My life has been up and down, but mostly good.  In this blog I've actually said that my life has been in the 99.99th percentile.   But part of that is because, over the course of time,  Homo sapiens  have had 117 billion birth s.  As there are now only 8 billion of us, and life today surely must be a lot better than in the past, that already places me at a great advantage, and you too. I was born in  1940 , a dark period in history when Hitler was conquering Europe.  The #1 song in the USA was  I'll Never Smile Again , by Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers. But more than just that, after an acceptable youth growing up in Kakaako ( Honolulu ), not a slum, but definitely below average, I had a great final two years of high school and got accepted at Stanford University. Life was generally fine there.  I read today an entry in  Quora  entitled:   Is Caltech the most academically diffic...

The Royal Hawaiian Band came to entertain us at 15 Craigside.    Clarke Bright  is the Bandmaster, as he has been since 2011.  I know him because when he was a student at the University of Hawaii, he worked for the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, which I directed.  His father is the legendary  Ronald Bright  ( photo to the left ), who appeared in a range of entertainment venues throughout Hawaii, and seemed to have been in charge of a lot of them. The Royal Hawaiian Band is the oldest and only full-time municipal band in the USA.  Formed in 1836 when these islands were ruled by King Kamehameha III.  It started as a military band, but attained global prominence under the leadership of Prussian Heinrich "Henri" Berger, loaned by the Imperial German Army to the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1872.  He would later be honored as the "Father of Hawaiian Music."  Berger collaborated with King Kalakaua in creating  Hawaii Ponói,  the offic...