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Tuesday/ Denny Way construction update

It was dry and warm enough (49 °F/ 9°C) this afternoon, for a nice walk down to Denny Way, to take my customary pictures from the Interstate 5 overpass.

Looking west along the Denny Way overpass. The 1200 Stewart St apartment tower in front, just left of Denny Way, still has some 30 floors to go (of the 45). Behind it, the 2014 Fairview Ave apartment tower seems to be complete (42 floors). The twin towers (on the right) of the 1120 Denny Way apartments have topped out, and are just about complete on the outside. (Will these apartment towers be filled with work-from-home renters, that never go to a corporate office?) The blue & white bus is the Community Transit bus from Snohomish county to the north, and the red & yellow one is a Rapid Ride bus from King County.
Now I’m walking up, east, along Denny Way. There’s the Space Needle between the two apartment towers of 1120 Denny Way. The No 8 bus is approaching, just barely visible in the distance. Normally I would hop on, but not today — and not for a while. No public transport for me, for now.
Approaching the Denny Way & Olive Way intersection. No 8 bus turning onto Denny Way. A little snow on the sidewalk, still. The blue sky is a welcome sight.
Here’s the Broadway & John St intersection with the new apartments at the Capitol Hill light rail station. Hey, I see ‘Oranje Blanje Blou’ I thought: Orange, white and blue, the colors of the old South African flag (in use from 1928 to 1994).
Here is the No 10 bus on Olive Way. Starbucks is open, but sadly quiet. It would normally be packed with people just camping out there for the day, until it closed at midnight. Behind Starbucks is the 1924 Biltmore apartments.
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Monday/ a bitterly cold President’s Day

It was a bone-chilling President’s Day holiday in the Midwest. Texas has ice and snow, all the way down to Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico.
Here in Seattle, the snow is melting steadily. It went up to 43 °F (6 °C) today.

Look at Dallas: 1 °F (-17 °C), a 100-year low. Texas has had widespread power outages today as well, so not a good situation to have this kind of cold, with no heating in the house. I suspect only some homes in Texas have central heating (say, a gas furnace), just as only some homes here in Seattle have central air-conditioning.
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Sunday/ the snow has stopped

There was more snow this morning, and into early afternoon (maybe an inch), but that was it.
The official tally for the city, for Saturday, is 8.9 in.
Temperatures will now stay above freezing, even tonight, and slowly rise every day. The snow on the ground has already started to melt.

Sunday, 1.20 pm. Still a little snow sifting down. Look for the snowman in the picture. My neighbors across the back alley cleared the snow around, and from their little blue car. Mine is still kind of stuck in the garage, with a lot of snow outside. That’s my out-of-use phone landline to the house, across the garage. For a brief time, it touched the thick blanket of snow on the roof.
Sunday, 4.15 pm. I had just run out with my regular-issue shovel (got to get a snow shovel, those wide plastic ones), to clear the walkway to my house, and the sidewalk in front of the house (not visible in the picture), as best I could. Not that I expect any visitors! .. but now the mailman can put junk mail in my mailbox, and Amazon can drop packages on my porch.
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Saturday/ it’s snowing dude, for real

Here are some snow pictures from today.

Hellooo .. snow, and lots of it, by my back door on the deck. We almost never get this much snow in the city.
Let’s see how much we have (this is Sat. 2 pm): 11 in., just about. This does include the little bit of snow from Thursday which was no more than 1 inch. So we’re well over the 4-8 inches that Seattle was projected to get, and we may very well end up with a foot of snow in the city. That would be a top three value recorded, ever. There were 10″ and 20″ events on two separate days in Jan. 1950, and 14.9″ on Jan. 27, 1969. However, these are dwarfed by the legendary Big Snow of Jan. 1880, which lasted a whole week, and had snowfall that measured several feet (there is no official record of the exact amount).
The snow is soft and powdery. The footwear I have on here, is woefully inadequate. Help! I need snow shoes, or Wellington boots!
This is 16th Avenue at 10 am this morning.
15th Avenue (at 10 am) looked a little more solid, just because a few more intrepid drivers negotiated it this morning. The city does not have many snow plows, but hopefully they will get to the arterials such as 15th Ave. at some point.
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Friday/ the Year of the Ox is here

Happy Lunar New Year! The Year of the Ox* starts today.
In Asian cultures people wear red to celebrate the arrival of the lunar new year, the color that symbolizes luck and prosperity.
Married couples hand out red packets with cash inside to children and unmarried adults.

