a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here’s December.
This cartoon is from South African Sunday paper Rapport.
I need to die before I’m dead
when my heart is still fertile and red
before I eat the darkened soil of doubt
give me two lips
and bright ink for tongue
to write the earth
one vast love letter
swollen with the milk of mercy
– From the poem ‘Rebel Song’ by Breyten Breytenbach
In 1960, Breytenbach left South Africa under a self-imposed exile.
After a two-year tour of Europe, he settled in France (he later became a French citizen).
In 1962 he married a French woman of Vietnamese ancestry, Yolande: a criminal act under South African law at the time.
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and Immorality Act (1950) made it a criminal offence for a person to have any sexual relations with a person of a different race.
In 1975, Breytenbach was arrested in South Africa after travelling there on a false passport. His intention was to help black Africans organize trade unions, and to recruit members for a branch of the African National Congress (ANC) for white people. He sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for high treason, the first two in solitary confinement in in Pretoria Central Prison’s maximum security wing. He was released after seven years, thanks to a campaign led by former French President Francois Mitterand.
In 1984, his memoir The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist was published, describing aspects of his imprisonment.
Thanksgiving is coming (Thursday).
Here is a cartoon from the Sunday Seattle Times, by Dave Blazek.
(Axe on the left 
).
The Cheshire Cat to Alice: “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
Alice: “How do you know I’m mad?”
The Cheshire Cat: “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
– From Lewis Carroll’s book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ ( 1865)
Happy Friday.
It’s time for another 1,000-piece puzzle for me, and I ordered one from Amazon, called ‘Most Everyone is Mad*’ by the puzzle maker Ravensburger.
*Mad: completely unrestrained by reason and judgment; unable to think in a clear or sensible way (definition by Merriam-Webster).
These stamps from Canada were on an envelope that had arrived from an Ebay seller.
The time came to bid Beantown goodbye on Tuesday afternoon, and fly back to the Pacific Northwest.
There was a rainstorm with strong winds as we made our final approach into SeaTac Airport, which made for a rough landing, but once we started taxiing on the runway, everything was OK.
Pictures:
Looking up while waiting for my Uber driver on Main Street across from the MIT campus in Cambridge; in Uber car in the Ted Williams Tunnel again; at the gate at Boston Logan airport (dry and calm); arriving at the gate at Seattle-Tacoma airport (wet and stormy); restaurant PF Chang’s dragon at Seattle-Tacoma airport’s North Terminal.
The MIT Museum, founded in 1971, is part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. It hosts collections of holography, technology-related artworks, artificial intelligence, architecture, robotics, maritime history, and the history of MIT. [Source: Wikipedia]
I don’t collect whole pieces of mail (such as envelopes, first day covers and post cards), but I found this post card that was for sale on Ebay impossible to resist.
Happy Veterans Day to all military veterans of the United States Armed Forces.
Here’s a sneak preview of the public art installation at the junction of 14th Avenue and Madison Street on Capitol Hill.
(Is it a time machine? Can I enter the big square and emerge four years into the future at the far end?).
Even though it’s only 5:20 pm in the picture, night has already cast its inky blacks.
I still have shoeboxes full of South African stamps on paper cutouts, and I dunk them batch by batch into water to separate the stamp from the paper.
Those that have nice postmarks on (place name and date), I keep on the paper, though.
Below is such a page.
Some of these postmarks belong completely to history.
The cities and towns that they denote have been renamed in recent years.
Postmarks:
ADELAIDE, HEIDELBERG, BEAUFORT WEST, WESTONARIA, BRANDFORT (Winnie Mandela since 2021), BENONI, ESTCOURT, BOKSBURG, FOCHVILLE, GRAHAMSTOWN (now also known as Makhanda), ALBERTON, KROONSTAD, KING WILLIAM’S TOWN (Qonce since 2021), NIGEL, PIETERMATIZBURG, PORT SHEPSTONE, POTCHEFSTROOM, QUEENSTOWN (Komani since 2016), SASOLBURG, STRAND, SPRINGS (now part of the City of Ekurhuleni), SOMERSET WEST, THBAZIMBI, VANDERBIJLPARK, LICHTENBURG, WORCESTER.
