But first, a thing or two about Opening Day for most of Major League Baseball.  I yesterday showed you how I was celebrating, spending essentially all of 9AM to 7PM, Hawaii Time, watching the games. That was brunch, and for the remainder of the day I had a variety of peanuts and chips with Johnny Walker Blue Label on rocks and a gin martini.  I also went down for a short dinner and had two glasses of Burgandy. Baseball is baseball, teams win and lose, inexplicably, making opening day mostly meaningless.  However, the  Los Angeles had quite a pre-game ceremony : Their ownership group, including Magic Johnson and Billie Jean King, raised the Dodger championship flag behind center field. In the audience was 92-year old Phil Brooks, a retired physician who was attending his 60th consecutive Dodger opening.  Accompanying him was his son Stan, only his 40th consecutive opener. Ice Cube, who has become a Dodger celebrity, drove up to pass on the World Series Championsh...

  We know there is life because we are alive.  We have seen deaths, and it is clear we won't live forever.  But this is my view.  Buddhists might disagree.  While I don't think there is any kind of afterlife, most religions promise or suggest that there is something after you die.  Aside for attempting to sway people into being better human beings, perhaps this final carrot at the end is why religion has done so well in the history of humanity.  Even if reality turns out to be my viewpoint, at least many religious-inclined individuals gain the benefit of some psychological relief about the coming inevitability. Hindu and Buddhism teach origins quite different from Islam and Christianity, but these two have rather similar beginnings because they developed in adjacent locales.  For Christians, in the beginning God created the heavens and Earth. Only on the fifth day did He bring forth life, in the seas and also flying creatures . Land animals and us...