2010 New York Times article http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/you-can-photograph-that-federal-building/ that says the guard was wrong. As a general rule – a photographer can stand in a public place and take pictures of federal buildings.
Wednesday/ a Starbucks breakfast
Wednesday morning had me in the office early to prepare some lessons for the day’s training. The slice of pumpkin bread from you-know-who (Starbucks) and a banana was breakfast.