I earlier mentioned that my very first airplane flight was when I was around 10-years old from Honolulu to Maui.  I was born at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu in 1940.  Grew up in Kakaako and when I was in high school, took a trip to Hilo.  The first 18 years of my life was otherwise spent on Oahu.  I left in 1962 for Los Angeles to spend the summer living with my older brother, who got me a summer job at the Naval Civil Engineering Center, Port Hueneme, California.  Then spent 3.7 years at Stanford University. During our junior year, most of my friends decided  to join the first full year of John Kennedy's just announced Peace Corps when they graduated.  So I had to do something similarly sacrificial.  To explore my possible future, I found a summer job with C. Brewer in Hilo.  Lived in the Boys Club, and adjacent was the little league field of a team I watched.  They went all the way to Williamsport for the Little League World Series in ...

I just watched: Woodstock:  Three Days That Defined A Generation This was  a 1 hr 36 min American Experience PBS documentary first aired at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019. However, you can now see it on Prime... but only until August 31 for FREE .   Rotten Tomatoes  liked it, bestowing 86/84 scores. Christy Lemire indicated,  It does bring a freshness to a story that we've heard a million times , and Glenn Kenny of the  New York Time s said:   Uses the perspective of nearly 50 years' hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess. For me, it was a trip down a memory lane that I never took.   Read my link to this event: In August of 1969 my wife and I were driving from Baton Rouge to Montreal to interact with the remnants of the recent World Expo.  We spent the night in Hershey, Pennsylvania to visit the chocolate company....

60 years ago, for my first job, I became a sugar engineer with C. Brewer in Naalehu within Kau on the Big Island of Hawaii.   Next door 12 miles away was Pahala, where I found my wife, Pearl.   34 miles further was The Volcanoes National Park. Hilo was another 22 miles ( 66 miles from Naalehu ), and at my arrival in this southernmost point of the U.S., there was no television nor radio reception in these two sugar cities.  Not sure if there was any area in the continental USA where this was possible.  The reason was Mauna Loa, which blocked signals.  At night you could with the right equipment listen to some radio static. About the history of this region, not  much happened in Kau until in 1868 when there was  a 7.9 Richter quake  which produced a tsunami devastating coastal villages, and five days later triggering a Mauna Loa eruption ( yellow spot below ), forming an 18-mile fissure, and fountains of 1000 feet, where lava entered the s...

Friday, April 29, will be the beginning of my 15th year of this daily blog.  You know how long that is? Imagine going back to your first year of pre-school, and suffering through kindergarten...all the way to graduating from high school.  That is a period of 14 years, or how long this site has existed. However, when going to school, we had weekends, holidays, semester/Spring/Christmas breaks and the whole summer off.  My blog, with rare exceptions--especially when I'm in China, for Google, which manages this site, and that country have had a long feud-- has been a daily production. Thus, the equivalent of 29April2022 is sort of like the day after graduation from high school, and I next will be off to college. I've had 5238 postings,  beginning with 29April2008 .  Click on that and you will see how unsophisticated it was, with no graphics.  Wrote about a book signing for  SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth  still on sale for $19.75.  Well, if y...