BRUSSELS IS WONDERFUL

Toured Brussels, Belgium yesterday.

We were met at the Atomium by by Blue-bar Pigeon.

The Atomium was the centerpiece of the 1958 Brussels Word's Fair, also called Expo9 58. Stands 335 feet tall and clas with stainless steel., with the representation of an iron crystal cell magnified 165 billion times. It was scheduled to be torn down after the Expo, but kept being rescued year after year until 2004 when it was closed for two years to replace the aluminum sheets on the spheres with stainless steel. It is today a museum, art center and cultural destination.

Home of the European Union.

There are beggars and homeless in Brussels.

Even a Hawaii poke bowl restaurant.

Apparently, as you rent these, you can leave them anywhere.

Returned in time for lunch. Notice the color of the river? It is never blue. Sort of a murky greenish hue.

Returned for a truly great lunch of salad and corn soup with red wine, followed by fish and chips with beer and white wine.

Fortified, we went out on a chocolate demonstration tour.

Basically, cacao beans, sugar and milk.

You can even buy chocolate beer.

Came back for the salute to the staff reception.

At this point we were supersaturated with food and drinks, so our final supper, went to Arthur's for nachos, hamburger and beer.

Ah, but the night was not over, for we had to partake of the chocolate jubilee.

Mozart chocolate liquer.

We next fly to Barcelona to board the Regent Seven SeasVoyager.

Comments

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...

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...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

Search This Blog