There is a little Christmas market in the Tyger Valley Shopping Centre, still open for a final few days.
It’s good that it is indoors: day-time highs here were 35°C and 34°C (95°F and 93°F) on Wednesday and Thursday, and 30°C (86°F today).
The Christmas market on the lower level of the food court in the Tyger Valley Shopping Centre. The jumbotron screen (top left corner) showed what was happening in the first of two cricket tests between South Africa and Pakistan .And what happened today in the first of two cricket tests between South Africa and Pakistan that is underway in Centurion in Gauteng Province? From espncricinfo.com: “The first Test match at Centurion is tantalisingly poised after Pakistan took three wickets in nine overs to leave South Africa wobbling at 27 for 3, still 121 runs away from the 147-run target that seals a win, as well as a place in the 2023-25 World Test Championship [WTC] final. After South Africa had bowled Pakistan out for 237, they needed a fairly comfortable 148 to secure victory, but an unerring spell of accurate medium-fast bowling from Mohammad Abbas and Khurram Shahzad was well rewarded. Aside from Aiden Markram, the South Africa batters were somewhat timid in their approach to the last few overs of the day, while Abbas and Shahzad targeted the pads. Abbas brought one to jag back in sharply into Tony de Zorzi for the first breakthrough.” Update Sun 12/29 [From espncricinfo.com] “South Africa have qualified for the World Test Championship (WTC) final after beating Pakistan by two wickets in a high-drama encounter at SuperSport Park. Set a modest but challenging target of 148 to win, they were 99 for 8 just before lunch and it was left to Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen to score the remaining 51 runs in a tense ninth-wicket stand against a Pakistan attack with their tails up.”
These photos are from yesterday, from a little trip I made with my family to Pringle Bay.
Pringle Bay is a small, coastal village in the Overberg region of the Western Cape, in South Africa. It is situated at the foot of Hangklip, on the opposite side of False Bay from Cape Point. The town and surrounds are part of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO Heritage Site. [Wikipedia]
The main beach at Pringle Bay has rocks and tide pools, and then a sandy stretch for heliophiles and bathers. The rocky outcrop in the distance on the left is Hangklip (Afr. “hanging rock”), 420 m tall (1,377 ft), marking the entrace to False Bay as one approaches Cape Town along the coast from the east.Here is the main beach at Pringle Bay. We’re on the Indian Ocean side of Cape Town (only just), and here the beaches have warmer waters than on the Atlantic side: the effects of the warm Agulhas Current that comes down along Mozambique from Africa’s eastern coast.Time for my nephew to deploy his drone (I don’t know the model name, but it’s a technological marvel; cost: about $800). It has very sophisticated navigation abilities and a super-high resolution 360° swiveling camera.Off it goes, up, up to 1,000 m (3,280 ft)— at which point it is invisible to the naked eye.We only saw something black with fins, maybe, from the beach out in the distance. The drone footage shows that the fins belong to the sea lions. (Seals or sea lions? These are sea lions: brown, bark loudly, “walk” on land using their large flippers and have visible ear flaps. Seals have small flippers, wriggle on their bellies on land, and lack visible ear flaps. – Source: noaa.gov).The drone’s camera has a very high resolution and superzoom capabilities.A viewpoint on the way back to Cape Town, showing the coastline and the fynbos* of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve. *Fynbos: fine-leaved shrubland or heathland vegetation found in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa.
Here is our flight path south on Monday night and into Tuesday morning. We were directlyover Tunis (capital of Tunisia) after crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Later on we were at 39,000 ft (the plane’s cruising altitude) over Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Windhoek (Namibia).
We landed at Cape Town International at 7.30 am local time (it’s an Airbus A350-900) and were bused into the terminal.
The shark tank dive billboard is from the pedestrian underpass to the rental car companies at the airport.
A few weeks ago Lufthansa cancelled the direct Frankfurt to Cape Town flight I had reserved. They rebooked all of us on a short hop to Munich, to catch the Munich to Cape Town flight from there.
Pictures: I ran into several more billboard pictures of “Venus” in Terminal A. Would you like to see all of them? (Of course you do. The “merivaglia” in the slogan “Open to merivaglia” is an Italian word that means “a wonder” or “beauty”). That’s a Boeing 787-9 at the gate at Terminal A that took us to Munich. It’s a 45-minute flight due east.
