Author: Willem

Hansel and Gretel is the name of the beer I had last night at The Elysian Brewhouse.  It is of course a Brothers Grimm fairy tale as well, with Hansel and Gretel left in the woods by their parents that could not care for them, after which they arrive at the witch’s house built from bread and with a cake roof.

Knupper, knapper, kneischen, wer knuppert an meinem Häuschen? (who is knocking on my house?) asks the witch.

The pictures are from a German version of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale book I bought in Vienna two years ago.   I had to buy it : I still remember many of the watercolor pictures (done by Janusz Grabianski – is that a Polish name?)  vividly from when I started reading !

I like to save articles from magazines or newspapers with interesting pictures or graphics .. this one is from a TIME magazine earlier this year and shows some statistics about the finances of the US federal government.  (Click the picture to make it bigger).

P.S. Typhoon Megi went north into mainland China, away from Hong Kong and Daya Bay.

It was another beautiful day in Seattle.   But on the other side of the world super typhoon Megi is approaching Hong Kong – the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane and is packing maximum sustained winds of 185 kmh (115 mph), according to the Hong Kong observatory.  This one does look like it will hit Hong Kong dead on in the next day or two, says my colleagues out in Daya Bay.  (They will stay away from going to work tomorrow).

There it goes – my ballot for the 2010 Washington State Mid-term Elections – into the security envelope and into the mailing envelope.  It’s a paper ballot* and the marks get counted by an optical scanner.   *In spite of it being the year 2010.  Paper ballots will only go away when paper money goes away, I believe.

We will see if Washington State gets a State Income Tax (we’re one of 7 hold-out states in the union).  The net income from the tax is intended for education (70%) and health care (30%) .. it’s just that state legislatures are notorious for applying funds raised this way for different purposes.

We will also see on Nov 2 if California voters pass Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana!  (But it may be a storm in a teacup since there is still a federal law in place that makes owning it illegal, and federal law trumps state law per the US Constitution).

A colleague alerted me to this picture posted on the Bryan Bros.’* website.  His wife happened to bring their baby in for a routine check-up to the hospital in Shanghai, and ran into them.  I love the giant tennis ball.

*Twin brothers Robert Charles Bryan (Bob) and Michael Carl Bryan (Mike) are American professional tennis players.   At one point they were the World No. 1 doubles team for 201 weeks.   Between 2005 and 2006, they set an Open Era record by competing in seven consecutive men’s doubles Grand Slam finals, three of which they won.   On February 26, 2010, they recorded their Open Era record 600th match win by defeating Taylor Dent and Ryan Harrison in the semi-finals of the Delray Beach ATP 250 tournament.

It’s the second Monday in October and therefore Columbus Day in the USA.   Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas around this time in 1492 (the indigenous people had been here LONG before that, of course).  And he didn’t really discover what is today the USA. Wikipedia put it like this : Christopher Columbus (c. 31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506) was a navigator, colonizer, and explorer from the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy, whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere. Spain and the other Americas celebrate Columbus Day as well – but not Canada.

The voyages of Columbus [Source: Wikipedia].

That’s a date reference (yes, I’m cheating a little since the year is 2010 but oh well).  It is also the birthday of Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (10 October 1825 – 14 July 1904), better known as Paul Kruger and affectionately known as Uncle Paul (Dutch: “Oom Paul”).   He was State President of the erstwhile South African Republic (Transvaal).   He gained international renown as the face of Boer resistance against the British during the South African or Second Boer War (1899–1902).

The Krugerrand is a South African gold coin, first minted in 1967 to help market South African gold.  It is produced by the South African Mint Company.   It is minted from gold alloy that is 91.67% pure (22 karats), so the coin contains one troy ounce (31.1035 g) of gold.    The second picture shows the rise of the gold price since 2000.   Friday it closed at US$1,318.95  on the New York Stock Exchange.  Is it headed even higher?

Google honored John Lennon’s 70th birthday today with a ‘doodle’ video .. the picture is from the video.   I love the words from ‘Imagine’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

I got my flu shot today.   The flu shots here in the USA this year protects against 3 strains of flu virus :

• A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like virus (the same strain as was used for 2009 H1N1 monovalent vaccines);
• A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like virus;
• B/Brisbane 60/2008-like antigens.

I will also try to stay away from people that try to cough and sneeze on me! : )  – remember that the latest cough and sneeze ‘etiquette’ says to crook your arm and sneeze into your arm and shoulder, NOT into your hands !

Here’s my current weapon to fight the jet lag : melatonin*.  On a previous trip I tried 3 mg which seemed to help very little, but the 5mg capsule seems to help a lot.  It’s a ‘natural’ drug – supposedly much the same as the hormone by the same name, secreted by the pineal gland in the brain, into the blood.   Some of my colleagues at work say the prescription drug Ambien is their knock-out drug of choice; it belongs to a class of medications called sedative-hypnotics and works by slowing activity in the brain to allow sleep.  Hmm.   Think I’ll stick to my melatonin for two more days and then I’ll be good to go.

*also known as N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine.  Got that? : )

My gym took a minute today to take three scans of each of my thumbs so that I can check in with a fingerprint instead of my gym card in future.  They store the print as some mathematical formula and not the print itself, they assured me.  (Hmm).   In the same vein in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, there is an article about India launching a massive project to record fingerprints and retina scans of all its citizens.   The project aims to assign a unique 12-digit number to each of its 1.2 billion people and store them in a massive central database.   The identities will help the government to reduce corruption and waste in the distribution of food stamps and other payments.