Willem's Planet

June 9, 2022June 10, 2022

Thursday/ ‘your dishonor will remain’

The Jan. 6 committee of Congress held its first prime-time (televised) hearing tonight, about the attack on the Capitol and the events leading up to it.
There were clips of pre-taped testimony from Bill Barr (Trump’s former Attorney General that had interfered with the first impeachment trial), and even from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
Viewers were also shown new footage of the attack from the blood-thirsty mob that had been egged on by President Trump.

The Jan 6. insurrection at the U.S. Capitol now lies 18 months behind us, and more than 800 people across the U.S. have been charged.
Of these, 189 had been sentenced, with sentences ranging from probation to five years in jail. High-profile trials involving the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are expected to start in the fall.
Several of their members are charged with seditious conspiracy (a serious but lesser counterpart to treason).

Will any of the really big fish, or the Mob Boss himself, pay a serious price? Nobody knows— and ultimately that will be up to US Attorney General Merrick Garland and his Dept. of Justice, not the Jan. 6 committee.

June 8, 2022June 9, 2022

Wednesday/ still going up⛽

Gas prices in Seattle still sit just below $5/ gallon, but around the rest of the country it has gone up steadily.
The national average is now $4.95.
Analysts say $6 gas by August is not out of the question.

A big constraint is refining capacity .. and now that hurricane season has started, it would be really bad if a hurricane disables the output of a large refinery for some time.

Refineries turn crude oil into a variety of petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, propane and butane. The largest refineries in the US sit on the Gulf of Mexico, smack bang in hurricane territory.
We have refineries in Washington State as well (two in Anacortes, and in Blaine, Ferndale and Tacoma) but they have 1/10 to 1/5 of the capacity of the largest ones on the Gulf Coast.
[Infographic from visualcapitalist.com]

June 7, 2022June 7, 2022

Tuesday/ more of the stalk

My new trick in the kitchen helps me keep a little more of the asparagus stalks that I like to steam in the pressure cooker.

I use a knife to cut off just an inch or so of the dry bottom of the stalk. (It’s a little hit-and-miss to break off the bottom by hand.)
Then I peel off one or two inches at the bottom with a vegetable peeler.

Now I can eat the whole stalk, without chewing on any tough fibrous skin.

June 6, 2022

Monday/ happy Pride month 🌈

There is a nice new Pride flag on the Uncle Ike’s building on 15th Ave. here on Capitol Hill.

LGBT Pride is celebrated in June every year to coincide with the month in which the Stonewall Riots occurred (Jun 28, 1969 – Jul 3, 1969 in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City).

June 5, 2022June 5, 2022

Sunday/ it’s good to be king ♚

Well, I got up at 6 am Pacific Time to watch the Nadal-Ruud French Open Men’s Final, but the match was very one-sided.

Nadal was never in trouble and won easily: 6-3, 6-3, 6-0. A ‘bagel’ for Casper Ruud (Norway, age 23) in that last set, as we say in tennis.

Rafael Nadal ⁠—the King of Clay⁠— turned 36 on Friday.
Will the king reign for one more year? We shall see, of course.

I love this collage on the front page of Monday’s Beeld.
(Newspaper from South Africa; Beeld translates to ‘Image’).
Each picture was taken moments after Nadal had won the French Open Men’s Final that year. Rafa does a great job demonstrating all the different ways to collapse onto the red clay! 😂
Nadal was emotional today as well (far right), but did not fall down onto the clay.

June 4, 2022June 4, 2022

Saturday/ the Platinum Jubilee 👑

**2022:** Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday, appearing with family members on the balcony of Buckingham Palace as part of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. She is flanked, from far left, by Princess Anne; Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; and Prince Charles. From far right, Prince William; Price George; Princess Charlotte; Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge; and Prince Louis.
**1953:** The Queen on the balcony after her coronation, with Prince Charles, Princess Anne and husband Prince Philip (Duke of Edinburgh) to her left.
Photos: Top- Hannah McKay/ Reuters, Bottom- Associated Press.

