I saw the gate of this sprawling Orcas Island property in real life once. The same might be true for its former owner, Oprah Winfrey.
I saw the gate of this sprawling Orcas Island property in real life once. The same might be true for its former owner, Oprah Winfrey. Charles Mudede

Welcome to the age of mask confusion. Rich Smith writes: "At a press conference Wednesday morning, Governor Jay Inslee said Washington will continue masking up in schools and will also ask people to consider masking in other conditions consistent with CDC recommendations." The only thing that Inslee's conference generated was confusion about masks. Wearing them is your decision? So, the situation is not that serious? Can a place throw me out if I don't wear a mask? And so on, and so on. But it is becoming clear that masks will be needed in the long-term fight against COVID. All of us should wear them inside supermarkets, stores, restaurants, gyms, and what have you. Just look at the numbers. At present, Seattle, a city with nearly 80 percent of its eligible residents fully vaccinated, has a higher infection rate than it did during the first lockdown period (March to June of 2020).

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Google doesn't need a crystal ball to see how this new Delta-driven surge is going to play out in the near future. According to the New York Times, the tech giant, which has a pretty big footprint in Seattle, has required "vaccines for employees" and pushed plans to return to its offices to October. Expect most companies to do the same.

Compassion Seattle's agenda (to add more misery to the lives of the homeless) will be on the November ballot. It must be said again and again that those who hate on poor people because they can do nothing about rich people have no taste whatsoever. Theirs is the morality, the mode, the sensitivity of a hyena.

What is this? Drones instead of fireworks? I like this idea. There would be less pollution, less noise, and more magic. Drones would be to fireworks what the T-1000 was to the T-800.

Washington State as a shortage of... license plates. Now, this kind of thing did not happen when Trump was in power. And had he stayed in power, we all would have had license plates made of gold. That's why they stole the election. They wanted to give us these socialist paper plates.

Shoreline showing its true colors? KIRO 7: "A Black-owned coffee shop in Shoreline that’s faced attacks and racist threats before was targeted once again." Windows smashed, cash register taken, but no racist messages this time.

What's happening Alaska? Right, that's happening: A Trumpy candidate for Senate showing she has it in her to break the law just like her master.

As Jasmyne Keimig posted yesterday, Oprah Winfrey made a big profit on the house she bought on Orcas Island like only yesterday (2018). It is indeed telling that her homes constitute a "impressive... portfolio". It's also likely she only visited her house and the island, which is beautiful and has great places to eat and drink, once. And she didn't even spend the night in the house. She just saw it, said something or other about it, and left it. Billionaires got to billionaire.

It's a little weird to see Kunta Kinte running the show that, for many Americans, is the very definition of brainy. Kunta Kinte ("stolen from Africa and brought to America") could not read.

Rubble City
Rubble City Charles Mudede

Today, I did a post about the great rubble that lasted for about a week at the site of what used to be the University District's University Temple United Methodist Church. In that post, however, I forgot to include this image of a man among the ruins. I captured it on July 20, at around 6 pm. The image reminded me of these and other lines in what is the first poem (first published in 1857) ever about gentrification, Charles Baudelaire's "Le Cygne" ("The Swan").

As I walked across the new Carrousel.
— Old Paris is no more (the form of a city
Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart);
I see only in memory that camp of stalls,
Those piles of shafts, of rough hewn cornices, the grass,
The huge stone blocks stained green in puddles of water,
And in the windows shine the jumbled bric-a-brac.

Only because the design of the University Temple United Methodist Church was Gothic: "Give me the ring!"