For those regulars of this blog site, I will get to our American Melody cruise on the Mississippi River.  But first, my topic of the day: the  Cicada . This is not a travel site.  No city/town has that name. Not about those swarming insects from 13- or 17-year broods.   Anyway, this happens not to be one of those springs when they emerge .  Although there will come a few stragglers, like this one shown.  Brood XXIII will strike in 2028.  In prime cicada years, you can more readily find chocolate chip cicada cookies. The Cicada I'm referring to today is the  new COVID variant . This will be an encore, for this variant first appeared in 2024. Cicada is nickname for BA.3.2, which first infected people in South Africa. Cicada is responsible for 30% of Europe's COVID ailments. More: Scientists say that Cicada carries   70 to 75 new mutations   in the spike protein, the portion that the human immune system recognizes and targets. That's m...

From today you can order four free at-home COVID-19 tests.  They say orders will ship in 7-10 days.  Go to   THIS SITE .  It takes about a full minute and is the first no hassle order I've ever made on a computer.  Unfortunately, my request was denied because someone else, who I know, already made this request.  It is only 4 kits/household, period.   The White House also will take from the Strategic National Stockpile  400 million masks to provide them free .  A limit of 3/person for distribution at local pharmacies and community health centers late next week.  Why not make all 750 million available?   That would be only 2/person.  Supposedly,  these masks can only be used once .  On the other hand, I twice bought boxes of these N95 masks and paid only about a buck for each mask.  Not a particularly big deal as announced, but a good PR device to get the nation into safer masks. According to the  Ne...