I noticed that a series called  Alien: Earth  was set to premiere on FX tomorrow, 12August2025.  Went to  Rotten Tomatoes , and reviewers gave it a 93 rating, and Meta critic indicated "universal acclaim."  I looked into this production and learned that it is a spinoff of the  Alien  franchise.  So I will record it.   There will be eight episodes. Director of the first  Alien  film, Ridley Scott, is one of the executive producers. Filmed in Thailand. One negative critic said this was  a Frankenstein’s monster of existentialism and aliens ripping people apart." [ 35 ] Will be a prequel, set in 2120, two years before the events of the original 1979 film,  Alien. By then, there will be humans, cyborgs ( human with some synthetic parts ) and hybrids ( people who have the human conscious transferred onto a synthetic body ).  One of these will be the lead character, Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler. How can you tell th...

My posting yesterday ended with the #1 song half a century ago, which was  Jive Talking.   I mentioned that the shortest tune reaching #1 on Billboard was the 1960  Stay .   So before entering my blog of today, I was wondering what was the  longest song to hit #1 on Billboard , and consulted Guinness. This was difficult to find because Google kept sending me to the #1 song that spent the longest time in that slot. The 10-minute version of Taylor Swift's  All Too Well  went on for 10 minutes and 13 seconds.  But this was the extended version of this ballad that originally in 2012 appeared on the album Red, and was only 5min29sec long, which was re-released as a single at that length.  Here is her  10-minute version .  Did she attend the  NFL preseason game yesterday ?  No. So I guess Don McLean's 1972  American Pie  is the longest chart-topper at 8min37sec. But according to that chart above, Swift. As an asid...

Although I've now been retired for 26 years, I still enjoy Saturday the most.  Don't know why, but it still feels like a day off.  Every day these days are a day off, so it shouldn't matter, but. Not only am I retired, but I live in a senior's community, where, for an entrance fee and monthly charge, there is nothing for me to do, for we are served three meals/day, apartment weekly cleaned with bed linen changed and new towels, have guards and a lot of cameras to protect us, numerous activities to keep us occupied, or not, for I tend to mostly avoid them, and lifetime security, for they have promised to take care of me until I die.  Of course, they won't let you in unless your finances are such that they are secure. You would think I am joking, but after returning from our recent trip, where one portion was a long Oceania cruise from Yokohama to Vancouver, I came to a conclusion that the best place to eat was at 15 Craigside.  Oceania is known for its fine cuisine, ...

Time  magazine this morning had this article:   What are the Five Strongest Earthquakes Ever Recorded? #6 was, of course, that massive Russian Kamchatka earthquake of 8.8 magnitude just experienced at 8:25AM local time on July 30.  Amazingly enough, there was only one death, but this was a woman in Japan while evacuating.  So there was none caused by the earthquake itself.   There was another 8.8 earthquake,  Chile in 2010 , which killed around 600, including 25 still missing.  So there is a tie for #6.  I happened to be in Amsterdam, Netherlands that day, but still wrote an article for the Huffington Post entitled  Hawaii Tsunami?   You can click on that link to read the whole article, but I will provide a beginning here: I'm on an around the world odyssey, which you can follow through my   HuffPost postings . Well, my most exciting day is happening right in front of me watching the 8.8 Chile earthquake cataclysm on ...