The Luminara departed the Port of Saigon, and is heading for the Port of Danang.  Tomorrow will be an at-sea day. Lunch was at Mistral.  Basically, Antipasto Misto, Truffle Fries and Sausage Pizza, with white and red wines, plus beer. Did not do much shipwise, for it was beginning to get a bit rough at sea.  Dinner at Haesu Bit began with a sake pouring and Pho.  Also, tuna and hamachi sashimi. Decided to watch TV in our stateroom tonight because it was too dangerous to walk around, and expected to get worse.  My lowest number of steps/day since I got my pedometer.  Only 901 steps. Just finished reading the 2024  Eruption , by Michael Crichton and James Patterson.   I reviewed this novel last year. .  Took me a long time because I finally got around to it this summer, and, through my iPhone, only read a few pages when I was waiting around for something.  Took me many months to complete. I am now reading two books: A soft-back, ...

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 ...

I stopped buying real books around a decade ago.  I have nevertheless continued reading, several of them/year, but to my iPhone, which also works on my iPad.  It is not the same.  Convenient, but different. Every so often, one enters a transition, as for example, leaving home to college, or retiring.  Recently, I finished  The Three Body Problem  ( a Chinese novel I'll report on soon ), and began reading  Eruption . ( a novel about a Hawaii volcano ).  Also during this period, I finished watching two Netflix series,  OA  and  Zero Day .   Next?  I have a problem, which I'll explain later. Michal Crichton passed away in 2008, but I noticed this  facebook comment by someone named Michael Crichton .  Another kind of transition? Crichton’s work often examines the dangers of advanced technology spiraling out of human control, a theme that aligns closely with Zero Day ’s premise. In Prey, Jurassic Park, Sphere, and The...