THE GENESIS OF SIMPLE SOLUTIONS FOR PLANET EARTH AND HUMANITY

On this Sunday, in my 17th year of this blog, I thought, my life is now not as exciting as in the past. While I did last month return from a nearly two-month long trip that took us from Honolulu to Seattle (by air); then a very long cruise through the Panama Canal to Southhampton, UK; another flight to Amsterdam, Netherlands; a European Christmas Cruise to Budapest; flight to Zurich for a couple of days; then a 27 hour return by plane to Honolulu; certainly more than virtually every one of you reading this has accomplished the past year, relatively, my earlier experiences were more memorable.

So I thought, over the next few months, I would select a few of my past postings to re-share with you, utilizing mostly my nostalgia day, Tuesday, for this purpose. But I'll begin today with a grand summary.

My first blog was published on 29April2008. How long ago is that?

Go back to your first day of kindergarten.
Imagine how long it took to get you to become a senior in college.
In blog time, I'm only three months from graduation with a degree.

However, while you had weekends, holidays and vacation periods

I've published a posting every day from 29April2008.
Well, there were a couple days when I couldn't, like when I spent time China. Google, which handles this blog, has had a feud with China since 2010. So in my China trips I've sometime published through a Russian site (and that was an experience that will appear as a nostalgic return, for the comments were scarily incredible), or was able to find a hotel brave enough to help me overcome the ban, illegally. As I think about this now.....that was pure stupidity, just for this blog.
Amazingly enough, for the past almost 17 years, I've never been too sick or incapacitated to post something, even when I one day had vertigo.

My posting today will be number 6229.

As of earlier today, I had 3,456,937 visits, so dividing by the appropriate number of days, there have been 555 people/day from somewhere reading this blog.
Last month, the average was 917/day.

However, the number of views, as counted, changed a decade or so ago when I stopped paying Google to keep track of them, causing the number to significantly drop. So the 3.5 million views could well be much higher.

221 "countries" have visited this site.

Yes, there are only 195 official countries, with 193 in the United Nations.
But entities like Antarctica and small islands as part of other countries are official domains, and this number is close to 250.
So perhaps 25 or so places have yet to see this blog.
48% of visitors are from the USA.

However, #2 is Singapore at 15%, which is a surprise because it is only 1.8% the population of the U.S. There must be someone there sending this site to his /her links.
#3 is the UK with 4%, #4 Germany 2.3%, and #5 India 2.3%. If you look at the top of the right column, this blog site can be translated into most languages. But you need to first find this site, so the leading countries pretty much are English-speaking.

My first posting was on 29April2008. Very simple.

TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2008

SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth and Humanity

WINDWARD OAHU
BOOK SIGNING

SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for
Planet Earth (www.SimpleSolutionsBook1.com)
and Humanity (www.SimpleSolutionsBook2.com)

Bookends in Kailua

Sometime this Summer

About that right column.

TRANSLATE TO YOUR LANGUAGE

Translate

Below the language translation, should you want to find a topic I have addressed, just type in that term and press search.

This blog emanates from Honolulu.
RADIO GARDEN

Long ago I inserted Radio Garden because it is so fascinating to listen to thousands of radio stations from around the world.

The larger dots refer to larger cities.
Click on one of them and that station will play.
Click on Explore, and other stations from that city will show.
Search, and something else happens. Wonderful.
You will find stations you want to keep, which is done by making it a FAVORITE.

Most Popular Posts

For the longest time, the day when the most visitors (3,356) clicked on this blog site was 27February2010 on THE CHILE EARTHQUAKE. Why? Probably because this posting was linked to my Huffington Post article of that day reporting on HAWAII TSUNAMI. Natural disasters tend to increase readership. However, on 6March2017, THE WONDERS OF ALCOHOL drew 6498. Further, too, on 6June2017, the one-month tally of visitors was 70,219, or 2340/day. However, on 18December2018, a record 27,775 people read that posting. On 22April2019, after 13,000 and 19,000 pings the previous days, a second all-time high of 27,318 was reached. The daily average has been about 500/day.

More on the Most Popular Posts

#1 has long been THE WONDER OF QATAR. Why, I don't know.
Just noticed that this column entry is keeping up with times, for the bottom posting, THE 60'S: GIRL GROOVES, now has a higher number than a couple that previously ranked higher. That number represents the number of times this site has been visited for that particular posting.. Click on GIRL GROOVES. Great songs, if you long for music of those days.

