TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR 2025: DONALD TRUMP

I decided to skip summarizing our city stops on our 60-day journey. You can read those postings at Seattle, Chihuly Museum, Amsterdam and Zurich.

As would be expected, Time's 2024 Person of the Year will be Donald Trump. Is it because he was the most fabulous individual of the year?

Nope. To quote.

A person, group, idea, or object that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year".^[2]

Time points out that controversial figures such as Adolf Hitler(1938); Joseph Stalin (1939 and 1942); Nikita Khrushchev (1957); and Ayatollah Khomeini(1979) have also been granted the title for their impact on events.^[16]
Here, read the Time 2January1939 article about Adolf Hitler.
Turns out that the just-elected president of the USA is now ALWAYS the Person of the Year.

Other noteworthy selections.

The first person of the year was Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He won for flying his monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, from Garden City, New York to Paris, France.
Franklin D. Roosevelt made it three times.
He was the first U.S. president so honored, in 1932, and since then every new first-time elected president automatically is now being so named.

Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford are the only ones not to be so recognized.
First female was Wallis Warfield Simpson in 1936.
In 1983, the computer was selected. First inanimate object.
Until 1999, was called Man of the Year.
Youngest person was 16-year old Greta Thunberg in 2019.
I predict that Global Warming and AI will be named Thing of the Year by Time during the next three years.
Interesting that both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were selected in 2020 for beating Donald Trump to the White House. First time a Veep was named too.
Want to mention that the 2021 Person was Elon Musk for becoming the richest in the world.
Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine were selected in 2022.
Then last year it was Taylor Swift.

Speaking of Taylor Swift, earlier this week in Vancouver she ended her 149-show Eras Tour that grossed more than $2 billion in 2023 and 2024.

There should have been 152, for three shows were cancelled in Vienna to avoid a possible terrorist plot.

Spent 484 hours (or 20 straight days) on stage. The average performance was 3 hours and 15 minutes. Just one song, All Too Well, took up 25 hours.

That was the 10-minute version in Singapore.
In 2021 she re-released this song, and doubled the length to just over 10 minutes. This broke Don McLean's American Pie for the longest #1 song on Billboard. Sent him a bouquet of flowers. He had held that record for 50 years.

To train for the tour, she ran on the treadmill everyday while singing the entire set list out loud.
21 countries.
Kicked-off on 17March2023 in Glendale, Arizona.
Became the girlfriend of Kansas City's Travis Kelce, (that's him above on the Eras Tour at Wembley Stadium) and in February 2024 flew back from Tokyo to attend the Super Bowl to watch Kelce.

Ah, she just missed Kelce's performance this past Sunday in K.C., for she was completing her Eras Tour in Vancouver that day. She had attended ALL home games this year.

Next Sunday, the Chiefs play at the Browns. She hasn't gone to any away games this season, and probably won't on December 15. Yet, she reaches 35 on December 13, so who knows for sure.

Odds are high that she will go to the home game against the Texans on December 21, for she has said that she plans to hibernate with Travis for a while.
Together, they are worth $1.59 billion, although one report shows she alone is at $1.6 billion, with Kelce at $90 million.

These are her 12 #1 songs on Billboard.

Swift had of course endorsed Joe Biden, and this following image turned out not to be true. In fact, after Donald Trump trounced Kamala Harris, Kelce attempted to mend the future relationship between Swift and Trump.

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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