But I'll start with the New York Knicks.  According to the New York Times , the Knicks gave their city something new, IMPOSSIBLE JOY .   It is different because New York’s mass unifying events tend to imply unbearable tragedy: 9/11, Sandy, Covid. Their best player, Jalen Brunson, was small (for basketball), underestimated (by his last team), conditioned (by his father, a former Knick) to know that winning here would mean more than winning anywhere else. This place has cheated bankruptcy, built (and rebuilt) towers, raised Jay-Z and J. Lo and J-Seinfeld. It has been told to drop dead and refused. It has elected a billionaire and a socialist and a Bill de Blasio. It has processed Donald Trump as a 20-something curiosity, a chattering pooh-bah, a steak salesman, a defendant and a president whose attendance in Game 3 had Knicks maniacs of all political persuasions wondering about an executive curse. Then from Sports Illustrated : Some of the greatest athletes in sports history hav...

  I've noticed that reading of my blog peaks during my travels.  We earlier this year had an around the world journey I called   OMGA for Our Memorable Global Adventure .   So today, an alert as to when you can return for three future trips. In a little more than a month, we leave for Europe to catch a European River Christmas Cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest.  Most people just take a long flight east to Europe.  Ours will be a cruise from Seattle, through the Panama Canal, to Southampton, England. Then in the Spring of 2025, we fly to Osaka for the World Expo. During the Winter of 2025, we are contemplating the following extravaganza, I call Our Monumental Epic Global Adventure, OMEGA. We would like to catch the Queen Mary 2's around the world trip.  We might need to leave the ship in Los Angeles.  It's possible that we won't be able to disembark in Honolulu.  However, we can fly back to Hawaii.  So three truly monumental trips, t...

My blog of 21 June 2011 was entitled:   A WORLD POPULATION OF 7 BILLION .  I went on to say: If there has been any criticism of my books, it is that  I have ignored the most important parameter:  the world population .   I didn't have a full chapter dedicated to this topic in any of my publications, and not one of my 100+ Huffington Post articles treated this subject. Why? ... mostly because there was not much I could add to the subject than to say that population growth will reverse once the world becomes economically prosperous, for then, the central government will have something like Social Security in place and parents won't need to have many children to take care of them at old age . It took us from our beginnings in Africa, perhaps 300,000 years ago, to finally reach a population of 1 billion in 1804.  218 years later, we last year reached 8 billion.  However, the  good news is that the time it takes to double our population is fi...