Time  magazine this morning had this article:   What are the Five Strongest Earthquakes Ever Recorded? #6 was, of course, that massive Russian Kamchatka earthquake of 8.8 magnitude just experienced at 8:25AM local time on July 30.  Amazingly enough, there was only one death, but this was a woman in Japan while evacuating.  So there was none caused by the earthquake itself.   There was another 8.8 earthquake,  Chile in 2010 , which killed around 600, including 25 still missing.  So there is a tie for #6.  I happened to be in Amsterdam, Netherlands that day, but still wrote an article for the Huffington Post entitled  Hawaii Tsunami?   You can click on that link to read the whole article, but I will provide a beginning here: I'm on an around the world odyssey, which you can follow through my   HuffPost postings . Well, my most exciting day is happening right in front of me watching the 8.8 Chile earthquake cataclysm on ...

  The top domestic earning film this weekend was  Superman . $196,616,498.  There have been dozens of  Superman films,  with 11 of them considered to be re-makes. #1 the weekend of July 4-6 was  Jurassic World:  Rebirth   $152,305,936. #1 the weekend of June 27-29 was  F1: The Movie   $124,133,275. The latest  Worldwide box office  ( in 100 million $, with Rotten Tomatoes rating in parentheses ): #1     Ne Zha 2   $1.90 or, $1.9 billion ( 96/99 ) #2      Lilo & Stitch   $0.99 ( 52/71 ) #3     A Minecraft Movie   $0.96 ( 47/85 ) #4     Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning   $0.58 ( 80/88 ) #5     How to Train Your Dragon   $0.56 ( 77/97 ) #6     Jurassic World: Rebirth   $0.53 ( 52/71 ). #7     Captain America: Brave New World   $0.42 ( 47/77 ) #8     F1: The Movie ...

This is the third and final part of our trip to France in 2019.  Part 1 was to  champagne country , Part 2  Bordeaux , and this Part 3 to Cognac, which is both a town ( 250 miles southwest of Paris ) and the highest form of brandy.  All bottles labeled Cognac are produced from grapes grown in this location.  The population of Cognac is around 19,000, but was as high at 22,000 in 1975. We only stayed two nights in Cognac, at what was then a new  Chais Monnet , one of the very finest hotels we have ever experienced.  Virtually adjacent are the grand four cognac companies, Martel, Hennessey, Courvoisier and Rémy Martin.  I picked this hotel because Rémy Martin is just across the street, where we had made a special appointment to get a private tour.  These four make 93% of all the cognac drunk.   We arrived by train.  Every major train station has a taxi stand, right?  Nope.  We waited for 15 minutes, and finally got some...