*Read: bovine creature. The zodiacal ox could be construed as male, female, neutered, hermaphroditic, and either singular or plural.

From my porcelain display case: a child holding the ‘newly born’ Ox, symbolizing the start of The Year of the Ox. I bought the item at a souvenir shop at Hong Kong International Airport in 2010 or 2011. At this point, I am really not sure when I will make it out to Hong Kong again.
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Thursday/ ‘it’s snowing dude’

A very enthusiastic player in my tennis text group inquired this morning if anyone was up for tennis, outside (for the record, it was 32 °F/ 0 °C at the time).
‘It’s snowing dude’ texted someone back, as a few snow flurries started to appear. I believe they settled for playing indoors: warmer inside, sans snow, but you have to play with a mask on.

The view of my street at about 5 pm today. Not much more came down, and none sticking to the street surface. There is a second system due in on Friday night, though, that will bring many more inches of snow with it.
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Wednesday/ the last of the little bell flowers

There was a little sun this morning, before a blanket of clouds moved in. (There is going to be snow in the city on Thursday night and into Saturday, say the weather forecasters).

By now the hummingbirds have ‘consumed’ most of the little bell flowers on my mahonia, but there are still a few left.

Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna), a female. They beat their wings about 50 times per second.
I got a little too close with my camera. The little bird whipped up from the flowers, gave me a long, dirty, why-are-you-bothering-me? look, as I snapped this picture, and then buzzed off into the sky.
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Tuesday/ cold – but not Chicago’s cold

It’s 37 °F (3 °C) here in Seattle, and only 10 °F (-12 °C) in Chicago.
I mention Chicago, because I’ve been using Google Earth & Google Maps all day to annotate a Chicago picture — one that I had taken in 1990 from the observatory of the John Hancock Center.

Just for fun, I also created a simulated ‘2021’ view with Google Earth, from more or less the same spot and elevation. The forest of skyscrapers is now a lot denser.

The year is 1990, and the NBC Tower (center left in the picture) and the Swissotel (to its left) are both brand new. I had no idea that I would actually work in the Wrigley Building (center right in the picture), in 2006, some eleven years after my 1995 arrival in the United States. The Aon Center in the middle of the picture obscures the famous Hilton Chicago hotel (opened 1927, refurbished in 1985).
Now in 2021, 31 years hence, many more condominium towers have been added. (That neighborhood on the left bordered by Michigan Avenue, the Chicago River, Lake Michigan, and Millennium Park is the New Eastside). The St. Regis Chicago hotel on the far left has 101 floors. The most ignominious tower of them all, would be the Trump International Hotel & Tower, completed in 2009. (The second impeachment trial of its disgraced namesake started in the US Senate today).
The Wrigley Building was Chicago’s tallest structure, and first building with air-conditioning, at its completion in 1922. I took this picture from the 16th-story patio in June 2006, looking south along South Michigan Avenue. The building with the green pyramid top is the Metropolitan Tower (1924). The black high-rise structure closer on the right, is the Carbide & Carbon Building (1929), in classic Art Deco style.
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Monday/ the B.1.351 strain is trouble

The AstraZeneca vaccine ran into trouble in South Africa.
Preliminary findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, of a study of around 2,000 participants (median age 31), were disappointing. The vaccine had been showing a 75% efficacy against mild to moderate COVID cases, before the B.1.351 strain became dominant in South Africa. These days, 90% of new infections in SA are of the new strain. For these new infections, the efficacy seems to have dropped to just 22% percent, based on 42 symptomatic cases. The 42 cases is too small a number to draw firm conclusions, but it’s a big red flag, for sure.

South African health authorities have now put the roll-out of the AstraZeneca vaccine on hold. They are negotiating with Johnson & Johnson for 20 million doses, and trying to ascertain if there is value in giving shots of the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger people.

One million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine (produced in India) arrived in South Africa last week. Testing from October showed 75% efficacy, but there seems to be a dramatic drop in efficacy against the B.1.351 strain of the virus that is dominant in the country now.  [Picture from South African newspaper The Sowetan]
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Sunday/ another not-so-super Bowl

ok I’ll give, who is Tom Brady
– Igor Bobic @igorbobic on Twitter, politics reporter at HuffPost, pretending not to know.

