All my ancestors are from Japan. Read about my father's father,  Kenjiro , who I was named after:  I did not learn much about him until I started my roots search after I retired.   That colored symbol says a lot, and  is explained in a 2019 posting about my visit to Utashinai , located north of Sapporo on Hokkaido, from where he left in around 1890 to the USA.  On his way back to Japan, he got married on Kauai, had a son and daughter.  This is why I grew up in Hawaii. About Utashinai, JR does not today have a station there anymore because this once coal town has dwindled into a skiing and wine spot.  Once up to 46,000, it is now down to 3000.  It was Japan's smallest city when I visited four years ago when the population was 3500. It is possible that I've landed in Japan more times than any non-airline employee in Hawaii.  At least a hundred times, and maybe 150, or more.  One reason why is that I've gone around the world so many times because I hate that overnight flig

  First of all, good news.    There has been sufficient agreement on increasing the national debt ceiling . The next new ceiling will again become a crisis point in early 2025 after the next presidential election. Appears that there will be some Democrat concessions regarding work requirements and standards on recipients of food stamps.  Medicaid will remain untouched. As Janet Yellen has more recently indicated an absolute deadline of Thursday, June 8, there will be some discussions in the House on Tuesday, where there will be grudging approval, followed by action in the Senate, probably on Wednesday.  Then the President signs on Thursday and the world will be saved from a Great Recession.  Might take a day later than Yellen's warning, but everything seems at this point  to be okay. I guess there will not be a fatal Act Two by Republicans.  What's that?   Read my posting of 26May2023 . So my take: Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that he has 95% of the his members happy, and while

Just another Sunday musing today, reflecting on my life full of miracles.  The greatest was being born on 6 September 1940.  What were the odds? The average male produces  2 trillion sperms  in a lifetime.   The average female produces 500 eggs in a lifetime. Multiplying the two, and you get one chance in a quadrillion for me to have been born. And that's just only because my mother and father got together. Incidentally, the longer odds of this happening can be viewed in a  TedX talk by Mel Robbins.   He says:  1 in 400 trillion. And another view .  Essentially, we're all miracles. There have been  117 billion miracles  since the beginning of us. My childhood was mundane and totally uneventful.  I lived just to the right of that tall building on the right, in a day when there were no tall buildings.  Nothing much happened until I got into high school.  As a sophomore at McKinley High School (p hoto to the left ) in Honolulu, the odds on my getting accepted by one of the better