The annual Indian Wells Masters tennis tournament is in full swing (in Indian Wells, California, of course). Novak Djokovic is not there: no vax, no play. Just last week, Djokovic lost his No 1 position on the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) rankings list, to the Russian Daniil Medvedev.
Should Medvedev be allowed to play, given that his country invaded Ukraine, and now wages a brutal war there? (Brutal being superfluous: all wars are brutal). The ATP has banned Russia from team events (such as the prestigious Davis Cup), but also ruled that Russians can compete as individuals, just not under the Russian flag.
Daniil Medvedev preparing to serve, in the first game of his match against Tomas Machac (Czech Republic), which was played on Saturday. (Medvedev won 6-3 6-2). There is no Russian flag next to Medvedev’s name on the electronic scoreboard.
dopeadjective
slang
excellent —used as a generalized term of approval
There are several Twitter handles that post pictures of products, usually personalized by their owners, that ask the question ‘Dope or nope?’ (Approve or disapprove?).
I found this blue Tesla with its orange highlights and matt black hood here on Capitol Hill’s 15th Avenue.
I think 🤔 it’s a nope, speaking for myself.
Metsker Maps of Seattle on 1st Avenue is a candy store for map lovers.
I went there today to buy a map for my friend in South Africa.
Seattle Art Museum on the corner of 1st Ave and University Street.Inside the store called Metsker Maps of Seattle. This is a lovely set of trail maps for Washington State. I bought a Mount Rainier Wonderland trail map (tab middle right of the box).Downtown had some foot traffic, but seems to be not quite back to business as usual. A handful of tents of homeless people right at Westlake Center (ground zero for tourists after Pike Place Market), were cleared out just today. Some businesses around 2nd and 3rd Avenue are still boarded up (!). Colorful artwork on the boarded-up window always helps, though.Here comes my train at Westlake Center for my short ride back to Capitol Hill. Washington State and King County’s mask mandate for businesses is cancelled as of today, except for healthcare settings and for public transportation. It will make no difference to me; I will still wear my mask to the grocery store and other indoor places for a while.
Expensive gas is in the news again.
I walked by three gas stations tonight and did a mini-survey.
It turned out that my average for just these three is spot-on for the city’s average.
Seattle is about a dollar a gallon above the national average, but a dollar or more below California’s prices.
(The New York Times: California’s high fuel prices are partly because of taxes as well as regulatory programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Together, they added about $1.27 to the cost of a gallon of gas last month, according to a calculation by the Western States Petroleum Association.)
Company
Regular Unleaded [$/ Gal]
7-Eleven
4.899
Shell
4.999
76
5.179
Average
5.026
7-Eleven was the cheapest at $4.899/ gal. Got to love those perpetual and silly 9/10 of a cent at the end. That’s Madison Avenue on which work had ground to a halt weeks ago, due to a city-wide strike by concrete workers.Here’s Shell with $4.999/ gal. Let’s call it 5 even, shall we? And yeah, those scooters on the sidewalk are looking better and better.And whoah. 76 is NOT SHY, coming in at $5.179/ gal. (If you are not willing to fumble with paper money and coins, and pay with a card, it’s $5.199/ gal). Take that street car behind the sign, mate.
It was still chilly this morning as I went out to put the empty trash cans back their place. (Early morning low: 34°F/ 1 °C). Mr Robin was undeterred by the cold —foraging for worms and hopping onto the fence as I walked by.
The extended 40-mile parade of Russian armored vehicles, tanks and towed artillery headed from the north on a path toward Kyiv has both alarmed and befuddled watchers of this expanding war. It’s not just its sheer size. It’s also because that for days, it has not appreciably been moving.
U.S. officials attribute the apparent stall in part to logistical failures on the Russian side, including as a result of food and fuel shortages, that have slowed Moscow’s advance through various parts of the country. They have also credited Ukrainian efforts to attack selected parts of the convoy with contributing to its slowdown. Still, officials warn that the Russians could regroup at any moment and continue to press forward.
-Reported by the Washington Post
..the convoy’s progress — or lack thereof — continues to capture popular fascination, thanks to a steady stream of satellite images and video recorded and disseminated by Maxar Technologies, a space technology and intelligence company, says the Washington Post. (Looking at the map, it sure looks like the convoy made its way through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Some areas in there still contain dangerous amounts of radiation).
[Image from Basis 365® Accounting’s blog]‘Cash is king’
– Origin unknown, but the saying gained popularity after Pehr G. Gyllenhammar, CEO of Volvo, used it after the global stock market suddenly crashed in Oct. 1987.
I was in the QFC grocery store at Harvard Market on Saturday, and about to put in my credit card to pay for my items at the self check-out.
‘Attention, customers!’ came an announcement. ‘For the next 20 minutes, no credit card, no Apply Pay, no Google Pay can be used; it will be cash only’.
The in-store transaction server must have keeled over or frozen up; maybe it had to be rebooted.
Lucky for me I had cash in my wallet, to let loose— and vamoose.
Russian attacks on nuclear sites could destabilize Ukraine’s energy supply
Russian forces attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on March 3 and are now reportedly pushing toward the South Ukraine nuclear power plant. These are Ukraine’s two largest nuclear power plants, together responsible for one-third of Ukraine’s electricity generation.
