My blog yesterday ended with some beautiful photos, indicating that these were sent to me by, for me, a relatively new informant, Gan Jing World.  Before I go into this mysterious organization, though, first, a question.  Do you want to be a billionaire? Turns out that the jackpot for the Powerball drawing tonight at 10:59 PM EDT is up to $1.8 billion. This is the second-highest grand prize in history, to the $2.04 billion jackpot won in November 2022. By the way, there is also Mega Millions, which had a $1.602 jackpot in August 2023.  Costs $5/ticket. But back to Powerball, say you match all five numbers.  Are you then a billionaire? Nope.  You have two options. Take a one-time cash payment, and while that is $1.8 billion, for the moment you are a billionaire.  However, the way this works, you only get $826.4 billion. Or, take 29 annual payments to get the full $1.8 billion.  But you still need to pay taxes and wait for 29 years to get it all. Either ...

Much of today brings back memories.  Let me start with the possible  return of COVID-19 , which served as the theme of my Thursday postings for years.  According to the CDC, there has a been a spike in COVID-19 cases of 18% this past week, and 24% hike in hospital admissions. From  Worldometer,  173 Americans died of COVID this past week and 277 in the previous week.  Of course, last year 550/week died from the flu, and this rate tends to jump in the winter, so flu deaths today are considerably higher than from COVID.  And few take the seasonal flu seriously. This alarms professionals like  Ashish Jha . More people tend to die 21 to 28 days after cases begin to increase. 60% of Americans did not get boosted. And look at how politics can make a difference. About that New Orleans terrorist attack by 42-year old  Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar , he was inspired by ISIS, but probably acted alone.  Donald Trump was wrong again, blaming Jabbar as an...

Thursdays have shifted from Covid to anything of medical or lifestyle worthiness.  But to start, I count ten pandemic waves: The tenth one was tiny, and occurred this past summer.  Will there be an eleventh? There usually is a winter uptick in respiratory virus ailments, as is expected for some combination of the seasonal flu, Covid and RSV. 15 Craigside has schedule a day next week to administer the updated Covid vaccine.  Everyone should get this shot. Reduces symptoms, hospitalization rate and death. Latest data seem to indicated that  vaccinated people are less liable to get Long Covid . How terrible was this Covid Pandemic? Nearly 7 million people died, a mortality rate of just under 0.1% of the world population. The USA Covid mortality rate is 0.34%.  This is more than three times the world average.  However, the world count is known to be too low. During the 14th century, the bubonic plague, or Black Death, killed 25 million Europe, a  mortality...