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Thursday/ a freebie 🍊

These little mandarins from Peru are sweet, seedless and plump, and I got them for free at Amazon Fresh. 🤗

As I attempted to scan the barcode and put them into my smart grocery cart, the scanner did not recognize the barcode. There was no 4-digit produce code to type in on the bag, or on the shelf. Searching for ‘mandarin’ on the cart’s lookup menu also yielded no result.

The store clerk in the aisle could offer no other solution either, and just tucked the mandarins into the back of the cart, saying I don’t have to pay for them.

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Wednesday/ a triceratops 🦕

It’s time for another cool British stamp that had arrived on an envelope in my mailbox.

150th Anniversary of Dinosaurs’ Identification by Owen
Issued 1991, Aug. 20
Perf. 14½ x 14 | Phosphorized paper
1577 1010 Triceratops | 37p | grey, greenish yellow, turquoise-blue, dull violet, yellow-brown & black
[Source: 1997 Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue Part 1: British Commonwealth]
Additional notes:
1. Richard Owen worked as a taxonomist for the London Zoo and coined the word dinosaur (originally ‘dinosauria’) in 1841.
2. Triceratops lived in the Late Cretaceous period, about 68 to 66 million years ago, in what is now western North America.
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Tuesday/ not too late for flowers 🌸

It’s getting late in summer, but I still find pretty flowers here in my neighborhood.

I thought this is a daisy, but no— it’s a single-flowered dahlia. The flower has a central disc with a single outer ring of florets (which may overlap) encircling it, and which may be rounded or pointed.
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Monday/ floatplanes 🌅

Here’s a beautiful view from this morning, of the south end of Lake Union.
I took the picture from the seventh floor of a building off Fairview Avenue North.

At about 8.15 am this morning, there was a line of five float planes getting ready to take off (four are in the picture), and one that had just come in. 
Those taking off could be heading the San Juan Islands, or even to Vancouver Island or British Columbia’s Inside Passage.
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Sunday/ au revoir until ’28 👋

I confess that I fast-forwarded through some (okay, most) of a recording of the three hours of the closing ceremony of the 2024 Games.

I liked the Golden Voyager and  the mummies— and was that a spry 62-year old Tom Cruise ‘sky diving’ into the arena to receive the Olympic flag, and take it to  Los Angeles on a motorbike? (Yes, it was).

Arthur Cadre as Golden Voyager performs at the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games at the Stade de France in Paris.
[Photo by Sven Hoppe/​Deutsche Presse Agentur]
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Saturday/ frightening 😱

Cartoon by David Horsey, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Seattle Times.
Toto, I’ve got a feeling this isn’t Trump’s show anymore, says the heading on the opinion piece that accompanies the cartoon.
.. and then there is Tom Nichols from The Atlantic that says about Trump’s press conference (‘press conference’ is flattering Trump) at Mar-a-Lago this week ‘His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny’.
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Friday/ Mr Woodpecker 🪶

Is the woodpecker (it’s a northern flicker) eating ants? I wondered.
Yes, woodpeckers eat ants and are known to eat more ants than most other birds. 
Some woodpeckers, like the pileated woodpecker and northern flicker, can eat hundreds or even thousands of ants at once. 
– Natural Audubon Society

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Thursday/ hazy skies 😟

Here is tonight’s sunset, seen from Capitol Hill’s 14th Avenue at Thomas Street.
That’s a layer of smoke out there, from the wildfires east of the Cascades, and also from those burning in Oregon and California.

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Tuesday/ it’s Harris-Walz 👩🏽👴🏼

I was convinced that VP Kamala Harris would pick Governor Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania as her running mate, but we learned this morning that it is Governor Tim Walz from Minnesota.

Here’s Lisa Lerer writing for the New York Times:
In selecting Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris has picked a partner who is many things she is not: a product of small-town America. A union member known to campaign in a T-shirt and camo hat. A white guy who exudes Midwestern dad energy.

And, perhaps most important, a politician who has had to rely on the support of independent, or even Republican, voters to win elections.

Their pairing is somewhat predictable; a cardinal rule of vice-presidential selection is to construct the ticket with political balance in mind. But it is also a statement about what many Democrats believe is one of Ms. Harris’s key vulnerabilities: that she is perceived as too liberal, putting even the small slice of rural, working-class and moderate voters that she needs across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan out of her reach.

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Monday/ don’t panic (yet) 📉

It was a rough Monday for stock indexes across the world, but most economists think the US economy is just slowing down somewhat, and that a recession is not yet in sight.
Now it is already Tuesday in Japan, and it seems Japanese shares are clawing back most of their record losses from Monday (the Nikkei 225 traded about 10% higher early on).

The three major indexes are well down from their highs, but still up for the year.
Dow Jones at 3% up (down from 9% up on July 17);
Nasdaq at 8% up (down from 23% up on July 24);
S&P 500 at 9% up (down from 19% up on July 16).
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Sunday/ the photo finish 📸

Only 0.005 sec (five thousandths) separated the gold and the silver in the 100 meters men’s final today.

