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Wednesday/ fed-funds now 5.0-5.25% 💸

“We feel like we’re getting closer or maybe even there.”
-Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Jerome Powell today, on whether more federal-fund rate increases are in the offing

The Federal Reserve Bank increased the federal-funds rate by another 0.25% today.
(So another message to the consumer to stop borrowing money, and to stop buying stuff that is not really needed.
The average credit card interest rate is now 24.25%, according to Forbes Advisor’s weekly credit card rates report. Inflation here in the States is now at about 5%.)

From the Wall Street Journal:
With the latest increase, the Fed has raised its benchmark federal-funds rate by a cumulative 5 percentage points from near zero in March 2022, the most rapid series of increases since the 1980s. The rate influences other rates throughout the economy, such as on mortgages, credit cards and business loans.

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Tuesday/ Tucker Carlson’s text 🤮

The New York Times published the text message that got Tucker Carlson fired.

According to the New York Times:
The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was set to defend itself against Dominion Voting Systems before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company.

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Monday/ the snail 🐌 mail is here

Some days there is no mail, some days only junk mail,
and then on other days everything I had waited for seems to arrive at once.
None of today’s mail had any stamps on.

Let’s see what we have, from the top to the bottom:
1. Envelope with a cardboard in, protecting the stamps I had bought from a seller in Poland, sent on Apr. 18;
2. A street parking permit for my guests, from the City of Seattle, sent on Apr. 28;
3. A letter from a financial institution in South Africa confirming that they had moved my funds as requested. The letter inside is dated Jan. 4, 2023 (so the cool ‘By Airmail Priority sticker means nothing, but hey,  at least the letter arrived, right?);
4. Airmail from the UK (more stamps inside- yes!), sent on Apr. 17.
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Sunday/ way to go, Kraken! 🏒

Wow!
The Seattle Kraken knocked off the defending Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche by 2 goals to 1 tonight in Denver, in the seventh and final game of their first-round play-off series.

From the Seattle Times:
A blistering, second-period wrist shot by Kraken winger Oliver Bjorkstrand had stunningly put his team ahead by two and allowed followers of his second-year franchise to dare to dream the impossible.
After being outplayed most of Sunday night’s opening-round Game 7 to that point, the Kraken somehow had found themselves poised to knock out the defending Stanley Cup champions for good. And though the Colorado Avalanche eventually did mount a furious, desperation-fueled comeback, the Kraken and goalie Philipp Grubauer held on for a history-making, 2-1 victory and advanced to a second-round playoff showdown starting this week against the Dallas Stars.
– By Geoff Baker, Seattle Times staff reporter

Seattle Kraken goaltender Philipp ‘Gru’ Grubauer gathers in a loose puck before Colorado Avalanche center Alex Newhook can get off a shot, as defenseman Vince Dunn defends during the first period. Gru successfully fended off 32 out of 33 attempts at his goal tonight.
[Picture by Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times]
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Saturday/ a PSA for the travel season 🔊

Here is a PSA* targeted at the drivers that park their cars illegally on the shoulder of the access road to Seattle-Tacoma airport.
(They wait there for arriving passengers that they are going to pick up, deeming it too much of a hassle to use the cell phone parking lot).

Well— you can stretch your legs in the cell phone parking lot, and it is actually a lot closer to the airport than that shoulder on the access road (by up to one whole mile).
Please use the cell phone parking lot.

*Public Service Announcement

I took this picture from the cell phone parking lot at Seattle Tacoma airport on Thursday night. The cell phone parking lot is right across from the North Terminal and exactly two minutes away from the Arrivals pick-up point at the main terminal building.
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Friday/ cheers 🥂

It was a lovely day with blue skies all around and 78 °F (26 °C)— a high temperature for late April.
We drop back into the normal range by Sunday, some 10 degrees cooler.

‘Cheers from Oregon’ says a little panel on the side of this Hop Valley Brewing Co. beer truck, here on 15th Avenue on Capitol Hill.
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Thursday/ a lot of trouble 😵

What is unbelievable is that this man, this immoral creature, still has sway over so many Americans. It would be comforting to imagine that a verdict in Carroll’s favor could break that spell, but we have learned the hard way: nothing will.
-Ruth Marcus, Associate Editor for the Washington Post

Trump’s trial for the rape & defamation of E. Jean Carroll started today.
Also— Last month Trump was charged in a New York State Supreme Court indictment with 34 counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree, following a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniel.
Also— Just today, Trump’s VP Mike Pence testified before a grand jury as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn 2020 the election results.
Also— The culmination of a more than two-year investigation into Trump’s election interference in Georgia is expected this summer, led by a local prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County.

