MY BEST LUNCH THIS YEAR, PLUS THAT CORONAVIRUS

Hate to start with the more newsworthy item, but I've been regularly covering that coronavirus and my basic message is decrying  the overreaction.  However, note that the growth of confirmed cases is still in exponential growth:

When will the affected numbers begin to peak?  Certainly in excess of 10,000.  But even if cases reach 100,000, how significant is that?  At the current 2% death rate, that would mean around 2000 fatalities.  If cases mushroom to 1 million, 20,000 should die.  Worldwide:

• up to a billion people get the flu each year (which means the average person gets the flu only every seven or eight years--seems kind of low)
• up to 650,000 annual flu deaths (that's less than one tenth of one percent who get sick)

Thus, if a million people catch the coronavirus, the number of deaths will be around 3% of the annual flu deaths in a bad year, or 5% in an average year.  Is it worth wearing an uncomfortable mask just for the coronavirus?  If you live in Wuhan, certainly.  But Honolulu, where there is yet not a case?

So now to my posting on food.  However, to begin, I noticed one of my watches wasn't working, and there was a discount coupon in the newspaper, so I went to the Ala Moana Shopping Center where in Macy's there is a place to replace batteries.  I also thought I'd stop by Foodland Farms to buy ingredients for Super Bowl watching.

What an embarrassment, but the watch repairer asked me if I had recently placed this watch under any kind of light.  Well, no, maybe a full year ago.  He said this was a solar watch. I later at home did so and the watch still works.  Saved $25.  But I'm still trying to figure out how to get the correct time.

As I was at that Waikiki end of the mall, I thought I'd scout around for a lunch place in the Hookipa Terrace area.  I saw Gen Korean BBQ House, which was new to me.

A huge restaurant, it was maybe 20% full at most.  Nice, spiffy, my kind of place.  Essentially, you order four items, and I picked garlic pork belly, pork belly, steak and vegetables.  The rice, green salad and soup come with the set.  I thought I'd try that new Natural Light Seltzer, which is a surprisingly high 6% alcohol, and added a bottle of hot sake:

This is an all you can eat establishment, where they allow you two hours.  To my surprise I somehow finished all that was initially served.  The lunch cost around $16, and I paid about double that with tax, tip and those drinks.  I very highly recommend Gen.

Let me add that it has been here now for almost three years, and is an all-you-can-eat yakiniku chain from Los Angeles.  There is a neon blue theme with mainstream pop music.

About what I will eat on Super Bowl Sunday, I initially thought hamburger and hot dog with beer and chips.  Then, I came up with Kansas City-style BBQ with Clam Chowder in Sourdough Bread, with Anchor Steam Beer.  Ah, too much work, plus you can't get some of those ingredients in Honolulu.

I had to somehow link to the above, so I found sourdough cheese crackers, two kinds of foie gras (and note that a duck version still costs $100/pound), asparagus, endive, Robusto spicy salami and red caviar.  Still pondering what alcoholic beverages will go best with this combination.  I'll spread out the actual consumption period to six hours.  Go  49ers.

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LATEST ON THE CORONAVIRUS AND MY CHINESE NEW YEAR CUISINE

Let me begin with the more serious news story.  Should you be concerned about the Coronavirus epidemic and begin wearing a mask?  No, unless you're visiting someone who has the ailment.

Should governments take every precaution?  Absolutely.  China has undertaken steps that wouldn't be done in the USA.  They don't deserve the blame they're getting.  At last check, 46 million living in and near Wuhan were in lockdown.  All this occurring during the Chinese New Year when people are driven to return to their roots where they grew up.  Train stations are normally in utter chaos during this two-week period.

Heard also about the 6,000 or so stuck on a  Carnival cruise ship Costa Smerelda at Civitavecchia near Rome?  A Chinese couple became ill.  Early news indicate that the coronavirus was not the reason.  Is this an overreaction?

Are those extra international airport precautions necessary?  Sure, but they might be largely ineffective, for the virus has an incubation period of up to two weeks.  The World Health Organization actually recommends against testing travelers.

While a pandemic approaching the Spanish Flu of a century ago will not repeat itself, mutation worries knowledgeable people.  And, incidentally, that major killer involved  the H1N1 swine influenza virus that we last saw in 2009.  But H1N1 is not the coronavirus, which is what caused SARS in 2003.