There has never before been a Platinum Jubilee in the United Kingdom. No king or queen before Elizabeth II had ever reigned for 70 years— but ‘the power concentrated in the British crown began diminishing in the 19th century, and it has continued to shrink during Elizabeth II’s time as queen’, writes Hayes Brown for MSNBC.

After Elizabeth had ascended the throne in 1952, the British Empire dissolved as colonial states, dominions and protectorates gained their independence, one by one.
(The Union of South Africa gained its independence from Britain in May 1961 and became the Republic of South Africa. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia in 1964, Botswana gained independence in 1966, and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1979.)

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 took away her ability to dissolve parliaments at her whim.
In practice, is the UK Parliament, and not the Queen’s Privy Council, that sets laws and carries them out.

The Queen is very popular, especially among older Britons (the rest of the royal family, not so much).
Will the monarchy survive? Time will tell, but there may not be another another Jubilee for several decades to come, given how old the heirs nearest to the throne are.

June 3, 2022June 3, 2022

Friday/ 100 days of death and destruction

Ukrainians crowded under a destroyed bridge on the outskirts of Kyiv over a week after the invasion.
PHOTO: EMILIO MORENATTI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

It’s been 100 days since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. There is no end in sight, say observers of the war.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Wednesday that since the day of the invasion,
4,149 civilians had been confirmed killed and
4,945 civilians had been injured.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says up to 100 Ukrainian soldiers might be dying each day on the front lines in the east of the country.
As of April 16, between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, with up to 10,000 injured.

Russia’s Defense Ministry had said in late March that 1,351 Russian soldiers had died – a lie. Western governments estimate that as many as 15,000 Russian soldiers have died.
(That’s already more than the total casualties over the course of the Soviet Union’s disastrous 1979-89 war in Afghanistan. This war contributed significantly to the collapse of the USSR in 1991).

The UN estimates that more than 14 million Ukrainians have fled their homes.
Some 7 million more are displaced in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s economic output is expected to fall 50% this year.
Rebuilding the country could amount to as much as 500 billion euros (US $537 billion).
Last month the U.N. lowered its forecast for global economic growth in 2022 to 3.1% from 4%, and its forecast for U.S. economic growth to 2.6% from 3.5%.
– Figures from a report by Ann M. Simmons and Courtney McBride in the Wall Street Journal

June 2, 2022June 2, 2022

Thursday/ there’s the wabbit 🐰

Come late afternoon, there was a little rain.
The neighborhood rabbit* was out front just then, munching on the soft new grass from my lawn.
He has good timing: the mowers will come by tomorrow.

*Eastern cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus)

June 1, 2022June 1, 2022

Wednesday/ Shanghai’s lockdown has ended

As of midnight Tuesday, Shanghai’s 25 million residents were allowed to leave their apartments and residential compounds to go to work. Businesses are cleared to resume normal operations with restrictions (such as no inside dining in restaurants).

Officials are eager to get China’s most economically important city running again.

Peter Jolicoeur enjoying an Oktoberfest-sized beer in Shanghai. His Twitter profile says he is a ‘Shanghai-based aviation consultant, pilot, musician, runner & Chinese student’. Cheers!

P.S. —for your vocabulary

shanghai
shang·hai | \ ˈshaŋ-ˌhī , shaŋ-ˈhī \
shanghaied; shanghaiing

transitive verb
1a: to put aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug
b: to put by force or threat of force into or as if into a place of detention
2: to put by trickery into an undesirable position

Example sentence: “To shanghai your friend into a mental health intervention might be a mistake”.

May 31, 2022June 1, 2022

Tuesday/ summer starts (unofficially)

Memorial Day is the unofficial start to summer here in the US. The week’s warm weather arrived a little late for this past weekend here in the city of Seattle, but we made it to 70°F / 21°C today, and it will be 75°F/ 24°C on Wednesday and Thursday.

