Yesterday I talked about Powerball.    Last night a ticket sold in Altadena, California won $2.04 billion .  The winning numbers were 10, 33, 41, and 56 for the white balls, and 10 for the red Powerball.  The previous record was $1.586 billion won by three ticketholders.  The announcement was 10 hours late because of a problem with processing sales.  How's this for luck:  the odds of winning were 1 in 292.2 million. Apparently, if you got infected with the COVID-19 virus, and took  Paxlovid , doing so reduced your risk of long COVID.  There is no data on how well this treatment works if you haven't had this disease. and later get infected. Would be worth a study.  Learn more about Paxlovid by clicking  here  and  here .  There is that matter of rebound that has occurred to some. Yesterday my posting seemed to be the only source of optimism for Democrats.  But who am I, plus I've never done this before.  Much will depend how much the Trump-effect affects those marginal 10% R

11March2011 was a pivotal day for Japan.  It is probable that the country won't completely recover for many decades yet to come.  The Great Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear cataclysm might have forever changed the destiny of the nation.  While the tsunami killed most of those who died, the subsequent Fukushima nuclear catastrophe  will cost a TRILLION DOLLARS and take perhaps a half century to clean-up . This is my third nostalgic Tuesday on this subject, and I'm not sure when this series will end, for  I arrived in Tokyo from Bangkok the day after the event , then soon thereafter felt it was too dangerous to stay, so I  escaped to Beijing , which was my posting of last week.  After a couple of days, I thought the radiation problem was not as serious as earlier thought, so I thought I would carefully return by first staying a few days in Seoul. It occurred to me then, and it weighs heavier today, that, while the entire populace of Japan was suffering, my style of reportin

Before getting into nostalgia, who is  new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ? 42-year old Hindu born in Southampton whose parents of Indian descent migrated from East Africa in the 1960s. Went to Oxford, then got an MBA from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar. While at Stanford, met his wife Akshata Murthy, daughter of Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, who founded Infosys. Rishi and Akshata have two children and are an almost billionaire couple, the 222nd richest people in Britain. First British Asian and Hindu to become prime minister. While relatively young, David Cameron in 2010 was only a year older at 43, while the first PM, Robert Walpole in 1721 was 44, William Cavendish in 1756 was 36, Charles Watson-Wentworth was 35, Augustus FitzRoy in 1768 was 33 and William Pitt the Younger ( right ) in 1783 was 24.  Winston Churchill in 1940 was 65, Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was 53 and Tony Blair in 1997 was 43. According to  Time  magazine: He bears none of the clownish antics