My car needed a wash, and off I went tonight, to Uncle Ike’s on 23rd Avenue. (Uncle Ike’s Car Wash, that is— not the Uncle Ike’s pot shop that is right next door).
I do a pre-rinse, put soap on, wash the car & wheel caps by hand with a big mitt, and then rinse everything off.
I dry it all by hand. There is a new blow-dryer gun right there for use in the wash bay, and I might try that next time. Hopefully it won’t fry the paint. Yikes. That will be bad.
Time in the wash bay is money, though. I spent $12 on the wash cycle tonight, a little more than usual. I also forgot to put the car in wash mode before I started washing (it gets the windshield wipers out of the way).
Done with the wash & rinse. I’m about to hop in the car to take it to the vacuum bay, to dry it all off by hand*, outside, as well as inside the doors, the door linings, the trunk lid and the frunk lid, where a little water inevitably gets in. The drying takes a lot longer than the washing & rinsing! *With a set of drying cloths called ‘Dry Me A River’, that I had bought on Amazon.
The Norwegian Forest Cat (or Wegie as it’s often called) is a sweet, calm, and gentle feline who’s often shy around new people, but is known for being sociable and affectionate with those they know well. During World War II, the breed became nearly extinct.
I see tomorrow is National Absurdity Day.
All right/ whatever .. but can anything that happens tomorrow be more absurd* than today’s Rittenhouse verdict?
*ab·surd
/əbˈsərd,əbˈzərd/ adjective
wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate.
“the allegations are patently absurd”
arousing amusement or derision; ridiculous.
The Rittenhouse trial was about the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August last year.
From Wikipedia:
On August 25, 2020, during the unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, fatally shot two men and wounded another during three confrontations.
Rittenhouse had armed himself with an AR-15 style rifle and said he was in Kenosha to protect a car dealership from being vandalized and to provide medical aid.
Rittenhouse had been pursued by a group that included Kenosha resident Joseph Rosenbaum, who was unarmed.
After armed Racine resident Joshua Ziminski fired a shot into the air, Rittenhouse turned towards Rosenbaum, who lunged at him and tried to take his rifle.
Rittenhouse fired four times at Rosenbaum, killing him. Rittenhouse then ran down the street while being followed by a crowd of around a dozen people.
He tripped and fell to the ground after being hit in the head, then fired twice at a 39-year-old man who jump kicked him, his shots missing both times.
While Rittenhouse was still on the ground, Silver Lake resident Anthony M. Huber struck him in the shoulder with a skateboard and attempted to take his rifle.
Rittenhouse fired at Huber once, fatally striking him in the chest. When West Allis resident Gaige Grosskreutz approached Rittenhouse while pointing a Glock pistol at him, Rittenhouse shot him once in the right arm.
Public sentiment of the shootings was polarized and media coverage both polarized and politicized.
Rittenhouse was charged with two counts of homicide, one count of attempted homicide, two counts of reckless endangerment, one count of unlawful possession of a firearm, and one count of curfew violation. Judge Bruce Schroeder dismissed the unlawful possession charge and the curfew violation during the trial, which began in Kenosha on November 1, 2021. It ended on November 19 when the jury found him, by unanimous agreement, not guilty of all the remaining charges.
I see legal scholars are not surprised by the verdict. That does not make me feel better. A 17-year old illegally bought a legal (why? WHY?) AR-15 assault rifle. Brings it across the Illinois-Wisconsin state line to a volatile protest. Gets in trouble and kills two people with it. Innocent because he ‘defended’ himself? [From the New York Times online]
The Neptune theatre in U District is now officially 100 years old.
I took this picture last night as I made my way back to the light rail station around the corner.
We still have 60 million unvaccinated Americans that qualify for the vaccine, which is free, and widely available.
The 7-day average for the number of new Covid-19 cases is 87,000 (16% up in one week). Dr. Fauci said today that it needs to be well under 10,000 per day, before one can declare that the pandemic is under control in the United States. Asked when that would be, he said it’s impossible to know.
