While love and happiness prevail, my mind nevertheless wanders and wonders a lot.  I see homeless people and realize that with only a wrong decision or two, that could have been me.   I have been lucky,  Very lucky. I consider my life to be a success.  Of the  117 billion born , surely I rank in the top one-tenth of one percent.  In other words I am among the best 11.7 million  Homo sapiens  who ever lived.  I'm tempted to improve this by another order of magnitude to 1.17 million, for it has only been in the past century that life became tolerable for most, but all this analysis is meaningless, for what is success? In this thoughtful mood, I looked back on certain points in my life and wondered where I would be today if I made another decision.   A big one was, which college? As a junior at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was only an above-average student, with no athletic talent and little social skills. Then my life changed.  My blog describes this all. I did not bother to ap

My wife Pearl passed away today, 13 years ago.  Every year since then her sister Doris has provided some flowers on her birthday, which was last week.  So I planted the latest, and adjacent is Pearl's Blood Lily plants, now just on the verge of blooming.  I'll later provide a story about this flower. As Tuesday is nostalgia day, here is my posting of 20July2009.   Sorry, but it did not transfer well.  You can read the posting by clicking on that link . ********************************* IN CELEBRATION OF PEARL My best friend, and wife, of almost 47 years, Pearl, just passed away, and it was both the saddest day of my life, and, surprisingly enough, still, joyfully blissful. Yes, I’m biased, but she was as beautiful on her 70 th   birthday (last week) than when we first met.   She was recently sent a portfolio of photos taken at the May Hilo High School Quad reunion in Last Vegas, and, considering that she was in the oldest of four classes, it was amazing that she was the best lo

 Ah, it's Saturday, and I found a draft of a posting I never sent weeks ago.  I had already begun clearing out my desktop.   To the left, Sacha Baron Cohen, who was just nominated for the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, playing Abbie Hoffman from  The Trial of the Chicago Seven , which got 90/91 ratings from Rotten Tomatoes.  I thought after his performance, he showed political potential, like Arnold Schwazernegger.  However, he and his family moved recently moved to Australia.  Maybe there, someday, he'll do something like that. Another from an actor who did get into politics. And about politics, what is legal or not is all semantics: Changing  the subject, this past year some of you were impressed by those drones, for they will someday soon replace fireworks, which are technically illegal from an environment viewpoint, and expensive.  You wonder if this will become another useful technology, or one which which  careens out of control . Animal videos are popular: Know anything

The New York Times this morning shared some good information.  The first had to do with why Africa and Asia, many countries without much health resources, were left relatively untouched by the COVID-19 virus: Why? Poorer countries are younger: In sub-Saharan Africa, only 3% of the population is 65 or older. Pakistan is at 4% The USA is at 16%, while the European Union has 20% 65 or older. 80% of U.S. deaths occurred among people 65 or older. People in those poorer countries spend more time outdoors and have their window/doors open for better ventilation . Many in these poorer countries have already historically been besieged by a wider range of microbes.  Thus, many of them are naturally immune to COVID-19. Some of these countries, like Ghana and Vietnam, immediately restricted entry into their country, distributed medical masks and subscribed to rapid COVID-19 tests. Also from the NYT : The number of new cases fell in the U.S. yesterday   for the ninth straight day , according to The