The beautiful fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria) that come up every year in my back yard, are back.
Wednesday/ the last penny minted 🪙
The American penny died on Wednesday in Philadelphia. It was 232.
The cause was irrelevance and expensiveness, the Treasury Department said.
Nothing could be bought any more with a penny, not even penny candy. Moreover, the cost to mint the penny had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin.
The final pennies were minted on Wednesday afternoon in Philadelphia. Top Treasury officials were on hand for its final journey. No last words were recorded.
– Victor Mather writing for the New York Times
Tuesday/ Veterans Day 🇺🇸
Happy Veterans Day to all veterans of the United States Armed Forces.
Monday/ a deal is made 🤝
The shutdown of the US government is going to end*, after eight Democratic senators broke with their party’s blockade to make a deal.
*For now. Most of the government is funded only until the end of January.
It seems to me the Democrats should have let the Republicans own the Republican shutdown.
A lot of people are being hurt right now with the shutdown, though. Of the eight senators that supported the deal with the Republicans, two are retiring, and the rest are not up for reelection in 2026.
Monday/ golden leaves 🍂
Here is a look down 19th Avenue East by Stevens Elementary School, looking south.
Sunday/ Gracie Mansion beckons 🏡
Reporter Eliza Shapiro writes for the New York Times:
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, recently spent a weekday morning blanketing the floor of his $2,300-a-month apartment with towels. The sink was leaking, and the super had been summoned.
That wasn’t the only frustration.
“My wife and I have just talked about the fact that a one-bedroom is a little too small for us now,” he said recently on “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” after detailing the plumbing troubles.
Assuming Mr. Mamdani decides to move into Gracie Mansion, New York City’s official mayoral residence, he is unlikely to be dealing personally with such workaday problems much longer. Nor will his new digs feel quite so snug.
It is hard to overstate the difference between Mr. Mamdani’s current home, a modest rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria, Queens, and Gracie Mansion, a 226-year-old, 11,000-square-foot home on the Upper East Side, with gleaming mirrors reflecting the light of chandeliers, faux mahogany doors, a vast lawn with apple and fig trees and a vegetable garden occasionally plagued by rabbits.
_________________________________________________________________________
The federal-style mansion was built in 1799 and consists of the original two-story house and an annex built in 1966.
The original house is a New York City designated landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Saturday/ don’t stop painting 🦁
It’s time for another safari cartoon.
(That must be Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in the distance, and on the canvas— elevation 19, 341’/ 5,895 m).
From a hardcover book called ‘The Dedini Gallery’, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York (1961). The cartoon first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1959.
Friday/ Day 37 🔒
Good morning.
It’s not a happy Friday here in the United States.
We are 37 days into this stupid shutdown of the US government.
A sample:
CNBC: Jobs Friday won’t be happening again this week as the record-long government shutdown has resulted in a lack of official data on the labor market as well as a host of other important indicators.
CBS: The American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union that represents more than 800,000 federal and D.C. workers, is urging senators to back Johnson’s legislation that would provide funding to pay members of the military and federal workers during the shutdown.
CBS: A Rhode Island judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to provide full federal food benefits to states by Friday and admonished the government for what he said is its defiance of an earlier order.
The Seattle Times: The Federal Aviation Administration’s order to reduce up to 10% of flights to bring relief to air traffic controllers at the country’s busiest airports takes effect Friday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that flights will be reduced until the government shutdown ends.
The outcome of the 2008 election in favor of the Democrats was actually a forgone conclusion (looking back now with the benefit of hindsight). It sure seems that we are headed that way with the 2028 election, even though it is still three long years away.
Thursday/ more rain ☔
There was more rain today (another inch or so).
I ventured outside with my umbrella before the gray outside tuned into black.
[Picture posted on Space Needle’s Instagram, but without any names]
A wet Wednesday ️🌧️
It rained on and off all day, and about 1.2 in (30 mm) was recorded here in the city the last 24 hours by late Wednesday night.
I’m about to turn right onto Westlake Avenue to go to Wholefoods Market. Free parking in their garage when it rains outside is nice to have.
Tuesday/ New York’s young mayor 👨🏽💼
It’s official: Zohran Mamdani (34 years old) is New York City’s new mayor.
From the New York Times:
Zohran Mamdani, after a triumphant campaign built on progressive ideas and a relentless focus on affordability, will become the city’s first Muslim mayor, and its youngest in more than a century.
Elsewhere, Democrats won races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and Californians approved a redistricting initiative designed to add Democratic seats in the House of Representatives for next year’s midterm elections.
We have a mayor’s race here in Seattle as well, with incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell leading progressive activist Katie Wilson by some 7%, but it’s still very early in the ballot counting.
And here’s the headline from Fox News: “Socialist shockwave: Zohran Mamdani stuns NYC as voters hand power to Democrats’ far-left flank”.
Monday/ shades of King George V 👑
I have long been unhappy with my pre-printed Leuchtturm stamp album pages for the first definitive issue of stamps for the Union of South Africa*.
The old pages are in bad shape, with bare-bones headers, and my South African Color Catalogue lists several more shades of the King George V issues, as well as a few with inverted watermarks.
The new page that I created is a difficult assembly and not yet complete, though. The black-and-white images are placeholders.
