Memorial Day is the unofficial start to summer here in the US. The week’s warm weather arrived a little late for this past weekend here in the city of Seattle, but we made it to 70°F / 21°C today, and it will be 75°F/ 24°C on Wednesday and Thursday.
It is bound to be a rough summer for domestic travelers and airline employees (the airlines do not have enough capacity for the demand).
As for wedding celebrations, wedding planners are in short supply too.
The Wall Street Journal says some 2.5 million couples in the US plan to celebrate their wedding this year, some 250,000 more than in recent pre-COVID years.
Many of these weddings have been postponed more than once.
The rhododendrons of late spring are still in full bloom— in their whites, pinks, carmine reds, lavenders, purples and even blues. This one is from 18th Ave here on Capitol Hill.
“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.” – For the Fallen, a poem by Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)
Flag (1954-55) by artist Jasper Johns, from Museum of Modern Art, New York City. In 1951, Johns was drafted into the army and spent two years in service during the Korean War at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and in Sendai, Japan. The forty-eight stars and red-and-white stripes depicted here picture an American flag from the year this work was made (Alaska and Hawaii had not yet become part of the union). Medium: Encaustic (using pigments mixed with hot wax that are burned in as an inlay), oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels. Dimensions: 42 1/4 x 60 5/8″ (107.3 x 153.8 cm) [Picture Credit: moma.org]
When rain has hung the leaves with tears I want you near, to kill my fears To help me to leave all my blues behind
For standing in your heart Is where I want to be and long to be Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind
– From Catch the Wind (1965), a song by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan
I basically turned off Twitter and the TV this week, and just watched French Open tennis on the Tennis Channel (it’s a subscription streaming service).
A bird’s eye view of Stade Roland Garros in the 16th arrondissement in Paris. Completed in 1928, it was named after WWI aviator and war hero Roland Garros (he was not a tennis player). The main stadium on the right, Court Philippe Chatrier, can accommodate 15,000 spectators. Chatrier (1928- 2000) was a French tennis player and tennis administrator.This is an iconic picture of the incomparable French player Suzanne Lenglen, whom the other main tennis court and stadium at Roland Garros is named after. Her feet rarely seemed to touch the ground when she played. Her tennis career was interrupted by World War I, but it is said that by the end of the 1920’s ‘La Divine’ Lenglen was more famous, and more popular, than any other athlete in Europe— or for that matter any movie star, singer or politician. The photographer did a remarkable job to capture Lenglen in action. That must be another photographer on the far side, with a contraption of a camera! [Photo: Getty Images Archive]
Here come the beers!
As for the food, we barely glance at the menu anymore.
Someone just order our usual four dishes for the table with some rice, and we’re good to go.
Inside the Thai restaurant Jamjuree, on 15th Avenue.
I told my friends last week that I think that the blackest mark against America, is that most of its citizens cannot get affordable healthcare.
I would like to take that back.
In America, mass murderers buy assault rifles legally and cheaply, and riddle you with bullets: inside the church, the grocery store, the movie theater, the bar— and the elementary school.
And our government (Republicans, to be fair) is OK with that.
Here’s Hungarian Márton Fucsovics in action at the French Open today, in Italian clothing brand Hydrogen’s bold design for men, called Tattoo Tech.
Márton Fucsovics in his Hydrogen Tattoo Tech outfit today. He beat Frenchman Geoffrey Blancaneaux 6-2 6-4 6-4 to go through to the second round. Players can earn a lot of money from clothing sponsorships— up to US$ 1 million a year, and even more for top-ten players. In my opinion the shirt is wild enough, and plain black —or white— shorts would have worked better. [Picture tweeted by Roland-Garros@rolandgarros on Twitter]
The highs made it into the 70’s here in the city today (72 °F/ 22 °C), but it will be cooler again this week.
The French Open (tennis tournament) in Paris has started, and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds.
Mr Squirrel sits on my garage roof, eating peanuts out of the shell, that he had found somewhere. (Then I have to pick up the discarded shells I find below on my paving .. but that’s OK, I don’t mind).
Here are a few scenes from the U District Street Fair, back this year after three-year hiatus because of Covid.
I had just exited the U District Light rail station, and rounded the corner of Brooklyn Ave NE and 45th Street. The red markings, for the newly designated bus lane on 45th Avenue, are a recent addition.The Fair had the usual assortment of vendors selling art, clothing and trinkets (and soap for blowing bubbles). This is University Way NE (closed to traffic, of course).The band was playing Fleetwood Mac’s Rhiannon. The singer delivered a decent interpretation of the lyrics of the 1975 song (written and originally sung by Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac’s lead vocalist). Nicks is said to have introduced the song in concerts by saying ‘This is a song about an old Welsh witch’.The food trucks seemed to be very well supported, with some having lines of 20, 30 people. The sign in the window of this truck serving up Alaska weathervane scallops says ‘We are the Fishermen’.Gyros and falafel on the left, and pirozhki across the street, the baked or fried boat-shaped buns with different kinds of fillings.And here comes my south-bound train at U District station to take me two stops down to Capitol Hill station. Some 75% of the passengers still wear masks, and I was one of those.