Ukraine has a total of four nuclear power plants consisting of 15 reactors that generate roughly 50 percent of the country’s electricity. After nuclear power, coal is the largest source of electricity generated in the country. Many of Ukraine’s coal-fired power plants lie in the Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
-From the New York Times, as reported by Lazaro Gamio and Eleanor Lutz
As evening fell, I was waiting by the Asian Art Museum’s camel in Volunteer Park for a sunset picture with a dozen or so other people.
Then I walked back home, by Uncle Ike’s pot shop on 15th Avenue.
South Africa’s Ambassador Joyini believes Wednesday’s meeting should have encouraged negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
-As reported in The Citizen newspaper (explaining why South Africa abstained from voting in favor of a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine)
Hey Ambassador: stop with the bullsh**.
This is not complicated.
Russia invaded Ukraine (again).
Russia is the aggressor.
There is nothing left to negotiate.
141-5 with 35 abstentions: The results of a UN vote to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, March 2, 2022. What a disappointment, the abstention from South Africa (and for that matter Namibia as well).
And so it is March, the month named after the Roman god of war.
There was no rain this afternoon, and a high of 56 °F (13 °C).
I walked down to the Melrose Avenue overlook (over Interstate 5), and back to Capitol Hill’s top along Denny Way.
I turned around every now and then, to look at the beautiful hues of color in the western sky.
About half a million refugees have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began last week, according to the United Nations refugee agency. About half of them crossed Ukraine’s western border to Poland. Others have gone to Hungary, Moldova, Romania and Slovakia. Ukraine enacted martial law at the beginning of the conflict that requires men ages 18 to 60 to remain in the country.
-Reported by the New York Times
It’s heart-breaking to see the footage on TV of families getting into the trains and buses to leave Ukraine – the mothers and their children, that is. The men have to go to war. Is this just the start? Ukraine has some 44 million people. Thousands of citizens from African countries, many of them medical and science students at Ukrainian universities, are still trapped in places around the country, and some 15,000 citizens from India, reports the New York Times.
The airspace of the European Union’s entire 27-nation bloc will now be closed to Russian-owned, -registered or -controlled aircraft, “including the private jets of oligarchs”, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyden on Sunday. Countermeasures imposed by Russia will make it more difficult for European carriers to fly east, notably to Asia.
-Reported by Annabelle Timsit and Paulina Firozi in The Washington Post.
The map of the EU countries offer a nice geography refresher to me, especially of Eastern Europe. The United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, North Ireland) is no longer part of the EU, of course. Switzerland (on the east of France) never was, and never will be. (Never say never?) That’s Belarus north of Ukraine— and check out that little blob of blue on the Baltic Sea, north of Poland. It’s Russian territory, an exclave called Kaliningrad Oblast. It used to be part of East Prussia, and home to the German city of Königsberg. In the aftermath of World War II, it was given to Russia. In 1947-48 the German population was driven out, and Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in memory of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Mikhail Kalinin.
The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/ national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.
– Inscription on page 2 of the US passport, below a depiction of The Great Seal of the United States (the bald eagle that clutches the Olive branch and the arrows that denote the power of peace & war which is exclusively vested in Congress).
My new passport arrived today.
The entire picture page is a sturdy plastic (polycarbonate), like a thin credit card (shown below).
There is an embedded data chip on the information page.
The alphanumeric passport number is laser cut as perforated holes, that get smaller all through the 26 pages of the passport book.
Other security features include a watermark, ‘tactile features’ and ‘optically variable’ inks.
The Next Generation Passport has been issued since March 2021. [Image from https://travel.state.gov/]
Columnist David Ignatius writes in the Washington Post, in an opinion piece called ‘Putin’s assault on Ukraine will shape a new world order’: Now that Russian troops have surged into Ukraine, how does Putin plan to extricate himself? It’s likely that he hopes to keep Russian ground troops out of Kyiv and other big cities, instead using Spetsnaz special forces and FSB operatives to neutralize these targets. He will probably seek to install a puppet government. But here’s where U.S. officials believe Putin’s planning breaks down.
Map of tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, from The New York Times on Thursday.
What Putin doesn’t appear to realize, with his vision of Russian-Ukrainian oneness, is that his bullying has deeply alienated Ukrainians. I saw that anti-Putin sentiment when I visited Kyiv in late January, and it’s undoubtedly even stronger now that Russian tanks are on the streets and jets are in the sky. Putin obviously believed his own rhetoric that Ukraine wasn’t a real country. That level of self-absorption so often leads to mistakes.
With his unprovoked invasion, Putin has shattered the international legal rules established after World War II, along with the European order that followed the Cold War. That old architecture was getting shaky, and it was destined to be replaced eventually.
The Ukraine assault, pitting a messianic Russian autocrat against the wishes of every other major nation, perhaps including China, will determine the shape of the new order to come. If Putin loses his battle to subjugate Ukraine, the new order will have a solid and promising foundation. If Putin wins, the new era will be very dangerous indeed.
Putin’s war on Ukraine has started.
Where will it end?
The Brandenburg Gate is illuminated in Ukrainian national colors, in Berlin, Germany February 23, 2022. [Photo by REUTERS/Michele Tantussi]Cartoon by Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte.
Today is two-twenty-two-twenty-twenty-two. 🤗
There was a frosting of snow on the ground here in the city this morning.
Temperatures will dip down to twenty-two °F (-6 °C) overnight.