Will I ever get my grubby hands on one each of the two £1 stamps at the very high end of the set?
I doubt it. The catalog values for perfect specimens of these are US$800 and US$ 1,000 respectively.
*The Union of South Africa was the historical predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa. It came into existence on May 31, 1910 with the unification of the Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange River Colony.
Sunday/ along Columbia Street ️️🏙️
I took the G Line bus to the waterfront, and walked back up along Columbia Street in downtown Seattle to take a few pictures.
The tallest building in Seattle is on Columbia Street: the 76-story Columbia Center, which rises 937 feet (286 m) and was completed in 1985.
I went back to the waterfront to watch the sun set.
Sunset is now at 4.49 pm.
On the right is the Pacific Building (1971, 22 stories).
This building was originally the Seattle Chamber of Commerce Building (1924), and is now the Northwest Title Insurance Company Building (since 2007).
Clockwise from the top right corner: the Columbia Center (1985), the Seattle Municipal Tower (1990), the F5 Tower (2017), 901 Fifth Avenue (1973), Fourth and Madison Building (2002), DocuSign Tower (1983).
The ferry is the Kaleetan, getting ready to depart for Bainbridge Island.
Saturday/ is it sundown already? 🌇
Daylight saving time here in the United States will end at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2025.
We will set our clocks back by one hour.
From a hardcover book called ‘The Dedini Gallery’, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York (1961). The cartoon first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1956.
Friday/ it’s Halloween 👻
Happy Friday and happy Halloween.
We have 50°F (10°C) and a steady rain here— early evening in Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
In spite of that, the trick-or-treaters (and their parents for the young ones) were out in full force at 5.30 pm, with umbrellas and rain coats.
Thursday/ beer and fried chicken 🍗
It sounds like at least fentanyl, rare earth metals and soybeans were discussed at the Trump-Xi summit today. Beijing will ease the restrictions on rare earth exports and start buying soybeans from American farmers again.
According to Trump, the relaxing of export restrictions on Nvidia’s latest chips was not discussed.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had beer and fried chicken with the CEOs of Samsung and Hyundai in Seoul, South Korea*.
It was clearly a marketing stunt, because there was a throng of journalists and photographers present as well.
*Samsung has a multi-faceted relationship with Nvidia, serving both as a supplier of memory and a foundry partner for specialized chips.
Hyundai will presumably use Nvidia’s chips for its self-driving cars of the future.
Does Tesla use Nvidia chips for its self-driving cars? No, Tesla does not use Nvidia chips for its vehicle’s self-driving computers, having switched to its own custom-designed chips in 2019. However, Tesla still uses Nvidia GPUs in large clusters for training its AI models, and has also recently purchased Nvidia chips for its new AI5 inference platform, which will be used in its new Cortex 2 AI data center alongside Tesla’s custom AI5 chips. – Google AI Overview.
Wednesday/ NVDA crosses 5️⃣ trillion
“It’s incredible. Did you ever think in our lifetime we’d see a $5 trillion company?”
– David Faber, a host on the CNBC show “Squawk on the Street”, this morning
Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia (ticker symbol: NVDA) is now worth 5 trillion US dollars.
The company’s latest AI superchip (the Blackwell Ultra) carry 200 billion transistors. Nine out of ten AI chips that are sold in the world, are made by Nvidia.
Tripp Mickle, writing for the New York Times:
Nvidia’s milestone, making it the first publicly traded company to top $5 trillion in market value, is indicative not only of the astonishing levels of wealth consolidating among a handful of Silicon Valley companies but also the strategic importance of this company, which added $1 trillion in market value in just the past four months.
Meanwhile, President Trump indicated that he would discuss the sale of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips with China in the summit on Thursday. Some US officials say that would be “massive” national security mistake.
So there is the answer to the question as to why the stock market indexes keep going up while the economy is barely growing. It’s the tech companies that are pulling them up.
Jason Furman, a professor of economic policy at Harvard, calculates that spending on data center construction accounted for 92% of the GDP growth in the US in the first half of the year. Take all of that out, and the US economy would have grown at a measly 0.1%.
[Graphic and headlines from the New York Times]
Tuesday/ Melissa makes landfall 🌀
Judson Jones, meteorologist and reporter, writes for the New York Times:
Melissa made landfall in Jamaica with both 185 m.p.h. winds and the 892-millibar pressure.
In the Atlantic, only one other storm has ever struck land with this exact ferocity: the unnamed Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which tore through the Florida Keys.
Nearly a century ago, that storm’s pressure reading was taken by a weather observer who climbed a tree to record it.
Melissa’s was measured by a hurricane hunter plane that flew into the eye of the storm.
The distance from the eye of the storm to the top of the frame is about 200 miles (320 km).
[Picture from NOAA, posted in the New York Times]
Monday/ more colors of fall 🍂
There were blue skies today.
I took these photos at Volunteer Park, and along Capitol Hill’s 14th Ave East.
Sunday/ after the storm 🌬️
The heavy winds knocked the power out for tens of thousands of Seattle metro residents last night. The power was still getting restored across the city and Western Washington today.
There was a break in the rain this afternoon, and I walked down to Elliott Bay Bookstore on 10th Avenue.
The store was still without power, but customers were allowed in.
I looked like they used their phones to pay for their purchases through the store’s website.
