Willem's Planet – Page 87 – a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010

March 21, 2021March 22, 2021

Sunday/ Miami’s vices

It’s spring break. In these times there should not even be a party, but this weekend young people travelled to Miami in the thousands, anyway. They crowded close together on the beaches, and in the streets on Ocean Drive, and then they brawled in the streets, and trashed some of the bars & restaurants.

‘Seemingly undeterred by the police presence on Sunday night in South Beach, two maskless men in their 20s, who were wearing board shorts and clutching hard seltzers, took turns snorting white lines from a postcard. Around the corner, a group of police officers stood calmly, talking with one another and shouting for people to go home.

A man who was part of a maskless throng of people walking toward Ocean Drive sipped from an almost empty bottle of cognac and nodded at the officers.

“I’m throwing it away,” he said, pointing into the distance. “It’s my birthday.”
“Hurry up, man,” one of the officers said, cautioning about a police detail nearby.
The officers stayed in place and continued their conversation as the group headed toward the bars that were now shuttered’.
– reported by Neil Vigdor, Michael Majchrowicz and Azi Paybarah in the New York Times

A man danced on top of a police car on Saturday night despite the 8 p.m. curfew in Miami Beach. [Photo Credit- Marco Bello/Reuters]
(Dude. 1. I would not dance on a police car, **even if I were** smashed-up drunk/ correction: **especially not**, if I were smashed-up drunk.
2. You have no friends, looking out for you, to pull you off from that car? Looks to me like you’re about to get shot dead.)
Miami-Dade County, which includes Miami Beach, has recently endured one of the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. The state is also thought to have the highest concentration of B.1.1.7, the more contagious and possibly more lethal virus variant first identified in Britain.

March 20, 2021

Saturday/ spring is here, very early

Spring arrived this morning at 2:37 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, the earliest on the calendar in 124 years. (Reason: the leap year of 2000, and the observation of daylight saving time in the United States).

Here in the Emerald City it was cold (46 °F / 7 °C) and rainy.

March 19, 2021March 19, 2021

Friday/ the Ellenbert apartments

The **Ellenbert Apartments building** at 915 East Harrison St on Capitol Hill. It was built in 1928 in the the Jacobethan style, during the neighborhood’s pre-Depression apartment building boom.

I have walked by the Ellenbert Apartments many times, on the way to Broadway market’s grocery store, and finally looked up its history today.

The architect is Max A. Van House, a Minnesota native (born in Moscow, MN). He spent time on Vashon Island as a youth, and picked up on-the-job experience by working for a variety of architectural firms, including a stint at one in Tacoma.

Invitation in the Seattle Times of Sept. 23, 1928 for viewing of the new Ellenbert apartments. Frigidaire refrigerators, hardwood floors, central heating by Ray fuel oil burner, Muralvox radio in every room. One block from the street car line. Downtown is 10 mins away. Sounds good to me!

March 18, 2021March 20, 2021

Thursday/ I want my Marmite

All three of my regular grocery stores were out of Marmite.
Well, I want my Marmite, and so they ‘forced’ me to search for it on Amazon, where it was available in tubs.
Whoah. Sign me up, got to get some of that! I thought.

Check it out .. the little jar on the left is 125g. The grocery store fleeces me for it: 8 bucks. (When it’s almost empty, I run my index finger around inside it, to sweep out every last bit). The tub (it’s made in Ireland, bless them), is 600g, and I paid $22.50 for it. That is **40% cheaper** than the grocery store price — admittedly for a bulk purchase (the equivalent of almost 5 little jars).

March 17, 2021March 17, 2021

Wednesday/ Happy St Patrick’s Day

The White House was lit up in green on Wednesday night to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, and the rich bond between the United States and Ireland.

Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheál Martin presented a bowl of shamrocks to President Biden today (a real bowl, but they conversed via video link) — a tradition that dates back to 1952 with President Truman.
Picture from @WhiteHouse on Twitter.