The section on Viewers and Visitors shows the 221 countries. Note, however, that the total pageviews is only 1.15 million, while the number at the very top of this pace shows total pageviews at 3,458,063 (the number I saw when writing this posting). Why the difference? I guess what I quit paying for is not related to the overall viewership.

Next, GLOBAL WARMING.

This blog site began with energy and the environment, my professional specialties, mostly because one of the books I wrote, published in 2007, had to do with my my knowledge of these fields.
When another book was published on topics I had little knowledge of, I thought, oh heck, why not just comment on anything and everthing, so the blog expanded.

Noticed that the PRICE OF OIL site does not work. Will need to repair it.
For BETTING ODDS CALCULATOR, just click on Go to.
Want to know the current value of money? Click on Measuring Worth - Relative Value of U.S. Dollars.
CONSUMER PRICE INDEX AND INFLATION RATE. As indicated.
Next, everything you will want to know about oil.
ALL TIME NUMBERS. I need to update this. For example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average record close occurred on 4December2024 at 45,014.04, with an intraday all time high of 45,073.63.

You can find earlier versions of these postings from BLOG ARCHIVES.
The ODDS CALCULATOR is redundant. It also appears earlier in the right column. Need to delete it.
Want to know how fat you are? Just type in your weight and height. You can change kg to pounds and metres to inches.
Finally ABOUT ME.

So over the next few months, I will weekly look back to some of my more consequential postings, mostly in chronological order. In fact, I'll do the first one today, going back to 31March2009, when I was traveling in Japan on a roots search of my father's father: THE SEARCH FOR KENJIRO'S GRANDMOTHERS.

That colorful symbol came to be one day when I was looking at the family mon, and colorized it. There was a four-year period, from 2007 to 2010, when I wrote three books, each using this symbol on the front cover.

But returning to that posting of 31March2009, I went back to 1963 when I was a trainee at a sugar company in Kilauea, Kauai.

A very old man came up to me one day and said he had known my grandfather. My initial reaction was mild astonishment, as while I knew that my father had been born on Kauai, I don’t recall him talking much about his parents. That individual said my grandfather was involved with the Wainiha Powerhouse and was extraordinary, in that he was very well educated and served as a supervisor. Unfortunately, he died only a few years after arriving and was buried up on the hill above the town. My family knew I was on this island. Why had no one said that I should visit my grandfather’s burial spot, for the culture of even Hawaii Japanese, was to honor the dead. Then again, maybe someone did and I did not pay any attention.

In September of 2005, Pearl and I visited Misa Tamura, the son-in-law of that older gentleman, to find the gravestone on Kauai. Misa, himself, was well into his 80’s by then, and he asked if we also wanted to see my grandfather’s powerhouse, for somehow, the community even then, a century later, referred to the site as Takahashi’s powerhouse. The Wainiha Powerhouse was commissioned in 1906, and today produces 4 MW with essentially the same incoming pipes and generation equipment. Around this time, my brother, Stan, found the earlier photo and sent me a note that the name on the gravestone was Kenjiro Takahashi. Thus, I learned for the first time that I was named after this grandfather, for my middle name is Kenji.

For the record, that hydropower plant is today (2025), nearly 120 years after it was commissioned, still producing 4 MW. But to continue.

There were still huge doubts on what was real until I had the good fortune to sit next to Elsie and David Ikegami at a 50th year Wedding Anniversary party of a mutual friend. David was born in Utah, was a Mormon, but lived most of his life in Hawaii. At the age of 80, he ran one of those Mormon family centers famous for conducting these root searches. I visited his office and passed on all the information I had, which was not much. Within two weeks his staff found a nine page document signed by the Secretary of the Territory of Hawaii showing that Kenjiro came to Kauai from America, was originally from Hokkaido, Japan, and served as a luna, or supervisor, at the Kilauea Plantation. He fell at the hydro site in 1906 and died in the same year that the powerhouse commenced operations. Well, with most of what I thought was largely made up now turning out to be true, the search was intensified with a trip to Utashinai, his home village, and will continue for Kenjiro’s grandmothers in Akita on Honshu and Otaru, just outside of Sapporo. Even if I find nothing else, there is enough already to write a book, tracing this possible female samurai Robin Hood to me. At this time, this one looms as a novel.

So what did I find in my subsequent roots search? Was there a female samurai in family? The unusual nature of my roots was that every Japanese person I know in Hawaii and USA in general, had parents or grandparents who came from Honshu and Kyushu, mostly from around Hiroshima. My father's father came from Hokkaido. A lot more to come about how all that led to my life where I have flown more than 2 million miles just on Star Alliance and been on special around the world trips more than a dozen times.

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...

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