PEERLESS PLANES, QEII, BLT AND BTS

The largest airplane, Stratolaunch (by wingspan), flew for the second time last month, a decade after first imagined by someone I mentioned this past Sunday, Paul Allen, who with Bill Gates founded Microsoft. Unfortunately, Allen never saw it take flight. Read the details here.

That plane will be reminiscent of Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, the wooden (made of birch, not spruce) Flying Boat that was originally designed to ferry American troops to Europe to avoid being sunk by German submarines. It was six times larger than any aircraft of its time, and made only one flight, in 1947. The plane can today be found, of all the places, in McMinnville, Oregon, where volunteers are trying to restore it.

Did you know the USA has a Doomsday Plane?

The following video indicates the power of Queen Elizabeth II. Donald Trump is not mentioned, but the Queen cannot be arrested and pays her taxes...even though she legally does not need to do this. She is the largest landowner in the world with 6.6 billion acres.

The Queen makes around $100 million/year and has a net worth of $88 billion, only #5 of royal leaders. The House of Saud, now headed by Mohammed bin Salman, is the wealthiest at $1.4 trillion. No wonder we are so deferential to him. But here is that clip about QEII:

Next, the story of BLT:

They lived together as brothers for 15 years, but Leo the lion died in 2016 and Shere Khan the tiger in 2018. You can still visit Baloo the bear at Noah's Ark Animal Sanctuary in Locust Grove, Georgia. He weighs 800 pounds and likes Tootsie Pop and Oreos. You know, I always thought the male lion had an impressive mane of hair around the neck. I guess not.

BTS just released Butter. Watch it hit #1 on Billboard. Already, there have been 137 million You Tube views. Maybe not for most of you, but you gotta admit it's more bearable than Gangnam Style of nearly a decade ago, which has now received more than 4 billion pings.

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A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicious and troublesome. This strain has also been spreading in

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics. Thursday was my pandemic day for years. Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments. All these subvariants derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms. One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell. From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant, BA.2.86, also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to lose hair for several months. This is caused by stress more than anythi

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These are held every five years, and there have only been

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