THE THREE MOST IMPORTANT DAYS OF YOUR LIFE

I'm skipping the COVID-19 information today, for Monday deaths are always underreported.  To refresh your mind, though, typically these days, 6000 people in the world die, 1000 from the USA.  The pandemic has entered a dangerous new wave for the USA and World.  Yet, to place this tragedy in perspective, on Planet Earth yesterday:

• 120,595 died, with about 5% being COVID-19 deaths
• but 287,324 were born
• the net gain yesterday was 166,389, even with the 6,000 deaths
• people who died from hunger just yesterday:  23,167
• abortions yesterday:  117,000
• deaths from HIV/AIDS yesterday:  around 4,000
• deaths from cancer yesterday: 25,000
• traffic deaths yesterday:  3717

More than five times more people died from hunger than from COVID-19.  Some other data for your general knowledge, showing that life goes on:

• TV sets sold just today:  half a million
• cellular phones sold today:  5 million
• money spent just on video games today:  $222 million
• e-mails sent today:  201 billion
• blog posts today:  5.5 million (I'm just one in 5.5 million)
• Google searches today: 5.7 billion
• undernourished people:  0.847 billion
• overweight people:  1.7 billion

In other words, sure, this novel coronavirus has discombobulated the world economy.  However, is this a clue that, perhaps, population control could well be a bigger problem than this pandemic?  Or poverty?

Back to our own lives, have you voted yet?  If not, you must.  Today or tomorrow could be one of the three most important days of your life.  Huh, you say?  What if your lack of voting was the one that made Donald Trump king for life in the USA?

What are  some other contenders?

• #1  Day you were born.  What are the odds of you being you?  1 in 10 to the 34th power, according to one calculation.
• #2  The day you die.
• #3  Maybe Mark Twain said this, but the second most important is the day you find out why you were born.  But you'll never ever know until you die, and maybe not ever if you're not religious.  Then too, we could all be random accidents.

Sure, there are other potentially monumentally significant days like when the world attains world peace, and the like.  Also too, what about marriage, meeting your soul person, graduation and other things more personal?  

Finally, a commercial:  when you vote, you should do so for Joe Biden, and a Democratic senatorial candidate, if nothing else than because Trump is a coronavirus vector:

...researchers at Stanford University have turned Trump’s rallies into a case study in wrongness. Looking just at rallies held between June 20 and Sept. 22, they came up with a total of 30,000 cases. That means Donald Trump isn’t just ignoring the pandemic, or even encouraging herd immunity. He’s the nation’s single largest vector of disease.

Can you imagine now six weeks later how many more got infected?  In his final swing through battleground states, most are just about at their peak of contagion, with the crowd mostly not wearing masks and wildly cheering, spewing this novel coronavirus to everyone around them.

Thus, the next three days, beginning with today, could well turn out to be the most important ones for your whole life.  Don't be a Donald Trump and screw them up.

I'm now at #58:

• Climb Ev'ry Mountain:  The Sound of Music
• When You Wish Upon a Star:  Pinnochio

The 1959 Sound of Music is another Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein musical, this one about the von Trapp family in 1938 Austria.  The production starred Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.  Oscar Hammerstein died of stomach cancer nine months after the premiere.  The film (RT:  83/91) with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer came in 1965 and won five Academy Awards. 

Climb Every Mountain stands out for me because of perseverence, rainbows, dreams and what have inspired me all my life.  I might add, though, that here is rating that places at #1 for the film Edelweiss, one of my favorite karaoke songs.  Climb Every Mountain is #9.

Pinocchio is a 1940 Disney film featuring When You Wish Upon a Star (RT:  100/73), sung by Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket. This you did not know, but Edwards is also known as Ukelele Ike.  Incidentally, there was an Italian version of Pinocchio (RT:  91/49) which was released last year, without the song, but with Oscar winner Roberto Benigni as Geppetto (Pinocchio's "father"), and is not animated.

When You Wish Upon a Star was written by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington for the film.  It is the representative song of The Walt Disney Company and won the Academy Award for best song in 1940, the year I was born.  Combined with what has driven my life, wishing upon stars and regularly dreaming impossible dreams--like the Hydrogen Society, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Blue Revolution--in many ways this song could well by my life anthem.  So, of course, it is #58.

All of a sudden, we have Category 4 strength Hurricane Eta at 130 MPH, just about ready to make landfall over Nicaragua.  

This ties the 2005 season, which did not quite get up to Eta, but had the same number of named storms.  Although the track above shows this hurricane turning back into the Caribbean, a Pacific Ocean emergence is possible.

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