Here are a few pictures from today, as well as a few clippings from the Sunday newspapers.
This closed-for-traffic street across from the Hauptbahnhof station (main train station) is lined with restaurants from the Middle East and the Far East. Döner kebab is very popular in Frankfurt: a dish of Turkish origin made of meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie.Inside the Hauptbahnhof. This train from regional operator Hessische Landesbahn GmbH (HLB) is a Bombardier Talent 2 model ET150 (a German manufacturer as far as I can tell, not the Bombardier that makes business jet airplanes). It is about to depart for Giessen, a 42-min trip to the north of Frankfurt.Hello. A fluffy pup inside the food court at the Hauptbahnhof station.My lunch from seafood franchise Noordsee. It’s Norwegian salmon. Very nice. An elderly woman took the seat across from mine. “Ich spreche nur ein wenig Deutsch” (I speak only a little German), I said. It was a little noisy to carry on a conversation, anyway. As I got up, she pointed to my phone and said “Dein Handy” (your cell phone). Cute word— and appropriate— that handy thing called a “Handy” in German.Paulaner from Munich also makes non-alcoholic beer now. (Weissbier is a wheat beer: a top-fermented beer which is brewed with a large proportion of wheat relative to the amount of malted barley (from Wikepedia). I will have some more when I stop over in Munich on the way back from South Africa.Back at the Flughafen train station, and across the street some nice dinosaurs on the sidewalk walls promote the Senckenberg Nature Museum in Frankfurt.“A MOOSE COW HAS ESCAPED FROM SCHONFIELDE WILD PARK” “WELL, ONE CAN SPOT THEM EASILY, BIG AS THEY ARE .. “ ” .. BUT THEY CAN STILL BE ASTONISHINGLY DIFFICULT TO FIND” [Cartoon by Naomi Feam for newspaper Tagesspiegel]A loose translation of a few paragraphs in this piece titled “When trees and nerves are burning out/ How to survive Christmas nonetheless” reads like this: Christmas can be a pretty stressful time. We have baked cookies, made the Christmas wreath, drunk mulled wine at overcrowded Christmas markets— and what now? Now the time has come. The extended family is about to arrive. Or: you find yourself in a crowded train traveling across the country and have to split your time between Christmas Eve and Christmas Holiday because your parents are separated. Grandma Inge wants to see you again, and Uncle Bert and his new girlfriend have invited you to dinner. Once you have managed all of that, New Years Eve follows. You should be totally festive here, as well— but now with sparklers and a glass of champagne in hand. And heaven forbid it’s not a great party! In short, December is a seemingly endless series of social, personal and societal expectations and gatherings that could send you straight into end-of-the-year burnout. How the hell is one supposed to survive all of that?This cartoon refers to the chaos in the German coalition government. (Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote, deepening the political turbulence in Germany). “Are these all returns? Rejected by the electorate? And what is inside yours?” “Candidates for chancellor”. [Cartoon by Stuttmann for Tagesspiegel newspaper]
Hey, on this winter solstice day I made it to the Christmas market at Römerberg. It was cold and raining, though, and I did not stay very long.
(It did seem that the inclement weather increased the glühwein sales volumes!)
Pictures: Entrance hall to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station). There was a strong of police presence at the station. Hauptbahnhof station looked a little more ragged and rundown from the last time I saw it— especially the floors leading to the U4 & U5 subway lines’ platforms. Poster for Messe Frankfurt (exhibition center) close by Hauptbahnhof station.
It’s two stops on the U5 subway line (turquoise train car) from Hauptbahnhof station to Römer/ Dom station to where the Christmas market is. The U5 is getting a 2.7 km (1.7 mi) extension that will open in 2027.
Last picture: the S9 regional train (red train car) arriving to take me back from Hauptbahnhof station to Flughafen (airport) station where my hotel is, a 14-minute ride.
We took off from Seattle-Tacoma Airport’s South Terminal almost an hour after the scheduled departure time. (The inbound flight from Frankfurt was late). The flight went without incident, though— always a good thing— and we made up the lost hour on the way.