We are told by the pollsters that this guy will likely be the Republican Party’s candidate for President of the United States for the 2024 general election.
Really?

E. Jean Carroll arrives to federal court in New York on Thursday. Carroll testified today that Trump had raped her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in New York three decades ago.
[Picture by Seth Wenig/AP]
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Tuesday/ off to the races 🚌

It’s official: President Joe Biden (80) is running for 2024.
He already has my vote.
Where’s my ballot? Oh— there’s still 566 days to go.

Cartoon by Michael de Adder for the Washington Post.
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg in the Washington Post, commenting on Biden’s ‘disapproval rate’:
‘The facts are that the country is better off. We’ve come out on the other side of Covid. We’ve seen the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since World War II, the lowest poverty and uninsured rates in American history. We’ve made future-oriented investments in infrastructure and tackling climate change. There’s an enormous amount to work with here’.
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Monday/ fishing for a watermark Ⓜ️

No 3: The RSA (Republic of South Africa) watermark was introduced in 1964 and used for updated prints of the Republic’s first definitive series of stamps which was originally issued in 1961.
[Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue]
I dunked about a hundred scraps of paper with 1c stamps on in cold water today, separating the stamps from the paper.

I was hoping to find just one stamp with an upside-down RSA watermark.
Alas— no such luck with today’s batch of stamps.

This 1c stamp from the Republic of South Africa’s first definitive series (1961) comes with five distinct watermarks:

1.  Coat-of-arms
2.  No watermark
3.  RSA triangles
4.  RSA triangles, arranged tête-bêche (one pointing up, one down)
5.  RSA triangles, upside down

Can you see it? Part of a triangle watermark is visible on the left of the stamp’s back, and part of another triangle in the bottom right corner.
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Sunday/ a poem about a fossil II 📱

Here it is, an AI*-generated poem about a fossil :
*ChatGPT Mar 23 Version, at https://chat.openai.com/

 

There was a ‘Regenerate’ button on the side, on which I clicked.
Instantly, a second poem was generated, line by line.
‘Was this better, worse or the same as the first one?’ inquired the AI chatbot.
‘Better’, I said.

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Saturday/ the grid needs an overhaul ⚡️

Happy Earth Day.
There is a series of articles on electric grids in a recent Economist news magazine.
The cover says ‘Hug Pylons Not Trees’, recognizing that while it’s good to protect Earth’s resources, it’s not enough. There needs to be a wholesale change in the way we produce energy.

From the magazine:
At present, 62% of the energy delivered as electricity comes from fossil fuels. That has to come down to more or less zero. A lot of its replacement will be in the form of cheap wind and solar, and that presents a serious challenge to grid operators. It means a lot of new connections, which are troublesome. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that renewable installations typically generate less power than steam turbines do. That means more connections per unit of capacity.
As well as adding a great many new connections, grids will also have to change shape. The places best suited to the generation of renewable energy in very large amounts are often not the places where today’s generation is concentrated. So new transmission lines will be needed. And because grids are complicated things, some of these expansions will require compensating changes elsewhere as bits of the grid become congested.

 

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Friday 🤗

Happy Friday.
Here’s another Nineteenth Avenue Tree Canopy report: looking fine, with the green of the budding leaves on the tree limbs just starting to show.

Seattle and western Washington have been locked in a cool, active weather pattern much of the spring, but the days are getting warmer. (Only 52°F/ 11°C today, but the weather people are promising us 72°F/ 22°C by next Friday).
That’s the Microsoft Connector company bus in the distance. Maybe it has employees on that are working on the Bing AI chatbot. I need to check it out— or create a ChatGPT account, to see what the brouhaha over the latest online AI tools is all about. Can the AI bot write me a poem about fossils?  Hmm, I wonder.
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Thursday/ another booster 💉

I scheduled an appointment for myself for a second Omicron booster shot. (The omicron subvariant XBB.1.16, known as “Arcturus,” has been listed by the WHO as a variant under monitoring since March 22. Experts say this variant has a higher transmissibility rate than previous strains but doesn’t appear to be more dangerous).

I bought a large box of old letter fragments with stamps on in South Africa, and had those shipped out with the books as well.
Here’s an interesting fragment from a windowed envelope, with an upside-down stamp on for ONE South African cent (equal to about 1 US penny in those days).
It was mailed in Johannesburg on Oct 12, 1961, and the message on the cancellation mark read ‘WIPE OUT POLIO’ (Afr. ‘ROEI POLIO UIT’).
Albert Sabin’s live poliovirus vaccine was recommended by the U.S. Surgeon General to be licensed on Aug. 24, 1960. This vaccine provided protection against Type 1 poliovirus. Soon after that, vaccines for Types 2 and 3 would be licensed. A 1963 vaccine would combine all three types.
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Wednesday/ elegant entrances

These entrances belong to condo buildings that are all on the same street block: on 17th Avenue between East Spring Street and East Union Street.