Gazelle Bundesliga’s husband
– Casey S.@nobody_news on Twitter, mangling her name. It’s supermodel Gisele Bündchen.

It was Super Bowl Sunday.
Congrats to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their veteran, ex-New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady (43), with their 31-9 win over the Kansas City Chiefs. One does not have to be a football expert to know that this is not the score of an exciting match-up.

The Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes (25), played with an injured toe, and his team just never got their offensive game going.

Thirty year-old Canadian rapper The Weeknd (real name Abel Makkonen Tesfaye; his parents are Ethiopian) performing during the halftime show. ‘Why are the dancers wearing underwear on their heads?’ wondered some Twitter wags. Hey: at least they are wearing masks, more than could be said of Tom Brady (as he arrived at the stadium and walked into the locker room), and of most of the revelers in Tampa Bay’s sports bars & streets on Saturday night. There were 25,000 people in the stands today (some 7,000 were vaccinated healthcare workers), the fewest ever at any Super Bowl.
[Picture from Reuters]
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Saturday/ lots of snow in the Northeast

This week, a three-day snowstorm left  17 in. of snow in New York City’s Central Park.

In northern New Jersey, a 122-year-old state record for most snow from a single storm may have been broken: the town of Mount Arlington ended up with 35.5 inches.
Three feet — that’s a lot of snow.

 

Cartoon from the latest New Yorker magazine. Presumably this is in the future, post-Covid and when Earth’s climate is even more out of control. (Is that ‘weather fan’ on the far right cheering the ‘touchdown’ of the tornado?). 
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Friday/ more soft-soled shoes

I did not need new tennis shoes right now, but I bought two more pairs from my local tennis store, nonetheless (Avanti Sports on NE 45th St).

I really don’t want them to go bust, because they string my tennis racquets. Besides, these Adidas shoes are shockingly hard to find anywhere online. They are regularly sold out at the Adidas store itself, as well. 

Adidas Sole Court Boost, is the name of these tennis shoes (I paid $129 per pair). I like the herringbone pattern on the sole. The size 9s fit my feet perfectly. There is extra padding in the sole, and a little edge on the outside to provide support for side-to-side movement on the court. World No 3 Dominic Thiem likes to play with the white ones with the pink soles.
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Thursday/ the degrees of friendships

I found this Arabic friendship pyramid on Twitter (@arabicwords_0).
There seems to be a specific Arabic word for every degree of friendship.
(Note: These words all describe platonic friendships/ relationships. There is a different set of Arabic words for carnal relationships!).

I could not resist to write in the Afrikaans words on the right, as well.
Finally: these are constructive or positive friendships, with the possible exception of drinking companion. Is that where we can add in fair weather friend and frenemy?

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Wednesday/ robins & jays

There was a break in the rainy weather today, with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. For the first time in a long while, I saw robins and jays around my house.

The Washington Dept. of Fish & Wildlife is advising homeowners to take down their bird feeders, though.  Outbreaks of salmonellosis (infection of the bacterium salmonella) are going around in the local bird populations.  There is enough natural food for them, and birds that crowd around feeders can infect one another.

So now our feathered friends need to keep their social distance for awhile as well? Oy vey.

This American robin (Turdus migratorius) was foraging for insects in the moss-covered roof in my neighbor’s yard. The crosshatch pattern in my yard’s fence is vignetting the picture.
A Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) with its black crest and striking blue wings & tail, was squawking up in a tree close by.
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Tuesday/ update: tennis in a mask

I’m doing better, playing tennis with my mask on. I bring 4 or 5 masks — they get sweaty— and I have learned not to feel like suffocating if I start to take big breaths.

The four of us try to play three doubles sets, which is a challenge in the limited 75-minute time slot we have indoors. We usually end up playing almost non-stop: no side changes, with only one or two quick breaks to get a sip of water.

If four players play the three possible match-ups of doubles, there are only two general outcomes possible.
One of the 4 players won in all three match-ups.
He/ she has 3 wins, and everyone else only 1. He/ she is the champ.
Or ..
One of the 4 players lost in all three match-ups.
He/ she has 0 wins, and everyone else has 2 wins.
It’s social tennis; it’s just for fun, but even so: no one wants to be the evening’s loser.