Still at the cruising altitude of 37,000 ft here, with about 2 hours of the 10h flight remaining. Our route took us over Nunap Isua (Cape Farewell), the southernmost point of Greenland.Our Airbus A330-300 bird landed on the tarmac. I have just boarded the bus that would take us to the terminal. Frankfurt airport is enormous, and it was more than a 10-minute drive, where we joined a line of buses and waited for another 20 minutes or so before we could go inside the terminal.A view from the bus. The bus drive makes for a mini drive-by tour of the airport. The striped livery is that of low-cost German airline Condor.Inside the terminal now, making my way to the passport control and baggage claim. These travelers are headed to their connecting flights. Recognize the woman on the Italian tourism billboard? She must be Venus from Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting called The Birth of Venus.Frohe Weihnachten (Merry Christmas). A little while later I would learn of the terrible events in Magdeburg at the Christmas market there. A madman (50-year old Saudi Arabian doctor that had lived in Germany since 2006) drove into the crowd, killing five people and injuring some 200.
My bags are packed for my trip to South Africa, with two-night stayover in Frankfurt, Germany.
That way I can check in on the Christmas market, at the historical Römerberg market square in Frankfort.
Ready to Go! says the friendly shinkansen (Japanese bullet train). My ‘junior’ wallet is a spare wallet, and it is stuffed with US dollars, Euros and South African rands. I should be able to use my credit card or debit card everywhere and I should not need the bills at all. (I bought this wallet in Hong Kong in August 2011 at the Sogo department store. Just the day before, my leather wallet was stolen out of my backpack ON MY BACK, and while I was on the escalator in an upscale shopping mall. One pickpocket distracted me by ‘bumping’ into me, and at the same time, his accomplice must have zipped open the pocket in the backpack to steal the wallet. I believe they watched me withdraw cash from an ATM just ten minutes before, and saw me put the wallet in my backpack. By the time I could notify American Express, the thieves had already gone on a shopping spree and spent some $7,000 on luxury items. American Express immediately cancelled all the transactions on the card. Several lessons here, of course, and all well-known: keep out an eagle eye when drawing money from an ATM anywhere; don’t let strangers in get too close to you; don’t carry your wallet in an easily accessible place.)
Fed Cuts Rates, but Projects Fewer Reductions Next Year
Federal Reserve officials projected just two rate cuts in 2025. Markets shuddered at the assessment, with the dollar soaring and stocks plummeting.
– Headlines from the New York Times
Here’s where the Federal funds target rate is in the United States. Inflation has eased notably, but remains above the Fed’s 2% target rate (2.7% as of November, up slightly from 2.6% in October). Unemployment is at 4.1%, relatively low. Mortgage rates are going to stay in the 6 to 7% range through 2025, say most analysts. [Graphic from CNBC]
It has rained all day in Rain City.
It will rain on and off all week here, in the run-up to winter solstice.
Here’s an artificial intelligence (AI) generated image that I generated with Apple’s Playground application. I selected a day-time image of the Space Needle that I had on my phone, and added a text instruction ‘Space Needle in the rain’.
The five amigos went to the Irish pub called The Chieftain on 12th Avenue for a beer and a bite tonight, but found it closed for the night.
We ended up right next door, at the German beer hall-and-restaurant Rhein Haus Seattle, where we found this cheerful Christmas tree.
Here comes the selfie! Cheers! Gary, Willem, Steve, Ken and Bryan. Thanks to Bryan for taking the picture.
Here is today’s cartoon from South Africa’s Sunday newspaper Rapport.
The summer school holidays are underway in South Africa, and with it the exodus of the binnelanders* to the coast.
*Afrikaans word for those that live ‘inside’ the country— far away from the coast.
“And this?” “I want to look up those words that dad will use on the road.” About the car’s license plate: VAALIES = Old South Africa (pre-1994) nickname for inhabitants of Transvaal province, home to Johannesburg, and which is now called Gauteng (GP) province. [Cartoon by Dr Jack for Rapport newspaper]
Here are stamps issued by South Africa that would be candidates for a themed collection of elements on stamps.
Given South Africa’s large mining industry, it is somewhat surprising that relatively few stamps with a mining theme have been issued.