Cases gave gone up in 12 states the last two weeks. (Washington State is one of them. Seattle and King County is doing better than most other counties in the state).
Infographic from the Washington Post. Yes, cases have come down from that latest peak, but have now stalled at a high plateau. I would not have thought that we would still have 1,100 deaths every day, at this point in the pandemic.
I drove out to Snoqualmie Falls today.
The falls are only some 30 miles east from Seattle as the crow flies, but a 40-minute drive.
Snoqualmie Falls has a 268-foot (82 m) drop, and is by far the most famous waterfall in Washington State. It draws a million visitors a year.
The Snoqualmie River is a 45-mile/72 km-long river in King County and Snohomish County in Washington State. The Snoqualmie River is part of the Snohomish Watershed, on the west side of the Cascades. The Snoqualmie runs into the Snohomish River, which empties into Puget Sound at Everett. [Map from Wikipedia, made using USGS National Map data]Snoqualmie Falls seen from the high view point farthest from the lodge. (There is a trail to the bank of the river down below for a different view, but a sign said that the trail is closed). That’s the Salish Lodge & Spa on the left, and parts of the Snoqualmie Falls Hydroelectric Plant are visible on the opposite bank (middle of the picture). [iPhone 13 Pro picture, standard lens]
A closer look at the power plant. It consists of two power houses. Plant 1 is underground (installed capacity 13.7 MW) and was completed in 1899, and the picture shows Plant 2 (40.2 MW) which was completed in 1910, for a total installed capacity of 53.9 MW. [Canon EOS 7D Mk II, telephoto lens]Most of the pictures that I took were spoiled by the persistent mist and water droplets from the thundering falls down below. The large lens of my big digital camera kept getting fogged up and downright wet. My iPhone with its tiny lens openings worked better under these conditions. At this time of day (early afternoon) the sun sits in the wrong place for an evenly-lit picture, but hey, you work with what you have. The lens flares even have little rainbows in them. [iPhone 13 Pro, Wide-angle lens]
The heavy rains of the last few days has stopped, but there is extensive flooding in Whatcom County (in the far northwest, against the Canadian border).
Interstate 5 is also closed overnight near Bellingham due to a mudslide.
Untitled picture of Hannegan Road, between Bellingham and Lynden (posted on the website of KGMI News). Looking at Google maps, I believe that the water is from Tenmile Creek nearby, that is flooding.
P.S. I’m not sure where this motorist is coming from, but it’s very dangerous to drive into or through running water, and even more so in the dark.
The 97 points of the Glasgow Climate Pact (COP26) make heavy reading for a Sunday night, but I glanced through it. Man a.. and China and Russia did not even attend the conference.
The United States is at least serious again to make an effort, but as George Monbiot writes for The Guardian, it’s too late for incremental changes, and we need a critical minority to commit to the cause.
It works like this: ”There’s an aspect of human nature that is simultaneously terrible and hopeful: most people side with the status quo, whatever it may be. A critical threshold is reached when a certain proportion of the population change their views. Other people sense that the wind has changed, and tack around to catch it. There are plenty of tipping points in recent history: the remarkably swift reduction in smoking; the rapid shift, in nations such as the UK and Ireland, away from homophobia; the #MeToo movement, which, in a matter of weeks, greatly reduced the social tolerance of sexual abuse and everyday sexism. But where does the tipping point lie? Researchers whose work was published in Science in 2018 discovered that a critical threshold was passed when the size of a committed minority reached roughly 25% of the population. At this point, social conventions suddenly flip. Between 72% and 100% of the people in the experiments swung round, destroying apparently stable social norms. As the paper notes, a large body of work suggests that “the power of small groups comes not from their authority or wealth, but from their commitment to the cause”.
