I leave this morning for Las Vegas and will stay at the downtown Circa Casino.  Took me 40 minutes from home to the United Club, which is unbelievably quick, considering that I walked almost 2500 steps (I have a pedometer).  My first Cup O Noodles in a decade.  I added two halves of boiled egg.  With a Bloody Mary, my best breakfast in a long time. 15 Craigside feature this week a Louisiana Seafood Boil and a luau. Then last night a  luau .  With the more traditional  lau lau,  fish,  lomi salmon ,  chicken long rice ,  mock bird nest soup ,  poi  and  haupia ,  I bought the  squid luau  and the ingredients for my enhanced  ahi poke , adding  ogo ,  kazunoko ,  ikura,  hot sauce, onion and  sea asparagus . The wines were both Cabernet Sauvignon, from Chateau Buena Vista in Napa and Oblivion in Paso Robles, pus Kirin Beer. -

I've always been interested in photography, and today belong to the 15 Craigside Photo Club.  Club?  Not sure what we are.   In any case, I love colors in general, and my very favorite course in college was Color.  When did color photography begin?  Here is a You Tube lecture on the  History of Color Photograph y.  Starts slowly, but provides most of the technical details I will not cover.  Otherwise: Some say our understanding of light and color began with Englishman  Isaac Newton  when he published his experiments in 1672. But  real color photography  came nearly 200 years later when in 1861 ( note:  Civil War in America ) Scottish physicist,  James Clerk Maxwell  ( he was that person who is responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation...all those equations ).   He showed that all the colors you see can be made by an appropriate mixture of only three colors:  red, green and blue light. Note, though, that red, green and blue paints will not do the same.  For g

It's Saturday, and I will be watching the Hawaii-Tennessee Little League baseball game, plus range of NCAA football matches.  But first, a short entry. From the  New York Times: But the situation changed around 2015, with the death rate mostly rising over the next several years. One reason seems to be   distracted driving . By 2015, two-thirds of U.S. adults owned a smartphone, up from almost none in 2006.  This year, 115 Americans/day die on the road. Was the pandemic a factor? The most plausible theories tend to involve the mental health problems caused by Covid’s isolation and disruption. Alcohol and drug abuse have increased. Impulsive behavior, like running red lights and failing to wear seatbelts, also seems to have risen (as my colleague Simon Romero   has reported ). Many Americans have felt frustrated or unhappy, and it seems to have affected their driving. Ethnic death rate: Why is the Asian death rate so low? Week started with two Japanese pork dishes, tofu and tonkatsu:

We haven't traveled in 27 months,  when we returned from a two-week trip to Thailand , which at that time was #2 to China in COVID-19 cases, only so labeled by the World Health Organization the day we left Honolulu.   Thailand is now #24 in cases with 4.4 million and China is #109 with 221,804.  But of course you know that this number is considerably higher.  The USA is #1 with 84 million cases, double that of India with 43 million.  Of course, WHO has indicated that this figure is a whole lot higher.  The World has had 521 million cases, which should at least be doubled.  The World population is approaching 8 billion. While Omicron is still lurking, and tomorrow I will post on the latest subvariants, it's possible that most cruise ships might be safer today than going out in Hawaii, for   our positivity rate is 14.3% .  We might need to avoid island tours, as this rate is 20.3% on Kauai. I've read that the  figure for cruises is lower , as Royal Caribbean, for one, mention