The first 18 years of my life was spent in Hawaii.  Just before starting college, I flew to stay with my brother in Oxnard to work for the summer at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory in Port Hueneme, California.  Oxnard is 60 miles north of Los Angeles. In September of 1958 my brother drove me to the Stanford Campus, located about 35 miles south of San Francisco.  I recall crossing from the west side to the East Bay area on Friday nights to the Garden of Allah, to dance and see entertainers like Bobby Preston and Marty Robbins.  After I graduated in 1962, over the past 62 years, I've returned to San Francisco at least 50 times. Mind you, I don't really like SFO weather.  It's almost always too cold for me.  Something enchanting about the fog, which comes and goes.  But bicycling to class at 7:30AM in the winter was not comfortable.  Stanford is a bit warmer than SFO, but still much too cold in the winter.  In fact, I remember on  21...

Today, I'll just borrow from traditional sources.  From the  New York Times : Russia’s Victory Day, celebrating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, is May 9. Western officials   worry Vladimir Putin may exploit it to intensify attacks .   (May 9 is this coming Monday.) Trying to tame inflation, the Fed approved its   biggest interest rate increase since 2000 . Tucker, Thiel, Trump: How J.D. Vance   won Ohio’s Republican Senate primary . About Vance's victory, many think, aha, Trump is still very influential, and will make a huge difference in the upcoming November mid-term elections.   Nope, what will happen is that a small percentage of Republicans will be so negatively effected by this Trump-effect that they will skip voting, and a small percentage of Independents will vote for the Democratic opponent.   This differential will in several elections only favor the Democrat.   I suspect Democrats will end up after the 2022 gen...

  I'll get  to the pizza part later, but will begin with this pandemic, using a few graphics from the morning   New York Times : If you've forgotten how to read graphs, the results are clear.  Those states voting for Donald Trump are killing themselves by avoiding being vaccinated.  How serious is this?  Almost a factor of 5. Further from the  NYT : Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June,   according to Charles Gaba,   a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000 . How do these numbers compare with the world in deaths/100,000 population? U.S.  21 Hawaii  and Vermont  5  ( lowest in  nation--yet, Hawaii's governor still refu...