Gold (atomic number 79) 1961 First Definitive Issue Issued May 31, 1961 Perf. 14 | Photogravure | Wmk Coat of Arms 201 113 2c Ultramarine and yellow | Pouring gold [Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue Part 1, British Commonwealth 1997]Iron (26) Steel is primarily composed of iron, with most types containing around 98% to 99.5% iron, with the remaining percentage typically made up of carbon and trace elements depending on the specific steel grade.
1978 50th Anniversary of ISCOR* (South African Iron and Steel Industrial Corporation) Issued Jun. 5, 1978 Perf. 12 | Design: Hein Botha | Litho. | No Wmk 441 225 15c Multicolored | Steel rail *In the early 2000s, Iscor was sold by Thabo Mbeki’s government as his administration sought to run a tight ship and right the country’s finances. The name Iscor disappeared for good in March 2005. [Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue Part 1, British Commonwealth 1997]
Carbon (6) 1980 World Diamond Congress, Johannesburg Issued May 12, 1980 Perf. 14 |Design: A.H. Barrett |Litho. |No Wmk 478 20c Multicolored | Cullinan II diamond*
*Yes, a diamond is nothing but a lump of carbon. The Cullinan II is a 317.4 carat cushion-cut diamond that is the second-largest cut from the original Cullinan diamond. It is also known as the Second Star of Africa and is the most valuable stone in the Imperial State Crown in the Tower of London. The Cullinan Diamond is the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found, weighing 3,106 carats (621.20 g), discovered at the Premier No.2 mine in Cullinan, South Africa, on 26 January 1905. [Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue Part 1, British Commonwealth 1997]
These four metals happen to sit right next to one another in the periodic table: Titanium (22) Vanadium (23) Chromium (24) Manganese (25) 1984 Strategic Minerals Issued Jun. 8, 1984 Perf. 14 x 14¼ | Design: Hein Botha | Litho. | No Wmk 558 11c Multicolored | Manganese 559 20c Multicolored | Chromium 560 25c Multicolored | Vanadium 561 30c Multicolored | Titanium [Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue Part 1, British Commonwealth 1997]Gold (79) 1986 Centenary of Johannesburg Issued Sep. 25, 1986 Perf. 14 | Design: J. van Niekerk | Litho. | No Wmk 607 30c Multicolored | Gold bars [Source: Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue Part 1, British Commonwealth 1997]
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).
From the Seattle Times: A ballerina from Pacific Northwest Ballet performs “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” on Wednesday evening at McCaw Hall in Seattle. [Photo by Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times]
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).
Check out this animation-style high school graduation photo of me. (So this is after Image Playground had processed it, of course. Sorry, I’m not going to post the original photo). The original photo was black and white, so the image generator had to guess my hair color (actual color: light brown), the color of the school blazer (actual color: also green, great guess), and tie (actual color: green). The source photo had a blank background and I added a ‘Party’ effect stipulation before generating the image.
This sounds like a very interesting project: find postage stamps of the world that point to an element in the Periodic Table, directly or indirectly.
That is exactly what Larry G. French from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, had done, and writes about here and says:
“A premium was attached to identifying stamps on which element names and symbols or some other chemical notation appeared. I also attempted to include as many nations as possible while ensuring a good blend of people, places, applications and scientific fields was represented. For some elements (typically those with great economic significance such as gold and aluminum) there were many options to select from. Conversely, the frustratingly chemically similar lanthanides and actinides and the ephemeral super heavy weight chemical division posed a more significant challenge, one requiring deep digging and a creative license“.
Here is the “philatelic table of the elements”. (I requested a high-resolution version of this image from the site’s webmaster so that I can see all the details of the stamps). At first blush, I know of several stamps in my South Africa collection that refer to gold or have the mineshafts of gold mines on them. There is also a set of South African stamps from 1984 with symbols for chromium, manganese, vanadium* and titanium on. *Atomic number 23, and the stamp appears in the table above.
Here are the descriptions of the stamps in the table:
1 Hydrogen – North Vietnam
Test of Chinese hydrogen bomb;
nuclear chemistry in hydrogen bomb
2 Helium – U.S.S.R.
Tokamak fusion reactor
Will fusion ever become a viable clean energy source?
