Saturday/ a taste of South Africa
blatjang
/ˈblatjaŋ/, /ˈblatʃaŋ/
noun
A tangy sauce made of dried fruit (usually apricots) and chillies cooked in vinegar; chutney.
Archaic forms: blaatgham, blatcham
Origin: Afrikaans, Malay
It is probable that in late 19th century Afrikaans this word still had two meanings:
1. A. Pannevis’s Afskrif van Lys van Afrikaanse Woorde en Uitdrukkings (1880) defines ‘Bladjang’ as being made of dried chillies and stewed dried apricots in vinegar;
2. H.C.V. Leibbrandt’s Het Kaapsch Hollandsch (1882) lists ‘Balachan’ and ‘Blatchong’, both with the same meaning as the Malay belachan; and the Woordelijst van het Transvaalsch Taaleigen (1890) includes ‘Blatjang’, defined as ‘een zeker gerecht’ (a certain dish).
When you say ‘blatjang’ or ‘chutney’ in South Africa, you really mean ‘Mrs. Ball’s Original Recipe Chutney. It is nonpareil.
The Woodstock, Cape Town factory that first made Mrs. Balls’s chutney, opened in 1917.
Friday/ adventures in video editing
I am using Adobe Premiere Elements*, to cut up and make .mp4 files of the enormous .VOB files of digitized film & analog video footage that I have, of old family trips. The recordings were shot on film and analog camcorder in the ’70s to early ’90s. My dad had done the digitization many years ago.
I keep the clip lengths to 2-3 minutes.
*Video editing software; the bare-bones basic version of Adobe Premiere Pro.
ON THE PLUS SIDE:
I have three layers of still picture/video and five layers of audio available to work with. That’s a lot.
I have a digital scalpel that I can use to look at, and slice in, between two video frames or a split-second of sound (down to 1/30 of a second).
I can add in titles, and fix the worst quality defects of the video (such as enlarging the projected image slightly, to erase its black border; or adjusting overall lighting & color hue).
IN THE MINUS COLUMN:
The dreaded Adobe .PREL (for ‘preliminary’, I think) files take a long time to load and render, even with my brand-new PC with 16Gb of memory and unlimited hard disk space (6 Tb).
The automatic save every 10 mins stopped me dead in my tracks for 2 mins at a time. I changed it to 20 mins. (Cancel it, and you risk losing a lot of work).
DO NOT mess around with moving files or renaming them. Adobe does not like that, and will give you a ‘Media Pending’ message or black screen, the next time you pull up your .PREL file.
Here are a few stills from a 3 minute clip of scenes at Victoria Falls, 1975 in then-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
I forgot to mention that I had added an ‘Adjustment Layer’ overlay to the entire clip to lighten up the footage a little bit; it was too dark. I might have overdone the lightening .. will take on more look before I render the clip and export it to .mp4 format from this .PREL format.
Thursday/ animals in LEGO
I ran out to Walmart in Factoria to go look for All Bran Buds today, but no luck. (All the stores here in the city seem to be out of it. Amazon has none, unless you want to pay $10 or $15 per box, from sellers in Canada!).
I almost bought a LEGO set at Walmart, but they lock them up in a display case, and the store assistant was swamped with four other shoppers.
So which is the cutest: the sleek bald eagle, the orca, the toothy crocodile, the angry lion, the macaw parrot (a psittacine; all parrots belong to the order Psittaciformes), the fat giraffe, the brown bear, the sleepy penguin, or the mama kangaroo (a nice touch, that joey squeezed into its pouch)?
Wednesday/ homeless in Seattle
I noticed tonight that the dozen or so tents that had been in Seven Hills Park on 16th Ave and Howell, are gone. (Probably have been for a while).
I hope our new mayor (Mayor Bruce Harrell) is making headway with his plans to get homeless people out of the parks and green spaces and into shelters or homes.
It is an intractable problem. (In computer science, these are problems for which there exist no efficient algorithms to solve them).
A count from 2020 showed that our city of 750,000 people have some 11,700 homeless among us (half of which are in shelters or in emergency housing, and the other half unsheltered on the street or in tents and such).
Tuesday/ burgers from a new joint, soon
The Dick’s Drive-in burger joint on Broadway is not open yet.
