a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Happy Friday the Thirteenth.
It was rainy and dark all day outside (but not quite as dark as in the forest from The Nutcracker in the picture below).
The second major update to Apple’s iOS 18 for the iPhone is out (iOS 18.2), and with it, the first Apple Intelligence image generation features, ChatGPT integration with Siri, and a few other changes and bug fixes.
I experimented with Image Playground a little today. (Image Playground came bundled with iOS 18.2 and is an app for creating stylized images based on prompts, and images of you and your friends).
Here is a cute cartoon from today’s Sunday Seattle Times.
(A reference to Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with classical conditioning.)
Here is an update that has Alice, the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, the Marsh Hare and the White Rabbit.
Monday 12/9: All done. The tree was a lot harder to do than I thought it would be. The little pink flowers inside the top corners were the last pieces to go in. All in all, it was a lot of fun— but I think I will go back to a painting or a landscape scene for my next puzzle.
Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy
She’ll beat you if she’s able
You know the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet
Now, it seems to me some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can’t get
– Lyrics from ‘Desperado’ (1973) by The Eagles
Happy Friday.
There it is: the pieces for the Alice in Wonderland puzzle, spread all over my dining room table for me to pore over them.
I have a long way to go, but the toothy grin of the Cheshire Cat is done, the clock faces are done, the ill-tempered Queen of Hearts is almost done, and I have the houndstooth trousers of Tweedledum and Tweedledee are in place.
I guess I should knuckle down and complete the frame.
Here is the final installment of the batch of Danish stamps on my envelope!
1987 The 100th Anniversary of the Danish Cooperative Bacon Factories
Issued Jun. 18, 1987
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Bente Olesen Nystrom | Issued in sheets of 50 | Engraving: Arne Kühlmann | No watermark
841 A289 3.80Kr Multicolored | Domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus)
1992 EUROPA Stamps – The 500th Anniversary of the Discovery of America
Issued May 7, 1992
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Niels Winkel | Issued in sheets of 50 | Litho. & Engr. | Engraving: Martin Mörch | No watermark
959 A342 3.50Kr Brown & green | Potato plant* (Solanum tuberosum)
*I’m not 100% sure why the potato is significant to this anniversary. The first permanent potato patches on US soil were established in 1719 near Londonderry, New Hampshire by Scotch-Irish immigrants.
1989 Nordic Cooperation Issue
Issued Apr. 20, 1989
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Birgit Forchhammer | Issued in sheets of 50 | Litho. & Engr. | Engraving: Arne Kühlmann | No Watermark
868 A312 3.20Kr Multicolored | Woman from Valby
1984 “Plant a Tree” Campaign
Issued Jan. 26, 1984
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Tage Stentoft | Issued in sheets of 50 | Litho. & Engr.|Engraving: Arne Kühlmann | No Watermark
749 A234 2.70Kr Red & green | Shovel and sapling
1982 The 500th Anniversary of the University Library
Issued Nov. 4, 1982
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Lisbeth Gasparski | Issued in sheets of 50 |Engraving: Arne Kühlmann | No Watermark
731 A221 2.70Kr Multicolored | Library Seal
[Sources: stampworld.com, Scott 2012 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, Vol. 2]
1981 EUROPA Stamps – Folklore
Issued May 4, 1981
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Palle Pio | Issued in sheets of 50 | Litho. & Engr. |Engraving: Czeslaw Slania | No Watermark
680 A208 1.60Kr Brown red | Tilting at a Barrel on Shrovetide
1985 The 300th Anniversary of the German and French Reform Church in Denmark
Issued Jan. 24, 1985
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Mads Stage | Issued in sheets of 50 | Litho. & Engr. |Engraving: Czeslaw Slania | No Watermark
769 A249 2.80Kr Magenta | Reformed Church (Reformert Kirke) in Copenhagen
1982 EUROPA Stamps – Historic Events
Issued May 3, 1982
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Jane Muus | Issued in sheets of 50 |Engraving: Czeslaw Slania | No Watermark
723 A215 2.00Kr Magenta | Abolition of Adcsription*
*Adscription means the state of being added, bound, or annexed.
[Sources: stampworld.com, Scott 2012 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, Vol. 2]
1983 EUROPA Stamps – Inventions
Issued May 5, 1983
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Lars Klint | Issued in sheets of 50 | Engraving: Czeslaw Slania | No Watermark
739 A227 3.50Kr Blue/ greenish blue | Proposal for Øresund Bridge, across Øresund strait to Sweden (the Sound)*
*Ideas for a fixed link across the Øresund strait were advanced as early as the first decade of the 20th century. Almost a century later, a cable-stayed bridge was finally constructed (from 1995-1999), opening in Jul. 2000.
1985 United Nations Decade for Women
Issued Jun. 27, 1985
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Hans Bendix | Issued in sheets of 50 | Lithography & Engraving |Engraving: Arne Kühlmann | No Watermark
779 A257 3.80Kr Multicolored | Cyclist
1983 Nordic Cooperation Issue
Issued Mar. 24, 1983
Perf. 12¾ | Design: C. Achton Friis | Issued in sheets of 50 |Engraving: Czeslaw Slania | No Watermark
735 A225 2.50Kr Brown & red | Egeskov Castle (opened 1554), Kværndrup, Denmark
[Sources: stampworld.com, Scott 2012 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, Vol. 2]
The Ebay seller in Denmark that mailed my latest acquisition of South African stamps, pasted a whole mini-collection of Danish stamps on the envelope.
Here are the first ones.
I will post more tomorrow.
1982 EUROPA Stamps – Historic Events
Issued May 3, 1982
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Jane Muus | Issued in sheets of 50 | Engraving: Czeslaw Slania | No watermark
724 A215 2.7Kr Blue | Women’s Suffrage 1915*
*Women in Denmark gained the right to vote on 5 June 1915.
1989 Tourism Industry
Issued Feb. 16, 1989
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Ponsaing | Issued in sheets of 100 | Engraving: Arne Kühlmann | No watermark
865 A309 3.20Kr Dark green | The Little Mermaid, sculpture by Edvard Eriksen
1988 Individual Speedway World Motorcycle Championship in Denmark
Issued Jun. 16, 1988
Perf. 12¾ | Design: Jørn Fabricius | Issued in sheets of 50 | Lithography | No watermark
856 A302 4.10Kr Multicolored | Motorcyclists at Vojens Speedway Center
[Sources: stampworld.com, Scott 2012 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, Vol. 2]
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.
