SPORTS AND SPELLING FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE

If you're into ice hockey, the Tampa Bay Lightnings should prevail over the Montreal Canadiens this week. Tampa is becoming the nation's city of champions, for their Lightnings won the NHL last year too, while the NFL Bucs got the Super Bowl trophy this year. The Rays were American League baseball champs last year and are doing well this year. Their soccer Rowdies were Eastern Conference champions.

In the NBA the Phoenix Suns play the Milwaukee Bucks. The only time I report on hockey is during the Winter Olympics, and, even though I have few basketball fantasy teams, lost interest in the NBA this year and never even watched a game. The Suns are the favorites at -189 (65%).

On the other hand I've watched a whole lot of Major League Baseball. Coming mostly from Coors Field in Denver beginning on Sunday are All-Star Futures and Celebrity Softball games. Close by at the Colorado Convention Center will be the first round of the MLB draft. Then the highlight attraction will be the T-Mobile Home Run Derby at 8PM EDT Monday night featuring Shohei Ohtani. I reported his coming to America in 2016 and three years ago said he was already the most popular person in Japan. He could well develop into the top baseball player of all-time, and this week was the first player selected to play in the Tuesday All-Star Game as both hitter and pitcher. Never been done before.

Thursday at 8PM EDT on ESPN2 and ESPNU will be the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee. If you haven't recently watched this event, you must this time. They have made viewing fun, really. You have to experience it yourself to appreciate what I'm saying. ESPN, yes ESPN, thought long and hard about how to make this program enjoyable. They succeeded.

When you compare with something like American Idol where thousands compete to become the annual Idol, the spelling bee each year begins with 11 million children. This competition has been annually held since 1925, except for last year because of the pandemic.

I can predict that the winner will be a student whose parents are originally from India. Of course the champion every year since 2008 has been a South Asian American child. This year nine of the 11 finalists have parents with roots in India. This dominance began in 1985 when Balu Natarajan became the first to win. He recalls that in 1983, the first year he first made it to the finals, there were only six of Indian descent in a field of 137. That's Balu, who is now a physician, with his son Atman, who competed in the last Scripps Bee that was held in 2019, but was eliminated in the final round by misspelling "Hanseatic."

You ask why are India Indians so successful? First their natural language is English. Second, only the very best came to the USA. The first generation born in the U.S. tends to be particularly motivated for immigrants. We saw this in the 70's into the 80's when Vietnamese children won a lot of academic competitions like science fairs. Then when you factor in filial piety and the Oriental social structure, honed by after-school spelling schools, and driven by pride, you have an unbeatable combination.

If you're into tennis, the Wimbledon Women's finals will begin at 10AM EDT on Saturday, July 10, with Men's finals at the same time on Sunday. Unlike the NBA which has two new teams gunning for the championship, looks like these tennis matches will end up with favorites vying for the crown. Ashleigh Barty has +400 odds to win, while Novak Djokovic is a strong -265 favorite. So you again ask, what do those numbers mean? Go to the right column under ODDS CALCULATOR and CLICK ON THIS. Type in these numbers and get a winning probability of 20% for Barty and 73% for Djokovic.

Then, of course, from July 21 to August 8 are the Tokyo Olympic Games, where you can watch 339 events over 7000 hours. The opening ceremony will be held on Friday, July 23, at 7AM EDT, but softball and soccer begin on July 21. Tokyo is 13 hours ahead of New York. Everything will be livestreamed, but NBC will daily rebroadcast the major activities over a wide array of their network.

It's now appearing that Elsa will attain hurricane strength as she skirts by Tampa tonight, then moves north to make landfall tomorrow morning in the region around Cedar Key :

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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