It was another rough week for the US stock market.
This was the eighth-straight weekly loss for the Dow Jones Industrial Index (-2.8%), its longest weekly losing streak since 1923.
The S&P 500 Index briefly dipped below 20% from its record high in January.
Cartoon by Dick Wright, printed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on March 3, 2022.
Here are two questions that Bill Gates had answered on Reddit today: Why do you think the world was utterly unprepared for Covid?
Infectious disease in rich countries isn’t the big problem it used to be. For things like fire and earthquakes we have small ones to remind us of the problem. A pandemic that gets into Europe or the US only comes along rarely so it is easy to not practice and not have dedicated resources. A few countries like Australia did a better job and have 10% of the deaths of most rich countries.
Why is the COVID-19 model behaving very differently in America as compared to other countries? With state-of-the-art vaccines and close to 70% of people fully vaccinated, the cases are always rising after dipping for a few days. Looking at the statistics of the number of people catching COVID and the number of people dying due to it, seemed like this was to end by January / February. The model is quite weird.
The new variants come along and evade immunity from vaccination and infection. Also immunity wanes fairly quickly in the elderly. When the cases are high people do change their behavior and when they are low they go back to normal behavior. So you get huge ups and downs in the case rate driven by seasons, variants and people’s behavior. Fortunately Omicron is less fatal than previous variants.
The men’s professional tennis tour action is in Lyon, France, and Geneva, Switzerland, this week. The clay court season is nearing its end, with the French Open in Paris starting in just a few days on Sunday.
Lyon (also spelled Lyons) is the capital of both the Rhône département and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes région, in east-central France. It is set on a hilly site at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers. Lyon is the third largest city in France, after Paris and Marseille. Geneva (French Genève, German Genf, Italian Ginevra) is the capital of Genève canton, in the far southwestern corner of Switzerland that juts into France. [From britannica.com]
Lyon. That’s Saint George Church of Lyon on the right, with the passerelle Saint-Georges (foot bridge) crossing the Saône river.The Georges Prévéral velodrome (Tête d’Or velodrome) is the site of the Lyon Open tennis tournament. Today, Holger Rune (Denmark, age 19) beat Adrian Mannarino (France, age 33) 6-4, 6-3 to reach the quarterfinals. [Still from Tennis TV]Geneva, at the southern tip of expansive Lac Léman (Lake Geneva). The big man-made fountain is a city landmark, Jet d’Eau (The Geneva Water Fountain).The Geneva Open is staged at the Tennis Club de Genève at the Parc des Eaux-Vives, the oldest and largest tennis club in Switzerland.
The acorn squash that I had pressure-cooked tonight, came out O.K.— but not great. Even though I cooked it for a minute longer than my recipe called for (6 instead of 5 mins), it still came out a little tough. Some recipes say to add butter and cinnamon (or nutmeg) onto the squash as it goes into the cooker, but I elected not to do that.
A pair of Steller’s jays (Cyanocitta stelleri) came to visit this morning.
We sometimes call these ‘blue jay’ in the Pacific Northwest, but the species is distinct from the blue jay (C. cristata) of eastern North America.
We had multiple mass murders here in the States this weekend, after multiple ones last week. (There is basically a mass murder every day: 198 so far this year). The killer (18 years old, white, male —of course) responsible for yesterday’s slaughter of 10 at the supermarket in Buffalo was clearly a domestic terrorist.
Was he a lone wolf?
Rolling Stone magazine opines that there is no such thing .. and that the shooter is pretty much a main-stream Republican.
From Rolling Stone: There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.
Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness ..
..the gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.
The Rolling Stone article points to the constellation of rightwing media, with Fox News at the front, and Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show that is obsessed with replacement theory and the grievances of white people. Make that ‘grievances’, the delusion that it is.
I know absolutely nothing about babies, but I know a little bit more after reading a report in the NYT about the baby formula shortage in the US.
Babies basically need breast milk or formula until they can start to eat solid food (at 6 months). Do not dilute formula. Do not try to make your own formula.
If you are out of options, give your baby pasteurized whole cow’s milk for a brief period of time.
Get advice from a pediatrician if your baby needs a special formula that has become unavailable.
I checked out the shelf at Amazon Fresh at 23rd and Jackson on Friday. So at least for this brand they still have stock. I like the gentle colors of the packaging :). One can will last 6-7 days for a newborn, and maybe as little as 2-3 days for a 6-month old baby.
out of the shell, that he had found somewhere. (Then I have to pick up the discarded shells I find below on my paving .. but that’s OK, I don’t mind).