March 16, 2021March 19, 2021

Tuesday/ the art of deception

‘You need only two rich people to want to buy something they can exclusively own for it to become very expensive’.
– Sebastian Smee, art critic for Washington Post

Here’s the instantly infamous digital work of art **‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’** by an artist from North Carolina called Beeple (Mike Winkelmann). It’s a collage of 5,000 digital images. Each one took one day to create. The buyer was a Singapore-based founder and financer of the cryptofund Metapurse who goes by the name Metakovan. That says it all right there, in my humble opinion.

An image from ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’, by Beeple. (Christie’s Images Limited 2020)

The recent sale of the digital thing (it’s a .jpg file) called ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days‘ with its non-fungible token* attached, has caused a stir in the art world. It went for $69.3 million.

*Essentially a digital certificate of authenticity that is a string of characters connected to a blockchain: the same concept that powers cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. (The blockchain means the characters sit in different physical places around the internet, and have to be combined to verify authenticity).

Is it art? I don’t know, I guess so — but it cannot possibly be worth $69.3 million. Just as the Rabbit, the Pool with Two Figures, or that duct-taped banana, cannot possibly be worth $91.1 million, $90.3 million or $125,000, respectively.

(Just for the record, Guinness World Records lists Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as having the highest-ever insurance value for a painting. On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US $100 million on Dec. 14, 1962. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US $870 million today).

Here is David Hockney’s ‘**Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)**‘ that went for $90.3 million in Nov. 2018.

***Rabbit*** by Jeff Koons was sold for more than $91 million at Christie’s in New York in May 2019. It set a new record for the most expensive work by a living artist to be sold at auction after the Pool with Two Figures.

The ‘Art Basel Banana’ was a stunt, and not a work of art (my opinion). It was created by Maurizio Cattelan, and he titled the ‘art work’ **Comedian**. Mr. Cattelan’s bananas were offered in a limited edition of three with one artist’s proof, sold at a cost of $120,000 apiece at the Art Basel show in Miami Beach in Dec. 2019. Maybe the bananas were special? No. At least one of the bananas reportedly came from a local Miami supermarket.

March 15, 2021March 16, 2021

Monday/ the many meanings of corona

co·ro·na
/kəˈrōnə/

From the Latin word corona, mid-16th century, meaning ‘wreath, crown’.
Architecture: a circular chandelier in a church, or a part of a cornice having a broad vertical face.
Astronomy: the rarefied gaseous envelope of the sun and other stars.
Biology: the cup-shaped or trumpet-shaped outgrowth at the center of a daffodil or narcissus flower.
Medical: coronavirus is any of a family (Coronaviridae) of large single-stranded RNA viruses that have a lipid envelope studded with club-shaped spike proteins.
Physics: the glow around a conductor at high potential.
Smoking: a long, straight-sided cigar.

It was only 45 °F (7 °C) for my late-afternoon stroll around the block today, but hey, now there is an hour more of sunshine.

Daffodils (genus Narcissus) at the corner of 18th Avenue & Republican St. The cup-shaped structure at the center of the flower is called the **corona**. Yes, the term has come to have decidedly negative connotations, I guess. Maybe it’s best to just shrug it off. We even have apartment buildings in the city called Corona Apartments and Corona Lofts.

March 14, 2021March 15, 2021

Sunday/ Happy Pi(e) Day

Here’s a ‘Pi Day’ picture from Twitter. (We write March 14 as 3.14 here in the United States).

From Wikipedia:
The number π (/paɪ/) is a mathematical constant. It is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and it also has various equivalent definitions. It appears in many formulas in all areas of mathematics and physics. The earliest known use of the Greek letter π to represent the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter was by Welsh mathematician William Jones in 1706. It is approximately equal to 3.14159. It has been represented by the Greek letter “π” since the mid-18th century, and is spelled out as “pi”. It is also referred to as Archimedes’ constant.

Hmm. A **berry pie** with a **very pi** crust: pi to 13 decimal places. This is a very fine approximation of pi. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses pi to 15 places in its computer programs that calculate space flight distances and trajectories to say, land a over on Mars.