As far as the hard numbers go, here is a to-the-point summary written by Adam Taylor and Harry Taylor in the Washington Post: Where (temperature change) are we at now? A Washington Post analysis of multiple data sets has found that Earth has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius on average over the past century. Some places may already have seen rises of 2 °C.
Where are we headed? In their latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that under the current scenario, the world would likely hit the 1.5 °C threshold by 2040. Under the most optimistic scenario presented in the report, global temperatures would reach 1.5 °C by the middle of the century and then drop back down as emissions were cut further, potentially avoiding some of the worst outcomes. Under the worst scenario envisaged by the IPCC, the best estimate was that the world will likely see a rise of 4.4 °C by the end of the century — with an extreme impact on life on Earth.
Human activity has warmed the climate by 1 °C (or maybe a little more) over the last century. Experts think it is here at then end of 2021, out of reach to limit further warming by the end of the century to 1.5 °C. These simulations show that even if humanity arrives at the year 2100 with warming limited to 2 °C, there will be places (the poles) that will see temperature rises of some 10 °C, with very dramatic and catastrophic impacts on Earth’s climate. [Infographic from the Washington Post]
It has been a soggy week.
The rain gauge at Sea-Tac airport has already logged more than 5 inches of rain for the month of November.
There is a 12-hour break in the rain right now, but more on the way for Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Most of the rivers here are under a flood watch until Tuesday afternoon.
A plot of precipitable water* from overnight. (It’s a classic ‘Pineapple Express’: moisture builds up in the tropical Pacific around Hawaii (on the left, middle of the picture), and then stream towards, and wallop the Pacific Northwest). *Precipitable water is the depth of water in a column of the atmosphere, available for precipitation. Tropical air masses hold a lot of PW. [Text and graph posted by National Weather Service Seattle @NWSSeattle on Twitter]
World War I commendation plaque awarded to wounded soldiers. Lady Columbia in front of the flag places a sword on shoulder of a kneeling soldier. Copies of this plaque were awarded to wounded and killed World War I soldiers. [Original is in the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, Washington DC, United States. Picture from Google Arts & Culture]
Above is the plaque awarded to Sgt. Andrew Segal.
At the top it reads “COLUMBIA GIVES TO HER SON THE ACCOLADE ON THE NEW CHIVALRY OF HUMANITY”.
The inscription below reads “Andrew N. Segal Sgt. Co. G 316th Inf. SERVED WITH HONOR IN THE WORLD WAR AND WAS WOUNDED IN ACTION”, with President Woodrow Wilson’s signature.
I took these pictures on 15th Avenue here on Capitol Hill tonight with my iPhone 13Pro. Perfectly lit and sharp night pictures are really hard to take with my big Canon EOS 7D Mk II DSLR camera— even when using its automatic program mode.
Here’s how Apple described what happens in ‘night mode’ when it debuted on iPhone11 (it’s a lot!): ‘Night mode comes on automatically when needed — say, in a candlelit restaurant. When you tap the shutter, the camera takes multiple images while optical image stabilization steadies the lens. Then the camera software goes to work. It aligns images to correct for movement. It discards the sections with too much blur and fuses sharper ones. It adjusts contrast so everything stays in balance. It fine‑tunes colors so they look natural. Then it intelligently de‑noises and enhances details to produce the final image. It all adds up to night shots that stand apart — with more detail, less noise, and an authentic sense of time and place’.
My temporary lock screen until I can find a more personalized one. (Dial from a 1950s Stromberg Carlson 1543 rotary phone, one of the most popular desk phones ever made).
The easy data transfer method (to set up my new phone) shown in yesterday’s picture stumbled, and I had to give up on it.
So I did a full iCloud backup of my old phone*, and an iCloud restore to the new phone, and that worked out fine.
*The backup took a while. Could it be that I have that many apps, and that much data? I wondered. It turned out most of the 22 Gb of backup data were photos, even though I had marked photos as excluded from the backup. I also deleted the 5,000+ pictures I had on the old phone, and deleted them from the ‘Recently Deleted’ folder as well, but they were still swept into the backup. They made it onto the new phone into the ‘Recently Deleted’ folder. Ah well, no harm done. They will disappear from there in 30 days.
