Notes From All Over -- The Afternoon-Interrupted Edition -- June 21, 2021

Happening now: huge rain storm / thunder storm / electrical storm just hit north Texas. If this was forecast, I completely missed it. I was finishing my tenth lap in the pool when I hightailed it out of there. But if forecast, I completely missed it and yet we know the global temperature will rise two degrees a hundred years from now. LOL. 

EVs: as we've said many, many times, no one has thought this through, link here. What's the penetration rate of EVs in California. Maybe 0.001%. And that few already overwhelms the grid. Has anyone thought this through?

Great photo:

If not the Bakken, this is exactly what the Bakken looks like.

Princess Leia's hair-do: Ms Carrie Fisher jokes about her parietal buns - hair-do in the Star Trek series. Interestingly, that hair-do looks a lot like the hair-do Audrey Hepburn had in Love in the Afternoon, as seen in the orchestra scene in which she plays a flute, I believe. 

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Amazon Vs Walmart

Data points (link here: https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/amazon-to-surpass-walmart-largest-us-retailer):

• not sure when, this year, next, the next year? But Amazon is on track to surpass Walmart as the nation's largest retailer;
• 2020, during the lockdown: Amazon posted a profit of $21.3 billion, compared to $11.6 billion in 2019;
• Amazon: 1Q21 profit more than tripled from a year ago;
• Amazon: 1Q21 posted revenue of more than $100 billion, the second quarter in a row to pass that milestone;
• in the first three months of this year, a profit of $8.1 billion; last year? $2.5 billion.
• EPS: $15.79 vs forecast of about $9.00 per share
• today, sudden storm, downpour -- do I go out in this weather to shop? Not on your life -- I'll click-order on Amazon.com.

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Word For The Day

Plectrum.

Guitar pick.

From Bettany Hughes, Helen of Troy, c. 2005, p. 138:

The ancient world credited Sappho with beign the first both to speak directly about love and to describe eros as a 'bitter-sweet' experience (in fact she describes it as glukopikors, sweet-bitter), as well as inventing the plectrum and creating a new musical mode later used by tragic poets.

See also, Music in Ancient Greece: The Later Years. Link here.