It was a proper spring day here in the city with 63 °F (17 °C), and I had to take off my jacket and drape it over my arm, as I walked back up the hill from Broadway today.
[Picture from Dick’s Facebook page]
Monday/ red pears
I bought some Red Anjou pears at Amazon Fresh. They are not nearly as red as ones I see in pictures online, but that’s OK. They taste fine.
My favorite pear is still the famous bell-shaped Bartlett pears, though.
(Also called Williams’ bon chrétien pear. The origins of this pear is uncertain).
My mom served up for canned Bartlett pears with custard, as a quick dessert.
Sunday/ very big, very pink
We had rainy weather and only 46 °F (8 °C) today, but the blossoms that have arrived with spring, are beautiful.
Caturday
There is a Pallas’ cat in this picture.
From Wikipedia: The Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul), also known as the manul, is a small wild cat with long and dense light grey fur.
Its rounded ears are set low on the sides of the head.
Friday/ Indian Wells tennis
The men’s semifinals of the Indian Wells Masters tomorrow will be very interesting.
Semifinal 1: 🇪🇸 vs. 🇪🇸
Semifinal 2: 🇺🇸 vs. [the country that shall not be named]
Specifically,
19* 🇪🇸 Carlos Alcaraz (age 18) vs. 4 🇪🇸 Rafael Nadal (age 35)
20 🇺🇸 Taylor Fritz (age 24) vs. 7 Andrey Rublev (age 24)
*This is the seed number for the player for the tournament.
On paper, the player with the lower seed number is favored to win.
May the best man win as far as the Spaniards go, and go USA!
We don’t want a Russian to win. Not this year, anyway.
Sat 3/19: Fritz won 7-5, 6-4, and Nadal won 6-4, 4-6, 6-3.
Sun 3/20: Taylor Fritz beat Nadal 6-3, 7-6 (7-5), the first American to win there since 2001.
[Still picture from clip posted on YouTube video channel 12kgp on Mar 10, 2022]
Thursday/ mini chocolate cones
Last night we had little chocolate cones after our beers and dinner.
The chocolate comes from Ukraine.
(Thanks to Ken & Steve for finding the intriguing chocolates!).
P.S. Happy belated St Patrick’s Day. Three more weeks to go for my green cast, then it all comes off for good.
Wednesday/ taming inflation
Inflation rose to 7.9% in February, the highest rate since 1982. It is still well below the peak of 14.6% in 1980. The Federal Reserve Board raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.25%, and will almost certainly raise it several more times this year, to bring inflation under control.
Jeanna Smialek writes in the New York Times of what happened in the early ’80s:
Mr. Volcker’s Fed rolled out policies that pushed a key short-term interest rate to nearly 20 percent and sent unemployment soaring to nearly 11 percent in 1981. Car dealers mailed the Fed keys from unsold vehicles, builders sent two-by-fours from unbuilt houses and farmers drove tractors around the Fed building in Washington in protest. But the approach worked, killing off the rapid price inflation that had festered throughout the 1970s.
Tuesday/ stop with the ‘springing forward’
So on Tuesday, with almost no warning and no debate, the Senate unanimously passed legislation to do away with the biannual springing forward and falling back that most Americans have come to despise, in favor of making daylight saving time permanent. The bill’s fate in the House was not immediately clear, but if the legislation were to pass there and be signed by President Biden, it would take effect in November 2023.
– From the New York Times
Most Americans (not residents of Hawaii and Arizona) lost an hour of sleep on Saturday night due to the adjustment to Daylight Saving Time. I have several clocks in the house that have to be adjusted manually. Every time I adjusted a clock, I thought: ‘This is stupid’. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Eat Some Pi Today
Sunday/ the new No 1 is Russian
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.
There is no Russian flag next to Medvedev’s name on the electronic scoreboard.
Saturday/ dope or nope?
dope adjective
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.
Friday/ at the map store
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.
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.
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.
Thursday/ gasoline: now above five
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 |
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.
Let’s call it 5 even, shall we? And yeah, those scooters on the sidewalk are looking better and better.
Take that street car behind the sign, mate.
Wednesday/ early bird
Mr Robin was undeterred by the cold —foraging for worms and hopping onto the fence as I walked by.
Tuesday
