BELMONT JEWEL and UFOs???

I've previously featured Mint Julep from the Kentucky Derby and Black-Eyed Susan from the Preakness Stakes. Tomorrow is the final race of the Triple Crown. The drink of the Belmont Stakes is the Belmont Jewel:

1.5 oz Woodford Reserve®
2 oz Lemonade
1 oz Pomegranate Juice
Orange Zest
Shake vigorously with ice and serve in a rocks glass with ice. Garnish with a lemon.

In case you didn't know, Grenadine is made from pomegranate juice, and is sometimes mentioned as the ingredient in this drink.

Wait a minute, I searched further, and this source said that The Belmont Crown was the official drink:

Peach Orange Ketel One Botanical Vodka
Elderflower
Grapefruit Sour
Pressed Lemon
Sparkling water

What is elderflower? Sure, it's a flower, but apparently it is also brewed into a kind of cordial, with or without alcohol. But I went to other sources, and they all sided with the Belmont Jewel. So I'll skip the Belmont Crown.

What is the cuisine of the Belmont Stakes? This is a big deal, for they hire 1300 staffers to work with 80 visiting managers and chefs from around the country. There will be 725 sale locations. Basically, they serve everything, including hot dog, pizza, pretzel, hamburgers, cheesesteaks and so forth. But also things like:

Arepas (right) corn flatbread from South America.
Belmont beef tenderloin (in a fancy sandwich).
Belmont charcuterie (like a sausages in bun and stuff)

Bacon bourbon caramel popcorn (right). I bought the ingredients and will attempt to make this tomorrow.
American farro salad of tomato, feta cheese, cucumber and basil.
Manja pasta ...or spaghetti and meatballs, with Pecorino Romano cheese.
Roasted chickpea and tomato salad, with a Middle Eastern flair.

The Belmont Stakes itself is a sidelight, but Essential Quality, who was the Kentucky Derby favorite, but finished fourth, is again the favorite at 2:1 Also prominent is Rombauer at 3:1, who won the Preakness. No Bob Baffert horse, for he is currently under investigation. This the longest of the three races, so stamina will make a difference. Post time is 6:49PM EDT. There will be rain on Friday, but Saturday is expected be mostly clear with a high of 82 F.

Japan is what it is because of how children are schooled:

But one shortcoming is that individuality is compromised. Here is an article that talks about 25 kids that made $1 million before graduating from high school. None is from Japan.

Then there is 9-year old Ryan Kaji. However he is only half Japanese, from his father, and half Vietnamese, from his mother. But he grew up in the USA, and started Ryan's World at the age of 3, and, using You Tube, is now worth $50 million.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of 16 was a fry cook at MacDonalds. He became the richest man in the world. Jack Ma? He failed the entrance exam at the Hangzhou Teacher's Institute, and got rejected by Harvard's business school 10 times....TEN TIMES, which shows he has something called persistence. He founded the Chinese version of Amazon, known as Alibaba. However, Ma is only worth around $50 billion. Bezos is approaching $300 billion.

Oh, got to add one more bit of news. The Pentagon finally released its UFO report. No evidence of aliens...but did not say the various sightings were definitely not...whatever that means. They looked at 120 incidents over the past 20 years.

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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