They were all built in the late 1920s, with views of the city from the upper floors, and close to the street car line at the time that was running along Madison Street.
Behold— the Margola (Mayan detailing, 1928), the Martha Anne (Art Deco art glass & terra cotta, 1929), Carmona Apartments (Mediterranean Revival, 1929), the Betsy Ross (1928), the Fleur de Lis (French, 1927), Mayfair Manor (1928), and the Barbara Frietchie Co-op (1928).

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Tuesday/ a poem for a dinosaur 🦕

I found a poem in one of my books that came yesterday— one that is apt for the dinosaur from German toymaker Scheich that I had brought home in my suitcase.

Fossiel
Versteende geheime skuil
in jou primordiale hart.
Hier waar die jakkals nou huil
het oerdier vir oermens getart.

Fossil
Petrified secrets hide away
in your primordial heart.
Here where the jackal howls today,
primeval beast gave caveman a start.

Original Afrikaans poem by Isaac David du Plessis, published 1965.
The rough translation into English is my own.

Once this dinosaur had its teeth in you and shut its movable jaws, there was no escape. Monolophosaurus was a genus of tetanuran (stiff-tailed) theropod (hollow bones, three toes & a claw on each limb) dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic Shishugou Formation in what is now Xinjiang, China.
It was named for the single crest on top of its skull. They lived about 165 million years ago. Weight about 1,000 pounds (425 kg) and length about 18 ft (5 m).
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Monday/ books from afar 📚

While I was in South Africa, I shipped myself a box of books to Seattle from Pretoria, and another box from Stellenbosch*.
The boxes landed on my porch today.  They went from South Africa to London’s Heathrow airport, then to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then to Seattle.

*The Protea bookstore in Stellenbosch —always full of new and old Afrikaans books— was going out of business, and I could not pass up the opportunity to scoop up fifty-some books for $1 or $2 apiece.

A box full of books is HEAVY, so the shipping by air (DHL) was expensive: several hundred dollars. It was still completely worth it. Ground shipping takes several months and it’s just not reliable (your package might never show up). 
The book with H.A.T. on the cover is a monolingual Afrikaans dictionary (‘Handbook of the Afrikaans Language’).
I read the little green book as a first grader.
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Sunday/ Super Heavy is ready 🚀

“My top hope is please, may fate smile upon us, and we clear the launchpad before anything goes wrong. That’s all I’m asking.”
– Elon Musk

Thirty-three Raptors are installed on Super Heavy on the SpaceX Starship that is set for launch tomorrow morning. (Raptors are the engines, and Super Heavy is the booster for the super-sized rocket).

A major concern is that a problem with one engine could cascade and destroy other engines, part of the vehicle— or even the launchpad. Rebuilding the pad, depending on what happened, could take several months.
[Information obtained from reporting in the Wall Street Journal].

On the left is the SpaceX Starship that sits on the launchpad in Brownsville, Texas. It takes an awful lot of thrust for such a large rocket to break free from Earth’s gravitational pull. (The booster can generate about 1500 tons-force of thrust). To the right is NASA’s Saturn V rocket of 1967-73, and NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that was launched last year.
Update Mon. 8.20am CDT: The launch was scrubbed due to a pressurization issue with the massive Super Heavy booster that could not be resolved before the launch time.
[Picture posted on Monday morning on Twitter @SpaceX]
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Saturday/ ferry trouble ⛴

Twenty minutes out of Bremerton, the lights cut out and they could feel the engines stop running. The lights came on a minute later, they said, and the ship’s alarm sounded twice before an announcer told passengers the ferry had lost propulsion and steering. Brace for impact, the announcer said.
There were 596 passengers and 15 crew members on the vessel.
Shortly after 8 p.m., passengers were being loaded onto Kitsap Transit fast ferries to be taken to Bremerton.
The last passengers were being offloaded shortly after 9 p.m.

– The Seattle Times, reporting that the ferry Walla Walla, headed from Bremerton to Seattle, ran aground around 4:30 p.m. Saturday in Rich Passage.

The ferry Walla Walla ran aground Saturday afternoon in Rich Passage on its way to Seattle from Bremerton. Washington State Ferries said generator failure is possibly the cause. (Mike Reicher / The Seattle Times)