a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
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.
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 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Preliminary findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, of a study of around 2,000 participants (median age 31), were disappointing.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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It is Holocaust Memorial Day. I took this picture when I was in Berlin in the summer of 2015.
Well, I played tennis last night with my mask on, as mandated by the Amy Yee Tennis Center. My mask had three layers of cotton fabric. It got a little ugly at times.
As you huff & puff after a long rally — through the mask — your panicked brain roars ‘MORE OX-Y-GEN ..NOW! MORE OX-Y-GEN ..NOW! .. and it makes you want to yank the suffocating $@#! thing right off your face.
So! I’m definitely going to have to try a few more different masks.
I’ve been following tropical storm Eloise for a few days now. There has not been large loss of life (official death toll in Mozambique: 12), but some 5,000 homes in Mozambique were destroyed or badly flooded.
I believe the Kruger National Park, the national parks in Zimbabwe, and the Moremi Game Reserve on the eastern side of Botswana’s Okavango Delta* will be OK. Some areas are getting soaked with 5 or 6 inches of rain, and this summer’s corn harvest is going to be damaged badly.
*This is the time of year that the enormous and very shallow bowl of the Okavango Delta fills up with about 2.6 cubic miles (11 cubic km) of water, spread over as much as 5,800 square miles (15,000 km2).
‘Cold, cold, colder, much colder, mu-uch colder!‘ say the ones observing the efforts of the blindfolded one.
[Cartoonist: Gernot Gunga from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany]
We again played tennis outside yesterday (officially 43 °F/ 6 °C). It was OK, but at times the cold numbed my fingers around the racquet handle.
Fortunately, Amy Yee Tennis Center has again opened up its indoor courts.
We have to wear masks while we play, though, so that will be interesting .. a little harder to yell out the score before you serve, for one thing.
Superb Cleaners dry cleaners on 15th Avenue has gone out of business.
No wonder, right?
In a stay-home-pandemic, people do not need much dry cleaning — not for business trips, not for the opera, and not for a Saturday night dinner party at a fancy friend’s house.
We had a lot of sun today.
It’s January, though – the doldrums of winter – and the day’s highs only made it to 45 °F (7 °C).
These pictures are from Monday.