It was November of 1899 in colonial Africa— in what is called South Africa today.
The Second Boer War had already started, on October 11.
The British government had rejected an ultimatum issued by the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
The republics had demanded the withdrawal of British troops from their borders, primarily due to growing tensions caused by the discovery of gold in the Transvaal (Johannesburg today) and the influx of British “Uitlander” (foreigner) miners who were denied political rights by the Boer government.
The mint, where the republics produced gold coins for 1899, soon learned that the Kruger Pound dies for the 1899 coins were intercepted by the British in then-Lourenzo Marques in Mozambique (Maputo, today).
On the 2nd day of November 1899 at 10.30am, a single figure 9 was stamped at the bottom of the President’s bust on an 1898 coin, slightly overlapping the design. The coin is known today as ‘the single nine counterstamp’ or simply the ‘Single 9’, and is South Africa’s only one-of-a-kind coin.
Some 50 million voters have already cast their ballots for the 2024 US Elections (one third of the electorate).
I came across this stamp in my shoebox with on-paper stamps today.
, and came away on a lifeboat with nothing other than the clothes that they had been wearing.
There was mail from Maryland in my mailbox today.
The cancellation says that ‘As in past elections, the USPS is ready. If you choose to vote by mail, please mail early.’
(Early voting has started in some states, and here in Washington State we will get our mail-in ballots by Friday, or by early next week).
Let’s check out the stamps.
1984 Horace Moses
Issued Aug. 6, 1984
Perf. 11 |Engraved printing (combination press) |Wmk. None
No 1845| 20c| Orange & dark brown | Junior Achievement founder, Horace Moses
[Sources: stampworld.com, mysticstamp.com]
There was mail from an Ebay seller in Tasmania, Australia, in my mailbox today— with a single pair of South African stamps inside.
Here’s a Cybertruck clad in white wrap, that we had spotted in Columbia City today.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a classic ice white look for one’s wheels— but how about a whitish wrap with a little pizzazz, such as the Satin Flip Ghost Pearl (from the website buywrap.com)?
These stamps from the USA landed in my mailbox (on an envelope from an Ebay seller that I had bought stamps from).
*The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by American author Mark Twain that was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. [From Wikipedia]
**Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is a classic American 1903 children’s novel by Kate Douglas Wiggin that tells the story of Rebecca Rowena Randall and her aunts, one stern and one kind, in the fictional village of Riverboro, Maine. {From Wikipedia]
I had business downtown and missed the No 10 bus on the way back.
Oh well, I thought, it’s such a beautiful day— let’s just walk back up to Capitol Hill.
Top to bottom:
The monorail station at Westlake Center.
The Summit Convention Center, the addition to the original Seattle Convention Center. (The Arch + Summit Convention Centers hosted 160 events in 2023, up from 114 in 2022, but still came in with an operating loss of $23 million for 2023).
Fall leaves at East Pike Street and Boren Avenue.
The Starbucks Roastery at East Pike Street and Melrose Avenue.
The pooch is wearing booties.
Beer truck from Ninkasi Brewing Company in Eugene, Oregon.
Korean Restaurant on Denny Way. (And now you know how to write Korean Restaurant in Korean!).
Hey! And here’s the Google Street View car at work. Maybe an image of me will make it onto the next update for Capitol Hill. 
My little ultraviolet lamp arrived today: one that is specifically designed to inspect postage stamps. (My pictures below).
Starting in 1969, South Africa began to add phosphorescent frames to stamps from its first definitive series of stamps*. Starting in 1971, the phosphorescent element appeared throughout the paper. It is almost impossible to distinguish between these two types of stamps without the aid of an ultraviolet lamp.
*Definitive series of stamps for the Republic of South Africa. The Union of South Africa became the Republic of South Africa in 1961 when it gained its independence from Great Britain.
Here are my pictures of a ride today on the new northbound extension of the Sound Transit light rail system to downtown Lynnwood.
