Yesterday I focused on Woodstock , that generation-defining rock concert held 57 years ago.  I opened with those wildfires in Southern California.  I should have also added another, more serious one, in Indonesia.  From Google AI: Indonesia is currently battling its worst season of toxic forest and peatland wildfires in over a decade , which have scorched nearly two million hectares of land and triggered severe health crises across Southeast Asia. Artificial intelligence is playing a major dual role in this crisis, serving as both a powerful tool for emergency detection and a vehicle for misinformation on social media . [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ] The Scale of the Havoc Unprecedented Destruction: Spurred by a severe, climate-change-fueled El Niño dry season , fires concentrated heavily in Borneo (Kalimantan) and Sumatra have generated massive plumes of dense smoke. Independent monitors like the Nusantara Atlas estimate the burned area at over 1.9 million hecta...

During the past half a century I have been on at least a hundred major trips away from Hawaii for pleasure.  We yesterday returned from what surely is in the top ten of them all.  Just over two months, including two cruises.  How do I feel this morning?  Great, actually.  I don't feel jet lagged after eight hours of sleep last night.  That is quite unusual, for I avoid traveling west to east with a passion, and my around the world extravaganzas always go westward. This one  began on November 21 , before Thanksgiving, and ended yesterday, almost a month after Christmas. A few days in Yokohama, then we boarded the Diamond Princess for a 28-night cruise throughout much of Orient along the Pacific Ocean between Japan and Singapore. A month is now too long for me to be on a ship.  We almost went around the world on the Island Princess in 2021, but mercifully for me, as I think about it now, was cancelled by the company because of the ongoing COVID Pand...

The Ritz-Carlton Yacht cruise line arranged for us to be picked up at 1:45PM.  Last view of the Marina Bay Sands. Seamless transfer of luggage to room, but there was so much confusion about processing the paperwork to board the ship.  Everyone was confused, including the staff. The luggage was in our room when we got on the ship at 1 PM or so.  We thought we'd have lunch at Mistral, which was on the 10th floor.  However, the elevator only traveled to the 9th.  A staff member saw us uncertain about how to get to our restaurant and came to help us.  He said that the back elevator would do the job, so he patiently walked us the length of the ship and up to where we wanted to go.  The other staff seemed overly respectful of him, and we learned why.  He was Captain Tom Roth, who is the leader of this ship.  From Switzerland with a nautical science degree and 30 years of at-sea experience.  Very nice and helpful gentleman.  So we took a p...