The ‘Tennis Center’ opened in Seattle’s Mt Baker neighborhood opened in 1977. It was renamed Amy Yee Tennis Center in 2002. Amy Yee was a Seattle tennis star, a graceful and inspirational teacher who had for 50 years, brought the love of the sport to thousands of young people and adults in schools, parks, and private clubs.
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Monday/ around Westlake Avenue

I went to the dentist this morning. At 7.30 am on a Monday morning, there was virtually no traffic on the way in. That explains why local TV stations are still not bothering with providing traffic updates like they used to.

After my appointment, I walked around Westlake Avenue, to take a few pictures of the deserted street blocks and offices and store fronts.

The two-story Streamline Moderne-styled building of the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library is at Ninth Ave. & Lenora St. It was previously a Dodge dealership, the anchor of Westlake Avenue’s long-departed auto row. Streamline Moderne is an international style of Art Deco architecture and design that emerged in the 1930s.
Westlake Ave. & Seventh Ave. Here comes the South Lake Union Streetcar. It’s empty. ‘Experience the virtual world of Minecraft like never before‘, says the lettering on the side. Hey, that’s OK. I’ll pass. Wild enough to experience the pandemic world of Covid-19, like never before.
I like the inside-outside seating area that had been set up across from the Amazon biospheres. There is an impressive extraction fan system in the green enclosure, for sucking out wayward SARS-CoV-2 virus that may be suspended in the air.
This brown office building on Eighth Ave. off Westlake Ave. is now called Amazon The Summit. The lights are on in a few offices in the middle, but the rest is dark.
This self-reflecting tower next door to The Summit is called Amazon re:Invent (520 ft tall, 37 floors, completed 2019). That’s the Cirrus Apartment building reflected in the bottom of the picture (440 ft tall, 41 floors, completed 2015).
Another view of the Cirrus apartment building on the left, and the Amazon re: Invent on the right.
Here’s Urban Triangle Park, with one of several 6-ft high aluminum Holding Hope signs, a new art installation now on display in several locations throughout downtown Seattle.
I was supposed to take a selfie there, and post a picture with the tag #HoldingHopeSeattle on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. I guess my blog does not count. For every post, the Downtown Seattle Association will make a $10 donation to the Pike Place Market Foundation.
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Sunday/ the 1920’s and the electric home

There were no cars in front of The Parkhurst apartment building on 14th Avenue, as I walked by, just before dark.
So I snapped a picture, to check up on its history at home.
Here is what I found.

The Parkhurst apartment building on 14th Ave. It was built in 1929 by builder & developer Gardner J. Gwinn (inset picture). A native from Nova Scotia, Canada, he moved to Seattle in 1909 at the age of 21. At the time the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition (a world’s fair) was underway (on the site now occupied by the University of Washington), and the city was booming.
Gwinn was a prolific home builder, and was selected by the Electric Club of Seattle to promote and market ‘Electric Homes’. In the very beginning, homes were wired with only the basics for electric lighting. ‘Electric homes’ had electric outlets & more extensive wiring for electric appliances in the kitchen and elsewhere in the house. [From the Seattle Times Archives, Sept. 24, 1922].
It’s 97 years later, but both of the homes pictured above in the 1924 Seattle Times, are still standing. This picture of the top one is from Google Streetview.
From the same Seattle Times supplement from 1924, an article that promotes the ‘modern home’ that has electricity. Vacuum cleaner, washing machine, 6-pound flat iron, toaster, percolator, stove, sewing machine .. who could resist? The nationwide electrical grid was still under construction, though. In 1925, only about half of homes in the US had access to electricity at all.
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Saturday/ come as you are

Hundreds of people lined up for Covid-19 vaccines at Seattle University and other clinics after a refrigerator broke at a nearby hospital, meaning nurses had to quickly give out 1,600 doses of the vaccine or throw them away. The call went out at 11.00 pm and by 3.30 am all 1,600 doses had been administered. [Photo: David Ryder/Getty Images]
From the New York Times, Sat. Jan. 30:
Wearing bathrobes, pajamas or whatever else they could quickly throw on, hundreds of people flocked to get Covid vaccines in Seattle on Thursday night after a refrigerator that was chilling 1,600 doses broke down, leading to a frenzied overnight inoculation drive.
The impromptu vaccinations began after a refrigerator malfunctioned at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Seattle, meaning the Moderna vaccines inside had to be quickly injected or they would become less effective and need to be thrown away. Health officials reached out to two other hospital systems in the city, and an urgent call was issued around 11 p.m., alerting residents that they had a rare chance to get vaccines if they could come right away.