March 13, 2021March 14, 2021

Saturday/ saving the daylight

We had sunny afternoons all week and the high touched 60 (15.5 °C) today.

Daylight Saving Time starts tonight in the United States. (‘Saving’ means shifting the day’s hour markers forward, so that the sun ‘rises’ an hour later, and ‘sets’ an hour later).
Pacific Daylight Time = Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) minus 7 hrs.

The bright sunlight (electromagnetic radiation visible to the human eye) propels the vanes of the radiometer on my kitchen counter top.

March 12, 2021March 13, 2021

Friday/ a thousand-and-one nights

My used book with Arabian fairy tales arrived at last, shipped from Germany with snail mail.
I could not find the Afrikaans edition online — the one that had I read in bed fifty years ago as a youngster! — but I found the German translation that offers the same gorgeous water paint illustrations, on Abebooks.com.

The tales inside are as follows:
How the Story of the Thousand-and-one Nights Started
Little Kadi
Sinbad the Sailor
Prince Sayn Al Asnam and the King of Spirits
Aladdin and the Wonder Lamp
Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers
The Magic Horse
The Envious Sisters
How the Story of the Thousand-and-one Nights Ends

**Sinbad the Sailor** This is the stuff that nightmares are made of. Big trouble for Sinbad and his mates on their third voyage, ship-wrecked on an island with one-eyed man-eating giants. The captain was eaten first because he was the fattest! I bet he could not run as fast as his crew. Yikes. (I don’t believe these are technically Cyclopes. The Cyclopes come from Greek mythology. Arabians were students of Greek literature, and Homer’s epic poem Odyssey probably inspired this fairy tale). [Illustration by Janusz Grabianski].

**The Magic Horse** Ah yes: the prince undoubtedly proposing to the princess with some servants looking on. (I confess that I don’t recall the details of this fairy tale. I will have to read the German, and report back). Got to love those lovely light blue veils worn by the servants, looking exactly like 2021 pandemic surgical masks! [Illustration by Janusz Grabianski].

March 11, 2021

Thursday/ ‘we all lost something’

‘While it was different for everyone, we all lost something, a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice. A year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us’.
– President Joe Biden, in a nation-wide address today, on the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the pandemic

March 10, 2021March 10, 2021

Wednesday/ here are my beers

These are the beers I had picked up on Sunday, at the enormous store called Total Wine & More, on Armory Way. They only had one six-pack of the Beck’s left, but I got more at the Whole Foods grocery store nearby.

Clockwise: **Radeberger**, 4.8% alc/vol, a light golden pilsner; **Erdinger**, non-alcoholic wheat beer (back in 2010 in China we would go to the Sheraton Hotel for burgers, and I would always order an Erdinger, the real one, to go with it); **Beck’s**, my go-to non-alcoholic beer with a malty hoppy taste; **Paulaner Weizen-Radler**, a non-alcoholic heffeweizen with a taste of lemon (first time I tried it, very good). I still enjoy the potent 8.2% alc/ vol **Space Dust IPA** from our local Elysian Brewing Company (not shown in the picture), just not every day.

March 9, 2021March 10, 2021

Tuesday/ trillions of dollars of help

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan bill is about to be voted on for the final time (tomorrow, in the House). Then it will be signed into law by President Biden.

Direct payments will be sent to 150 million households ($1,400 per person), $300/ month unemployment benefits will be extended through September, additional monthly assistance will be paid to families with children, and it will provide funding for vaccine distribution & for state and local governments, and also boost subsidies for healthcare.

In the Senate, Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan through a procedure known as ‘reconciliation’, which enables certain budget bills to pass with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes necessary for a regular bill. (The Senate can only pass three bills a year through this process, and there are strict limits as to what can be in them).

If I have it right, not a single Republican has voted for the bill so far. Their anti-democratic, anti-everything, Party of Perceived Grievances should dissolve. You’re fired, all of you.

This eye-opening graphic from the Washington Post, tallies up the massive assistance that has had to be doled out from the federal government to counter the devastation from the pandemic. **‘Was this going to be the last?’** asked a reporter of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi today. **‘We will have to see’** was her reply (I’m paraphrasing).