“Forget the feet, it’s the clavicle,” explained NBC’s Mike Tirico on what determined the winner. The thin red line drawn from Noah Lyle’s 🇺🇸 (third from the bottom) indicates that he gets the gold.
Gold Noah Lyles 🇺🇸 9.79
Silver Kishane Thompson 🇯🇲 9.79
Bronze Fred Kerley 🇺🇸United States 9.81
4 Akani Simbine 🇿🇦 9.82
American sprinter Noah Lyles celebrates after winning the gold medal in in the men’s 100-meters final at the Paris Olympics on Sunday in Saint-Denis, France.
[Photo by Martin Meissner/AP and posted on npr.org]
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Saturday/ setting it up 💻

I had my grubby paws on my pristine machine yesterday and today, setting it up with my preferences and applications.
Nicely done:
—Easy to sync contacts, notes and settings shared with my iPhone.
—Super easy to set up use a non-Apple mouse via bluetooth (for now, using a Logitech Signature M650 L).
—Easy to add widgets to the desktop.
—Added Google Chrome, YouTube, YouTube TV and Netflix browser links onto the task bar for quick access to Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, YouTube, YouTube TV and Netflix.
(I don’t use Safari nor the MacOS calendar).

Not so nice/ not possible to do:
—As of 2024, there is no Netflix app for MacBook!
So it’s possible to login & watch online at netflix.com, but I cannot download movies to watch offline on the plane on my MacBook Air the way I do with my iPad.
—I will have to get a hub to expand the connectivity options (the machine only has two USB-4 ports). My 2017 Canon digital camera needs a USB-A port to connect to the MacBook, for example.

Here’s the desktop with the widgets I have added. (The big world map only appears if the clock widget in the right corner is double clicked).
I have also added several browser links to the task bar: Google Chrome, YouTube, YouTube TV, Netflix, and others. I should remove some app links from the task bar.
There is a ‘launch pad’ link on the taskbar (second from left) that will bring up a screen with all the apps on the MacBook Air.
The launch pad screen is similar to a smartphone or smart pad screen, with the apps arranged on one or more screens per the user’s preference.
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Thursday/ free at last 😘

This is wonderful news.

Reporting from the Washington Post, above.
That is Evan Gershkovich to the left of President Biden, hugging his mother Ella Milman. The prisoner swap with Russia ultimately involved 24 detainees and 7 countries.
From CNN online:
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva have landed in the United States, following a historic prisoner exchange between Russia and the West. The returnees were greeted with tears and embraces by their joyous families at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were also on the tarmac to welcome them after their plane touched down about 20 minutes before midnight on Thursday.
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Thursday/ a new machine 🍎

My Windows notebook computer is 7 years old, and it so it was time for a new one. I am making the leap into the world of macOS, though, by replacing it with an Apple MacBook Air.

Yes, I have long had iPhones and iPads, but those don’t have the menus and file management and applications that Apple’s notebook and desktop computers have. So I have a lot to learn.

*MacOS, originally Mac OS X, previously shortened as OS X, is an operating system developed and marketed by Apple since 2001.

Fresh out of the box. This is ‘midnight’— a very dark gray gun-metal finish that is said to be a fingerprint magnet. I could have gone for the classic Apple silver, but no, I really wanted this one. This is the 13″ (13.6 in) Macbook Air M3. I bumped up the base 8 GB of memory to 16 GB and the SSD from 256 GB to 512 GB for my machine.
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Wednesday/ the dream is over 🥹

The superstar Spanish pairing of Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz lost on Wednesday afternoon, as the U.S. pair of Austin Krajick and Rajeev Ram bounced the big-name duo in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4.
-Ryan Phillips writing for si.com

Team USA 🇺🇸 (far end) squares off against Team ‘Nadalcaraz’ 🇪🇸
Reported by James Hansen from The Athletic: “We’re not doubles players,” said Alcaraz. “If you hesitate a little bit, it’s not easy. We’ve only played together a few times, and it made a difference.”
Picture from Getty Images (published on https://www.nytimes.com/athletic)
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Tuesday/ registered mail labels ✉️

Below is my four-page collection of the South African Post Office labels.
These labels were widely used by post offices use to track registered mail from the 1940s until about 2000.

After that, computer-generated labels with numbers and barcodes became the standard— with no city name or post office name.

Registered air mail from Bulawayo, Rhodesia to Cape Town, South Africa, postmarked
Dec 8, 1965. Rhodesia was the de facto successor state to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, and in 1980 became modern-day Zimbabwe.
The yellowed labels are probably from the 1950s or 60s. The font of the boxed letter R changed a few times over the years.
A closer look. Look for the label called THREE RIVERS.
Three Rivers is the suburb in Vereeniging, Gauteng province, South Africa, where I grew up and went to elementary school and high school.
I am sure that registration labels exist that show VEREENIGING (for Vereeniging’s main post office). With a little luck, I should be able to find one to put into this collection.
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Monday/ a little bit of rain ☔

This is the driest day on the calendar for our region*— but there was a little bit of steady rain around the city this morning.

*When looking at daily averages for 79 years of records at the Seattle-Tacoma airport weather station.

The tennis courts/ pickleball courts at Mount Baker Park this morning.
And hey! look at the neon-powder blue paint lines that the city put on for pickleball.
[Thanks for Steve K. for the photo]
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Sunday/ positron beer ⚗️

A positron is the antiparticle of an electron.
It has all the properties of an electron except for the polarity of the electrical charge, which is positive. Therefore, a positron can simply be considered an electron having positive unit electrical charge.
– sciencedirect.com

I left home this afternoon with an empty and dirty car, and returned with a clean car— with beer in the trunk ☺️.
( I stopped at Brown Bear Car Wash and the Total Wine store in Magnolia ).

These is a plethora of beers and wines on the shelves at Total Wine. Here are some of my favorite beer labels.