I was on my way to completing Part 3 of the series on My Family, when I instead thought I would rather today tell the story of Tony Bennett. About that title, he actually passed away in 2023, but if he lived, he would have turned 100 last month. Was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in New York City in 1926.  Father ailed, so the family grew up in poverty. Began singing at the age of 10, the year his father passed away. At 13 was a singing waiter in Italian restaurants in New York City. Drafted into the army near end of World War II, and spent some time in the European front line he would later described as a front-row seat in hell.  Several times escaped death.  Left the military as a Private First Class. Pearl Bailey and Bob Hope helped Tony get started in 1949, with Hope suggesting a shortened name, Tony Bennett. At the age of 24, signed to Columbia Records in 1950, with Mitch Miller producing and Percy Faith providing the orchestral arrangement, released in 1951 was Bec...

Here is something I did not expect, from  NBC News : A majority of people in the U.S have had Covid-19 at least once — likely more than 70% of the country , White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha said on Thursday, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many have been infected multiple times.   Let me do some math.  So far, the U.S. has had a little more than  92 million COVID-19 cases.   Our population is 335 million, so I calculated 28%, which is far lower than the 70% cited by Dr. Jha. But the  World Health Organization  reported in April that up to 65% of Africans have been infected by SARS-CoV-2.  If this is true, the continent had 97 times more cases than reported!!! Further, the global average should be 16 times higher! There is no mention of how asymptomaticity factored into the above. So if you multiply the actual covid cases by 16, that would mean that the average person in the USA actually was infe...

Well, the Tokyo Olympics will end today   (already Sunday Tokyo time ).  The Final Ceremonies air at 7AM EDT ( 1AM Hawaii time tonight ) tomorrow.   Left are the men's marathon in Sapporo and Japan vs USA in women's basketball.  Sure we won in men's basketball, and women's golf and water polo, but we lost to Japan in both the softball and baseball championship games.  Japan was strong, winning thirteen gold medals in judo and wrestling, the women especially, for they dominated in four of the six wrestling events.   So who won the most medals?  If it's only gold, then China.  Total?  USA.  On the other hand, using medals per million people, the leaders are: #1  San Marino:  88.4 #2  Bermuda:  16 #3  Grenada:  8.9 What about medals/million for the larger countries? New Zealand:  3.9 Australia:  1.7 Great Britain:  0.9 USA:  0.3 China:  0.06 Wasn't that surprising? What was th...