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)
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”.
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.
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)
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]
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
[Picture credit: Joey Williamson, ©2020 HGIC, Clemson Extension]
Caturday
Here is a puzzle for today, Saturday— Caturday, as ailurophiles like to call it.
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).
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]
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.
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.
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. 😡 😡 😡
Monday/ are you.. wearing your pajamas?
Here’s Hungarian Márton Fucsovics in action at the French Open today, in Italian clothing brand Hydrogen’s bold design for men, called Tattoo Tech.
[Picture tweeted by Roland-Garros@rolandgarros on Twitter]
Sunday/ hello 70 °F
The highs made it into the 70’s here in the city today (72 °F/ 22 °C), but it will be cooler again this week.
The French Open (tennis tournament) in Paris has started, and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds.
Saturday/ the U District Street Fair is back
Here are a few scenes from the U District Street Fair, back this year after three-year hiatus because of Covid.
Friday/ the stock market is now closed
It was another rough week for the US stock market.
This was the eighth-straight weekly loss for the Dow Jones Industrial Index (-2.8%), its longest weekly losing streak since 1923.
The S&P 500 Index briefly dipped below 20% from its record high in January.
Thursday/ one million
Here are two questions that Bill Gates had answered on Reddit today:
Why do you think the world was utterly unprepared for Covid?
Infectious disease in rich countries isn’t the big problem it used to be. For things like fire and earthquakes we have small ones to remind us of the problem. A pandemic that gets into Europe or the US only comes along rarely so it is easy to not practice and not have dedicated resources. A few countries like Australia did a better job and have 10% of the deaths of most rich countries.
Why is the COVID-19 model behaving very differently in America as compared to other countries? With state-of-the-art vaccines and close to 70% of people fully vaccinated, the cases are always rising after dipping for a few days. Looking at the statistics of the number of people catching COVID and the number of people dying due to it, seemed like this was to end by January / February. The model is quite weird.
The new variants come along and evade immunity from vaccination and infection. Also immunity wanes fairly quickly in the elderly. When the cases are high people do change their behavior and when they are low they go back to normal behavior. So you get huge ups and downs in the case rate driven by seasons, variants and people’s behavior. Fortunately Omicron is less fatal than previous variants.
Wednesday/ tennis, in Lyon & Geneva 🎾
The men’s professional tennis tour action is in Lyon, France, and Geneva, Switzerland, this week. The clay court season is nearing its end, with the French Open in Paris starting in just a few days on Sunday.
Lyon (also spelled Lyons) is the capital of both the Rhône département and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes région, in east-central France. It is set on a hilly site at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers. Lyon is the third largest city in France, after Paris and Marseille.
Geneva (French Genève, German Genf, Italian Ginevra) is the capital of Genève canton, in the far southwestern corner of Switzerland that juts into France. [From britannica.com]
The big man-made fountain is a city landmark, Jet d’Eau (The Geneva Water Fountain).
Tuesday/ first attempt: acorn squash
The acorn squash that I had pressure-cooked tonight, came out O.K.— but not great.
Even though I cooked it for a minute longer than my recipe called for (6 instead of 5 mins), it still came out a little tough.
Some recipes say to add butter and cinnamon (or nutmeg) onto the squash as it goes into the cooker, but I elected not to do that.
.
Monday/ the blue jays say hello
A pair of Steller’s jays (Cyanocitta stelleri) came to visit this morning.
We sometimes call these ‘blue jay’ in the Pacific Northwest, but the species is distinct from the blue jay (C. cristata) of eastern North America.
Sunday/ no such thing as a lone wolf
We had multiple mass murders here in the States this weekend, after multiple ones last week. (There is basically a mass murder every day: 198 so far this year). The killer (18 years old, white, male —of course) responsible for yesterday’s slaughter of 10 at the supermarket in Buffalo was clearly a domestic terrorist.
Was he a lone wolf?
Rolling Stone magazine opines that there is no such thing .. and that the shooter is pretty much a main-stream Republican.
From Rolling Stone: There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.
Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness ..
..the gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.
Saturday/ the baby formula crisis
I know absolutely nothing about babies, but I know a little bit more after reading a report in the NYT about the baby formula shortage in the US.
Babies basically need breast milk or formula until they can start to eat solid food (at 6 months).
Do not dilute formula.
Do not try to make your own formula.
If you are out of options, give your baby pasteurized whole cow’s milk for a brief period of time.
Get advice from a pediatrician if your baby needs a special formula that has become unavailable.
One can will last 6-7 days for a newborn, and maybe as little as 2-3 days for a 6-month old baby.