There is still a little work after all the apps & data had been transferred to the new phone, to make sure everything is good to go. • Check if home screen, main apps, phone contacts look OK. • Log onto e-mail accounts, messaging apps, credit card & banking apps, and check that the Apple Wallet is set up correctly (vaccination card was missing). • Request a new QR code for my Washington State vaccination card to put into the Apple Wallet. • Connect my Tesla’s key card to the new phone. • Download my preferred Siri voice onto the phone. • Use iTunes on Windows (I have no Mac or MacBook) to sync my CD music collection into the Apple Music app & add my PC photo albums to my phone’s photo albums. It’s a known issue that the artwork for the CD albums sometimes get scrambled with the sync. All right, so I could not have that. Deleted all 4,105 synced songs and the Apple Music app (! – to get rid of invisible files & indexes). Downloaded the app back to the phone, and did the sync again. Issue solved.
Below are pictures shot with each of the phone’s three lenses: wide angle, standard and close-up.
(Note: These are 2560×1920 pixels. The blogging platform automatically scales them down from the original 4032×3024 pixels).
There was sunshine all day.
My new iPhone was out for delivery, and I had to wait for the FedEx guy to show up before I could venture outside. He showed up shortly after 1 pm.
The iPhone Xs (on the left), is transferring its information & settings over to the iPhone 13 Pro that came out of the little black box. I will go and take a few pictures tomorrow with the spiffy three-lensed camera on the new phone. The 13 is noticeably longer and thicker than the Xs, which I hope will still be OK.Sun always follows rain .. mural art that I had found yesterday on the corner of Pine St and Third Avenue. The Columbia clothing store that was there is all boarded up and closed.
There was a break in the weather by 3 this afternoon, and I went down to Pike Place Market just to get out of the house for a while.
It is skull cap, scarf and glove time: 44 °F (7 °C) with a little wind chill.
Here comes the marine vessel (ferry)Tacoma from Bainbridge Island— it must have been the 2.55 pm sailing. The crossing is about 35 mins, and the time stamp on this photo was 4.38 pm*. *Which is really 3.38 pm Pacific Standard Time. I forgot to turn off the Daylight Saving Time setting in my big Canon DSLR camera (it has no built-in Wi-Fi).Upstairs from the viewing deck at Pike Place Market. The Mountain is not out (Mount Rainier), but there is a little blue sky. Finishing up the waterfront space that opened up with the demolition of the Alaska Way Viaduct is coming along. That speck at the top left is a Delta Airlines plane on the way to Seattle-Tacoma airport.Now I walk down First Ave. for a bit. Here’s the Seattle Art Museum. See the 3-D optical illusion/’please slow down’ island in the intersection? I like it, but I wonder how many motorists notice it.Qualtrics Tower, formerly known as 2+U and 2&U, is looking good, sitting on its massive V-shaped pillars. Its 37 floors were all leased out by September 2019, but I’m sure it has yet to fill back up again with workers and tenants.There is a variety of ‘Welcome Back to Your Seattle’ signs adorning the lamp posts in downtown. This one is cute.I like this one, too. A leaf happened to be stuck right on the swoosh line running around the Space Needle and skyscrapers.The ten-story building (at 400 University St, on the southwest corner of the city block with the new Rainier Square Tower), is now complete as well.Hey! Macy’s the store is gone, but the building is there*, and so is its iconic 160-ft tall star. If I’m not mistaken, it was switched on early this year. *A real estate firm bought the building for $580 million earlier this year.These lights lining Fourth Avenue came on just as I turned around (and just in time to better see those approaching e-scooter riders).I was aiming to catch the No 10 bus at the old Convention Center building, but it rumbled by me while I was still a block away from the stop. I didn’t want to wait 20 mins for the next one, and ended up walking up to Capitol Hill.Here’s Broadway. It’s 5 o’clock and the sun has been gone a good 15 minutes. A fat rat scurried away from me up ahead and disappeared into the little bit of greenery on the sidewalk.