3 Lithium – Bolivia
Salar de Uyuni Salt Flats; Lithium resources for battery production/resource development in underdeveloped economies
4 Beryllium – Brazil
Emeralds; Legal battle over ownership of 180,000 carat Brazilian Bahia emerald
5 Boron – Turkey
Colmanite CaB3O4(OH)3 H2O; boron production
6 Carbon – Austria
Petrochemical industry, carbon compound; energy, carbon emissions, global warming
7 Nitrogen – France
Alkaloids, quinine discovery;
medicines from plants, malaria
87 Francium – France
Discovery by Frederic & Irene Joliot-Curie; work of Marguerite Perey at Curie Institute
88 Radium – India
Marie Sklodowska Curie discoverer; radium therapy in medicine
89 Actinium – Zaire
Trace quantities of actinium in pitchblende; uranium ore from Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo (Zaire) source of uranium for Manhattan Project
90 Thorium – Austria
Auer’s thorium mantle gas lamp; thorium pollution around superfund site(s) Camden, NJ Auer Lamp manufacturing site(s)
91 Protactinium – Sweden
Frederick Soddy; partial credit for discovery of protactinium isotopes, Nobel Prize
92 Uranium – West Germany
Uranium fission; Otto Hahn and discovery
of nuclear fission
93 Neptunium – United Nations
Fallout from above ground nuclear tests; nuclear arms control
96 Curium – Madagascar
Curies in Lab; Curies’ contributions to chemistry; uranium ore for radium production from Madagascar
97 Berkelium – Rep. of Guinea
Ernest Lawrence discovery of berkelium with cyclotron; Lawrence’s role in Manhattan Project; cyclotrons for synthesizing elements
98 Californium – Egypt
Landmine prohibition; neutron source for mine detection systems
99 Einsteinium – Rep. Marshall Islands
Ivy Mike test at Enewetak Atoll; first production element 99; nuclear testing, discovery of synthetic elements
100 Fermium – Italy
Enrico Fermi (with famous mistake in equation on board); Fermi’s role in Manhattan Project
101 Mendelevium – U.S.S.R.
Rutherford and Einstein; production of mendelevium via einsteinium bombardment with alpha particles
102 Nobelium – Hungary
10th anniversary JINR
103 Lawrencium – St. Vincent
Lawrence with first cyclotron; Lawrence’s role in Manhattan Project, cyclotrons for synthesizing elements
104 Rutherfordium – New Zealand
Electrons orbiting Rutherford’s head; Rutherford’s contributions to chemistry & physics, Nobel Prize
I guess I have to confess that I broke my self-imposed news blackout* of more than a month, to learn a little about the manhunt that ended in the capture of Luigi Mangione (the 26-year old man charged with killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last week with a ghost gun).
*No Twitter, no Washington Post, no MSNBC cable news, no NBC Nightly News, no Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), no National Public Radio (NPR), no King5 (local) news.
Just a little Seattle Times and New York Times, to read about the end of the war in Syria.
Andy Newman writes in the New York Times: “If someone you know is the subject of a nationwide manhunt and the authorities are desperately trying to learn the person’s name, are you under any legal obligation to come forward with it? The answer is, in a word, no.” (In this case, an employee at the McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized Mangione and called 911. Even so, it’s not clear the person will get the reward money. There is a complicated review process and in some cases the alleged criminal needs to be convicted first. And of course: very arrogant or stupid or careless of Mangione to show up in a public place such as a McDonalds, while a national manhunt is underway for him. )
The last batch of my on-paper stamps are getting dunked into the water here (to separate the stamps from the paper).
There he is, in the middle of the picture, The Big Crocodile (Afr. Die Groot Krokodil): nickname of South African State President Pieter Willem (P.W.) Botha in 1984. (Botha passed away in 2006). By 1985, push had came to SHOVE in South Africa’s national politics, with a State of Emergency in place (effectively a form of martial law), and thousands of demonstrators detained in jail. Botha declared in his famous Rubicon speech in August 1985 that he would not support majority rule or the participation of black South Africans in the national government. He fell ill in 1989, though, and was forced to hand over the reigns to F.W. de Klerk. De Klerk introduced radical policy changes that led to the dismantling of the apartheid system, and to the release of Nelson Mandela from jail (in February 1990), which paved the way for the country’s first multiracial elections in April 1994.
and Pakistan 
.
is from the pedestrian underpass to the rental car companies at the airport.