March 8, 2021March 12, 2021

Monday/ Roger is ba-aack

There are three Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tournaments on the calendar this week: in Marseille, France, in Doha, Qatar and in Santiago, Chile.

Roger Federer, he of 20 Grand Slam titles fame, is making his long-awaited comeback in Doha, at the age of 39½. He last played on the tour 14 months ago (in the 2020 Australian Open), and had two knee operations after that. He said today that he is now free of pain and injury — and has no plans to retire (!).

Update Wed 3/11: Federer ousted Dan Evans (30, Great Britain) in his first match, but then stumbled and lost against Nikoloz Basilashvili (29, Georgia) in the quarter-final.

Here’s the scene in **Marseille**, France. **Bouches-du-Rhône** (lettering on the hard court’s surface) is a department (region) in Southern France named after the mouth of the river Rhône. Those are cardboard cut-outs as the ‘spectators’ – ugh. In this match, the Italian **Jannik Sinner** (19) overcame Frenchman **Grégoire Barrère** (27) by 7-6 (7-3), 6-7 (5-7), 7-5.

Here’s the red clay of the Chile Open in **Santiago**. Nobody in the stands, just camera crew and coaches. This was another nail-biter. **Frances Tiafoe** (23, USA) beat **Nicolás Jarry** (25, Chile) by the narrowest of margins: 7-6 (9-7), 6-7 (7-9), 7-6 (9-7).

Here’s Doha, Qatar. A few spectators here and there. (ExxonMobil is a sponsor – boo! BOO! for denying for DECADES that your oil products are destroying the planet, and for lying about climate change. Hey ATP, please find someone else). That is one of the tallest guys in the tour serving, **Reilly Opelka** (23, USA). He stands 6’11” in his socks. He lost this match in the end, though, against ‘veteran’ **Roberto Bautista Agut** (32, Spain) : 6-4, 3-6, 4-6.

March 7, 2021March 7, 2021

Sunday/ Denny Way & 5th Ave

I went on a beer run today to track down some of my favorite German beer. (The grocery store was out of stock, and my own supplies were running dangerously low).
On the way back there was a break in the rain, and so I stopped at Denny Way and 5th Avenue to take a few pictures.

Nice to see that **Fat City**, the ‘German car clinic’ is still there, at Denny Way and 5th Avenue. (They’ve been there since 1972). The Space Needle is not far away (on the right).

There goes the **Seattle Center Monorail train**, doing its 0.9 mile run from the Space Needle, and running along 5th Ave to Westlake Center in downtown.

The new **Seattle Spire** **condominiums** on Denny Way, officially at 600 Wall Street, has 41 storeys. (The building does not taper to the top; the vertical lines are just bent by the wide-angle panorama shot). The two light gray towers on the left are those of the **Insignia Towers condominiums** (also 41 storeys), completed in 2016.

Here’s a little skyline of Amazon’s buildings, seen from the corner of Battery St & 6th Ave. The big square building with the ‘key slot’ in the middle is **Amazon Nitro North**, the black one in the back, to its right, **Amazon re: Invent**, and the tall rectangular towers on the right are **Amazon Day 1** and **Amazon Doppler** behind it. There’s a whole lot of Amazon buildings downtown, and I don’t know the ones in the middle, such as that light blue one. I will have to find out, so that I can annotate my picture. The blue Porsche is a 911, I think. (I’m no Porsche expert).

March 6, 2021March 6, 2021

Saturday/ Paradise visitor center update

Here is this morning’s picture of the Paradise visitor center on the slopes of Mt Rainier. That’s a lot of snow, that had been cleared from the parking lot!

The center itself is still closed to visitors, so those vehicles must belong to sightseers or merrymakers looking to sled on the low slopes.
The elevation there is 5,400′ (1,646 m), and the Mt Rainier summit is at 14,411′ (4,392 m).

March 5, 2021March 12, 2021

Friday/ Anton Goosen turns 75

South African folk singer Anton Goosen turned 75 today.