It’s that time of the year again in the United States, when we attempt to outsmart the universe.
We have to set our clocks back by one hour tonight.
Can we please pick one time and stick to it?
As David Policansky writes in The Washington Post: “The people of Fairbanks, Alaska, show that it is possible to adjust to very early sunsets or very late sunrises. There just isn’t much advantage in shifting daylight around when you have only three hours and forty-two minutes of it on the shortest day. But in the Lower 48, in the mid-latitudes where most of us live, we complain”.
The Uniform Time Act of 1966 allows states not to observe Daylight Saving Time. That’s why residents of Arizona and Hawaii do not have to adjust their clocks twice every year. My vote for Washington State: Just Say No. Stop observing Daylight Saving Time. [Infographic by the National Geographic at nationalgeographic.com]
What started as a bad week for the Biden Administration/ the Democrats, looked much better by late Friday night.
There were good October jobs numbers out this morning, and the Housed passed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that includes transport, broadband and utility funding, sending it to the President’s desk.
531,000 jobs added in October to the US economy. Writes Neil Irwin for the NYT: ‘Employers are paying more to get those workers, it’s worth noting. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers were up 0.4 percent in October, and are up 4.9 percent over the last year. That is high by recent standards, but probably a bit below the inflation rate in that span. October inflation numbers are not out yet, but for the 12 months ended in September the Consumer Price Index was up 5.4 percent.’ [Graphic from the New York Times]
It rained most of the day. It is November after all, and so it rains a lot.
We are also coming out of a very wet October.
The rain gauge at Sea-Tac airport recorded 5.76 in of rain in October, two inches more than the average of 3.76 in.
Living dangerously (a meal for robins and crows): an earthworm on my lawn that is just beginning to green up, along with other unwanted little greenery. Earthworms are invertebrates and lack true skeletons, but maintain their structure with fluid-filled coelom chambers that function as a hydrostatic skeleton. The earthworm eats a wide variety of organic matter and the digestive system runs the length of its body.
Tuesday was a rough odd-year Election Day for Democrats, not boding well for next year’s mid-term elections. Trumpist Republican Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race. Democratic governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, barely won his race.
Why has President Biden’s support, and that of the Democratic Party in general, been declining?
I guess it doesn’t help that the pandemic is dragging on. Republicans and their supporters fight the vaccine and mask mandates, though.
People don’t know, don’t care, don’t believe— that we have now lost 750,000 Americans. That’s more than the population of Alaska, or Vermont, or Wyoming.
Should the Democrats ring the alarm bell and finally pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework & Build Back Better legislation?
Maybe it will help, but maybe not much. Paul Kane of the Washington Post writes ‘If history is any guide, Democrats will pass this massive agenda in the weeks or months ahead — and it will have little to no impact on their political standing in next year’s midterm elections’. He mentions several cases where the party in power passed transformative legislation aligned with its values (Obama 2009: Affordable Care Act, Trump 2017: Tax Cuts), only to be pummeled at the midterm elections thereafter.
It’s been six months since I had my second shot, and so today it was time for the third one*. The pharmacist put a Spiderman band-aid on my arm afterwards. They must be gearing up for the influx of 5-11 year-olds that will come in for their shots from tomorrow.
*Pfizer’s booster shot is the same dosage strength as their primary series. Moderna’s booster dose is half the strength of its primary shots.
Big Pharma: “The third dose is recommended for people with certain preconditions” African person: “Which preconditions?” (Sign says ‘Africa needs vaccines’) Big Pharma: “Wealth” [Cartoon by Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte]
I do a pre-rinse, put soap on, wash the car & wheel caps by hand with a big mitt, and then rinse everything off.
