WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT IN 2023?

Odd-numbered years tend to be transitional. No Olympics, no national elections in the U.S. From mostly Wikipedia:

January.

1: Croatia will adopt the euro and become the 20th member of the Eurozone. First new entry since Lithuania in 2015.
1: Luis Lula da Silva will be sworn in as President of Brazil.
3: Republicans take over House of Representative with either:

Kevin McCarthy as speaker with a bare majority vote.
Kevin McCarthy with only a plurality, which will make leadership an impossible task.
No speaker at the beginning.
Boy, are the Republicans screwed up.

5: funeral for Pope Benedict XVI.

February: First light of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Also known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Vera Rubin is an American astronomer. Will have the largest digital camera of any telescope.
February: Ukraine will host a UN-backed peace summit around the end of the month.
April: Voyager 2 will overtake Pioneer 10 as the second-farthest spacecraft from Earth. Voyager 1 is the furthest away.
May 6: Coronation of Charles III and Camilla as King and Queen of the UK.

May 9-13: Eurovision Song Contest from Liverpool. Ukraine's Kalush Orchestra singing Stephania won the past year.
May 19: G7 in Kyoto.
July 20 - August 20: Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand...USA is favored at +300, which means they only have a 25% of prevailing.

September 8 - October 28: Men's Rugby World Cup in France. The favorites keep changing, and France, South Africa, England and New Zealand currently vie for the top.
October - November 26: Cricket World Cup in India. Not many reading this blog will watch, but India is the favorite, although England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Pakistan are competitive. All past members of Great Britain.

October 14: annular solar eclipse. But limited to portions of the Americas, North America in the west and South America up north.
November 30 to December 12: United Arab Emirates will host COP28 in Dubai. More fossil fuel lobbyists attended the Egypt COP27 this year than any single national delegation. It worked. These same lobbyists are linked to the oil and national gas industry of the UAE, so doubts are abundant. However, having spent some time there in November, I have a strong sense that the UAE absolutely wants to take a major leadership role in the ultimate transition to a future society. An example is Masdar City.
Sometime this year, India is projected to surpass China as the most populous country.

On the entertainment front:

From TIME:

The 49 Most Anticipated Movies of 2023. Arghhh...another Mission Impossible, John Wick, Little Mermaid...
The 10 Best Korean Dramas of 2022 to Watch on Netflix.

Or, in general, everything coming to Netflix in 2023.
From Rotten Tomatoes, the 35 most anticipated movies of 2023.

Got an hour? Here on You Tube are trailers of the best upcoming films of 2023. Starts with the next John Wick.
Coming to Broadway:

Pictures from Home with Nathan Lane.

Bad Cinderalla, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Another Sweeney Todd, this time with Josh Groban.
Bob Fosse's Dancin'.

The return of Camelot.
Remember the movie? Life of Pi on the stage.
Loosely based on a Scorsese film, New York, New York, partly composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Jessica Chastain stars in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House.
Summer, 1976 starring Laura Linney.

Using Britney Spears songs, Once Upon a One More Time.
Sure, this was coming for a long time...Back to the Future: The Musical.

Can you believe that this has never before played in New York? Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, after 70 years in London's West End. The enduring trap is that anyone can be the murderer.

You saw the movie with Gary Cooper 70 years ago, now, High Noon on Broadway.
Merrily We Roll Along with Daniel Radcliffe.

Oh, never before has there ever been two semi-final epics in the NCAA championship series. You can read the details elsewhere, but a very lucky Georgia plays a determined TCU in the final on January 9. This circus expands to 12 team in the 2024-25 season.

How best to start the year?

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 suspicio...

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...

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 a...

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