It is bound to be a rough summer for domestic travelers and airline employees (the airlines do not have enough capacity for the demand).
As for wedding celebrations, wedding planners are in short supply too.
The Wall Street Journal says some 2.5 million couples in the US plan to celebrate their wedding this year, some 250,000 more than in recent pre-COVID years.
Many of these weddings have been postponed more than once.

The **rhododendrons** of late spring are still in full bloom— in their whites, pinks, carmine reds, lavenders, purples and even blues. This one is from 18th Ave here on Capitol Hill.

May 30, 2022May 30, 2022

Memorial Day

“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
– For the Fallen, a poem by Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

**Flag (1954-55) by artist Jasper Johns, from Museum of Modern Art, New York City.**
In 1951, Johns was drafted into the army and spent two years in service during the Korean War at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and in Sendai, Japan.
The forty-eight stars and red-and-white stripes depicted here picture an American flag from the year this work was made (Alaska and Hawaii had not yet become part of the union).
Medium: Encaustic (using pigments mixed with hot wax that are burned in as an inlay), oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels.
Dimensions: 42 1/4 x 60 5/8″ (107.3 x 153.8 cm)
[Picture Credit: moma.org]

May 29, 2022May 29, 2022

Sunday/ catch the wind 🍃

When rain has hung the leaves with tears
I want you near, to kill my fears
To help me to leave all my blues behind

For standing in your heart
Is where I want to be and long to be
Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind
– From Catch the Wind (1965), a song by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan

It rained all day, steady at times. The raindrops like to stick to the leaves of my Solomon’s-seals (genus Polygonatum) in little blobs before they roll off onto the ground.

The round speckled scar from the point of stem attachment is where these plants get their name.
[Picture credit: Joey Williamson, ©2020 HGIC, Clemson Extension]

May 28, 2022May 28, 2022

Caturday

Here is a puzzle for today, Saturday— Caturday, as ailurophiles like to call it.

[Source: Picture is from a game called Seekers Notes in Apple’s app store].

May 27, 2022May 28, 2022

Friday/ lots of French Open

I basically turned off Twitter and the TV this week, and just watched French Open tennis on the Tennis Channel (it’s a subscription streaming service).

A bird’s eye view of **Stade Roland Garros** in the 16th arrondissement in ‎Paris. Completed in 1928, it was named after WWI aviator and war hero Roland Garros (he was not a tennis player). The main stadium on the right, **Court Philippe Chatrier**, can accommodate 15,000 spectators. Chatrier (1928- 2000) was a French tennis player and tennis administrator.

This is an iconic picture of the incomparable French player **Suzanne Lenglen**, whom the other main tennis court and stadium at Roland Garros is named after.
Her feet rarely seemed to touch the ground when she played. Her tennis career was interrupted by World War I, but it is said that by the end of the 1920’s ‘La Divine’ Lenglen was more famous, and more popular, than any other athlete in Europe— or for that matter any movie star, singer or politician.
The photographer did a remarkable job to capture Lenglen in action. That must be another photographer on the far side, with a contraption of a camera!
[Photo: Getty Images Archive]

May 26, 2022May 27, 2022

Thursday/ Thai food and beers 🍻

Here come the beers!
As for the food, we barely glance at the menu anymore.
Someone just order our usual four dishes for the table with some rice, and we’re good to go.

Inside the Thai restaurant **Jamjuree**, on 15th Avenue.

May 25, 2022May 25, 2022

Wednesday/ all-black, with a big white bow

There’s a brand-new Tesla Model Y on my block, complete with a giant white bow.

May 24, 2022May 29, 2022

Tuesday/ my country’s massacre du jour

I told my friends last week that I think that the blackest mark against America, is that most of its citizens cannot get affordable healthcare.

I would like to take that back.
In America, mass murderers buy assault rifles legally and cheaply, and riddle you with bullets: inside the church, the grocery store, the movie theater, the bar— and the elementary school.

And our government (Republicans, to be fair) is OK with that. 😡 😡 😡