First I'm intrigued by the sudden popularity of this blog site.  Visitors: All Time 8307449  Today 774535  Yesterday 882129  This Month 2796190  Last Month 653676  In other words: 8.3 million viewers since this blog began 18 years ago. 0.775 million today, which has a few hours to go. 0.882 million yesterday. 2.8 million this month. 0.654 million last month. My first blog was on at the end of April 2008, so this site is now a little more than 18 years old. 18 divided into 8.3 million gives 1263 visitors per day. Yesterday, there were 0.88 million visitors, a record that will be broken today. Could well reach 1 million viewers today, which would be 792 times more than my daily average. For reasons I can't comprehend, this blog site has gone viral. There was a jump in visitors during our recent 50-day trip to the USA and Canada. Historically, I do get more viewers on a trip. But we returned almost 3 weeks ago, and the exponential viewership began this week. My blog postings ...

For nostalgia Tuesday, I'm going back 15 years to 7October2020.  Why?  Mostly because I woke up this morning and watched Debby Boone singing   You Light Up My Life ,   which ranked   #92 in my Top 100 list.   More specifically, because on the screen was something about her mother-in-law Rosemary Clooney.  I did not not know they were related.  That photo to the left is of Debby with her husband Gabriel Ferrrer and Rosemary. About 7October2010, from  Wikipedia : A lot of deaths in the Middle East. Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize in Literature. A lost Vivaldi flute concerto,  Il Gran Mogol , is  found in Edinburgh.    The other three pieces of the quartet remain lost. Written in the late 1720s or early 1730s. How did it get to Scotland? Listen to  Il Gran Mogol . I love Baroque music, a genre created between 1600 and 1750 in Europe.  Prominent composers include Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, ...

Well,  Time  magazine was right.   The Trump-Putin summit fizzled, and ended earlier than expected .  Worse,  Putin won .  Their next session will be in Moscow.  When?  And, in case you were wondering, Putin is 5'7" and Trump 6'3". Way back in 2014,  Guinness World Records deemed the Got Talent franchise the most successful reality TV format worldwide.   At that time, there 58 countries showing their own version of the program.  The whole concept began with  Britain's Got Talent,  created by Simon Cowell.  However, disputes delayed their release, and the first to air was  America's Got Talent  in 2006.  They both run during the summer. The latest ranking  (13August2025) , however, shows the following: #    1  Idol franchise  3.2 billion, 23 years,  2002 to 2025, but did not air in 2017. #    2  Got Talent franchise  500 million in 190 markets, 20 ye...