He sings mostly in Afrikaans, but also in English.
I love his song called Magalies, O Magaliesberg — a song that (somewhat) romanticises the hardships of the 1830s Great Trek of the Voortrekkers (pioneers).
Some of these pioneers ended up in what would become the Transvaal Colony, and is today called Gauteng Province.

The Magaliesberg is a modest but well-defined mountain range north of Pretoria, with ancient origins. It was formed some 2 billion years ago.
The area around the range has seen occupation by humans dating back at least 2 million years, to the earliest hominin species (such as Mrs Ples). The Sterkfontein Caves, which lie at the World Heritage Site called the Cradle of Humankind, are close by. [From Wikipedia].

Ox wagons during the Great Trek in South Africa (1835-1838).
[Picture from Wikimedia Commons, from p209 of the book ‘The Voortrekkers’ by J.S. Skelton, 1909].

Voor op die wa sit my hoepelbeenpa,
agter op die wa sit my vaalhaarma
Waai die wind, waai my jas,
knoop my Sannie haar sydoek vas
Veertien rooies voor aan die wa,
sewe van my en sewe van my pa
Die hotagter, die Afrikaan,
hy en sy maat moet die disselboom dra

(Front of the wa¹ sits my hoop-legged pa,
back of the wa sits my drab-haired ma
Blows the wind, blow our coats,
ties my Tammy her silk cloth close
Fourteen red ones front of the wa,
seven of mine & seven of my pa’s
The left back, the Afrikaan²,
he and his mate, must bear the bar)

¹Short for wagon, we say v-ahh in Afrikaans
²A breed of cattle indigenous to South Africa

Lyrics from ‘Magalies, O Magaliesberg‘ from the Anton Goosen album ‘Liedjieboer Innie Stad’ (1986), with my own rough translation into English.

March 4, 2021March 4, 2021

Thursday/ maybe it will be May, for me

Washington State has published new dates and target groups that qualify for getting the vaccine. I’m not making the cut, yet.

President Biden has promised that there will be enough vaccine doses for all Americans by the end of May*. It takes a lot of logistics to get that vaccine injected into people, of course.

*For example, Merck and Johnson & Johnson will collaborate to ramp up vaccine production, with the help of the federal government.

Descriptions of the groups that qualify next for the vaccine. I’m not sure how if or how it will be verified that a person has two or more comorbidities.

And here is Washington State’s timeline for Covid-19 cases. We’re down to about 1/3 of the highs in December, but still double where we were in September of last year. The state has now crossed the **5,000 mark as far as recorded Covid-19 fatalities**. A little bit of good news: so far, this is the mildest flu season in the 25 years that records have been kept. Of course, it kind of should be: people are wearing masks and not congregating in large numbers.

March 3, 2021

Wednesday/ a touch of spring

We had 58°F (14°C) at the high here in the city, and sun all day.
The little crocuses with their flowers have popped out of the ground, just a little bit later than they were last year.

And how do they know when to flower? It’s very complicated. Flowering plants have a master gene called APETALA1 (AP1). A combination of sunlight, soil temperature and water, prompts the AP1 gene to generate proteins, which in turn, switch on more than 1,000 other genes that are involved in the flowering process.

March 2, 2021March 2, 2021

Tuesday/ my new iPad: a few notes

I have had my new iPad Air 4 for a few weeks now, and I like it. (Of course I like it). It is not a replacement for my Lenovo notebook computer (Windows), and so I do not have a little keyboard for it. The iPad holds my iTunes music collection, my photo albums, my Scrabble games and my newspapers & magazines from Pressreader. I did get the 2nd-generation Apple Pencil — to see what cool things I can do with it, more than anything else.

I’m still getting used to the harder edges that Apple has reintroduced to their iPhones and iPads of late. There is definitely no air in the Air (it feels heavy), and the edges hurt my fingers a little bit, after I have held it too long while I lie on my back in bed, watching Netflix. (I know. I should watch Netflix on the big TV screen downstairs, and not in bed).