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Friday/ the South African variant is here

Two patients in South Carolina with no connection to each other, and with no history of travel, have been found to be infected with the South African variant, 501Y.V2.  Then there is the United Kingdom variant, also known as B117, which could be dominant in the United States by March, say Dr Fauci and others.

In spite of this, Seattle, with surrounding King County, is once again allowed to loosen restrictions from Monday (25% indoor dining, 25% gym capacity, 5 persons from two households, blah blah blah).  Small businesses want to reopen, and people need to work.

None of this makes any difference to my daily routine. I’m not going anywhere.
When will I get my vaccine? is all I want to know.
Shots are in very short supply — and I don’t qualify for one at this point, anyway.

‘There you go! The rest comes later!’ At this point there is not enough vaccine to go around — does not matter where in the world. 
[Cartoon by Klaus Stuttmann in German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel]
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Thursday/ the GameStop shares frenzy

This is gambling, not investing.

– Brett Arends in an opinion piece on MarketWatch called ‘An open letter to the GameStop army on Reddit’

There has been a ferocious tug-of-war happening on the US stock market with the shares of a company called GameStop.

Let’s set the scene first.

GameStop is an American video game, consumer electronics & gaming merchandise retailer. They closed 1,000 stores last year and seems destined to go out of business altogether in a year or two.  (Computer games are, in general, no longer sold as physical items that can be resold second-hand. Game players buy & download their games from the web).

Hedge funds are for billionaires and wealthy investors, and their managers like to use derivative instruments to make ungodly sums of money for their clients (and sometimes ungodly losses).  One such instrument is short selling. The investor (hedge fund) borrows shares from a broker, sells it into the market. The investor has to buy back these shares at a future date. So the investor hopes/ believes the share price will fall. (That way the investor pockets the difference). If the share price ends up higher at the future date, the investor will be forced to buy it back at the higher price, and lose money/ lose a LOT of money.

Robinhood is a financial services start-up with an app that makes it super-easy for individual investors to buy and sell shares, at zero commissions (free).  Critics charge that they make transacting too easy, and that they lure young and first-time investors into day-trading, instead of long-term investing.

Enter social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website Reddit.
The community members from reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ want to flip off the hedge fund managers and help the little guy to make money. One of the ways to do this recently, has been to pile into GameStop shares. If large enough numbers of investors (‘investors’?) ignore the sage advice from Yahoo Finance that a stock is overvalued, and buy it anyway, things start to happen.

GameStop was sort of left for dead by July 2020 ($4), but then came Jan 1, 2021 ($18), and when more short-sellers had to jump in this week and start to buy GameStop in a classic ‘short squeeze’. The demand pushed the price up to $468 at 9.45am this morning. That’s a 100-fold increase from six months ago. 

By today, hedge funds are said to have lost at least US$5bn. On the other side are people such as a Texas fifth-grader that cashed in the 10 GameStop shares his mom gave him for Kwanzaa, on Wednesday — for almost $3,200. She had bought them for $6 apiece as a holiday gift in 2019.

Robinhood jumped in and blocked its investors from buying GameStop today. I’d say that is interfering with the free market.  Google removed over 100,000 one-star reviews of the Robinhood app on Google’s Play Store, to restore its 4-star rating. I’d say that is interfering of some kind. Billionaire Leon Cooperman was on CNBC again today, saying he doesn’t fault the wallstreetbets investors, but that this would end in tears. (Yes, it would for some, but not for everyone). Cooperman reiterated his position that rich people shouldn’t pay more taxes.

All this is happening against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic, that has devastated the economy & magnified inequalities ten-fold. The federal government is pushing trillions of dollars of stimulus into the economy, with hundreds of billions going to undeserving companies and individuals.

So exactly how free is this economy, this market, and who on Wall Street, is manipulating whom?

Today’s panel for GameStop shares from Yahoo Finance. Volatile! 44% down in one session, and then 61% up after hours. Look at the belated ‘Overvalued’ marker at the bottom left. One-year target estimate $13.44.