Last week I posted a two-part series on red wines.  On this nostalgic Tuesday, I will make it a five-part series with a visit I made in 2019 to France, where we tasted champagne and Bordeaux wine and cognac.  Parts 4 and 5 will be posted on subsequent Tuesdays. But first, a few newsworthy items. As my  blog expressed yesterday , President Donald Trump has transformed himself from dud to hero. Looks like that  fragile ceasefire for the Israel-USA vs Iran War is holding.   Lot of questions about where those 880 pounds of enriched uranium might be  to  future role on how the International Atomic Energy Agency can check on Iran  to  how long the ailing 85-year old Ayatollah can hang in there  to  a million others.  However, give Trump credit for solving this war in less than two weeks.  Israel still has that Gaza Strip problem, and there continues the Ukraine-Russia war, but the world today is in a safer place than yesterday. ...

Deloitte published their assessment of Rome's 2000 year-old Colosseum, which could well cost from $250 million to $1 billion to build today.  You can  read the details here , but, ta-da, it is worth $79 billion.  It would rank   #14 in the current list of world billionaires . There are moments and experiences, says Mastercard, that are priceless, but many famous historical artifacts are also in that category, especially those of Leonardo da Vinci. Some of his works do have known values.  A prominent one, and most expensive art piece ever sold, is  Salvator Mundi,  which was bought by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Bin Salman in 2017 for $450 million, some say as a gift to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and today has a value closer to $500 million, or half a billion dollars. To the right is how the Leonardo pictured Jesus Christ, but it is still not clear if he finished it in the 1490s while working in Milan on  The Last Supper , or in Florence a...

President Joe Biden today signed into law the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.  He hired former New Orleans Mayor  Mitch Landrieu  to oversee the implementation.  He played a key role in helping the city rebound from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Republicans participated in the White House press conference. Two years ago I almost went weekly to movie theaters, usually on Sundays, saw two films, with maybe a  Buca di Beppo meal  between them if at the Ward theaters, and was in a nice rut.  Then in December of 2019 I went on a  Diamond Princess  cruise from and to Yokohama.  A short while after I returned to port, COVID-19  patient zero  boarded, spreading the virus to the rest of the world. But was I concerned?  Nope, I took another trip from Honolulu to Thailand in February of last year when it was #2 to China in COVID-19 cases.  This was before this virus gained its name.  Further, this outbreak ...