Almost 20 years ago 10% of those who got the illness died.  This time, the fatality rate appears to affect about 2%, so there is something different.  Conversely, this current coronavirus has already exceeded what happened in 2003, and has only begun.

While H1N1 is highly contagious, the coronavirus can only be transmitted by direct contact.  This virus is similar to the one that caused SARS and MERS, but yet is not the same.  Some common colds are also linked to a type of coronavirus.

On an airplane, the ventilation system should not be, as such, a carrier.  Wouldn't hurt to bring along a mask, though.  If you're seated close to anyone who is coughing, you might want to wear it, even though the odds are minuscule that this person will have the coronavirus.

There are various conspiracy theories on how this coronavirus became active, starting with a stolen military biological virus being purposefully released.  All false, except in 2003, the SARS outbreak was traced to a civet cat.  This is that animal which ingests coffee beans and craps with bean intact, which is processed as the most expensive coffee sold, Kopi Luwak.  Buy from Amazon.com for $26/100 grams, which is less than a quarter pound.  The brewed coffee is safe.  And, anyway, this product comes from Indonesia.  The Chinese civet cat was probably originally infected by a bat.

The latest statistics show 7800 confirmed cases, with 170 reported deaths, holding at 2%.  Wuhan is about 500 miles west of Shanghai.

 I wouldn't travel to China today, but other locations should be okay.  I'm leaving for Thailand in two weeks.

Hawaii had a bubonic plague epidemic 120 years ago.   A ship arrived from Asia with a dead crew member who was diagnosed with the ailment.  No one was allowed to leave the boat.  However, Chinatown was adjacent, and at least one rat escaped, bubonic plague struck and that part of Honolulu was first locked down, then torched.  The effort was a disaster, as the controlled burning effort spread to 38 acres.

Well, enough of all that for now.  Also related to China, let me share with you my final two Chinese New Year meals.  On Monday, 15 Craigside featured a Chinese New Year lunch:

The hit of the feast was that brown liquid in the wine glass.  I tried to find a special Chinese wine that is served on important occasions.  They heat that brown wine and pour it into a glass with ling hing mui, a Chinese plum preservative.  Well, I could not find that liquor, so I bought a Chinese brandy.  The wine, actually, has a funny taste that does not agree with me, while the brandy was like cognac, and tasted much better for this, or any, celebration.

My final Chinese meal required stopping by Duck Lee in the Makai Marketplace.  These restaurants always have their duck and roast pork hanging in the window.  One wonders about how sanitary that is, and you got to worry about the wooden cutting board, which I've never seen them ever wash:

I ordered cold ginger chicken, roast pork and chow fun.  Of course, I needed an enhancement step, frying the pork in some olive oil to have it crispier, and frying some Japanese wagyu beef fat, to which I added the chow fun and a lot more vegetables.

Quite a sequence of Chinese dishes in a five-day period.  I began with Peking Duck, went on to Shanghai Soup Dumplings, and followed with a fabulous duck soup with dried abalone.

It might seem blasphemous to be eating so well while people are dying from the coronavirus.  However, we continue to drive even though 1,250,000 (3,287/day) annually die in traffic accidents.  The 170 coronavirus casualties could easily rise to a thousand and more.  However, the standard flu which now and then afflicts us annually kills up to 640,000 (1750/day).  I feel fortunate to be alive today, and hope to continue on in my current state of euphoria.  I will not let any coronavirus or the impeachment process unduly trouble me.  Have a great day!  On this note, let me end with J.J. Pantano, who stunned America's Got Talent judges this week.  You got to see that.  He is 7 years old.

THEORY OF EVERYTHING?

You need to be a theoretical physicist to be passionate about the Theory of Everything--TOE, or final, ultimate, master framework.  In other words, a single, coherent system for physics.

But how can they possibly be serious about all that when they still can't explain Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which dwarf what we see and envision?

Well, that TODAY was offered in 2014.  No one is absolutely certain of those numbers.  According to National Geographic this month, the figures today are 70%, 25% and 5%.  Anyway, you get the point that you, me, comets, galaxies,  dust, everything...amount only to 5% of the Universe.  And physicists are serious about that.

Mind you, 5000 or so years ago Egyptians developed a theory of everything and called it the Heliopolis Creation Myth, a god-based concept.  Also, too, Greek Democritus in 400 BC pronounced his Atomic Theory, where all things were atoms and the void.  He was the last thinker to make any sense about  the TOE.

In 330 BC Aristotle is credited with promulgating a detailed general theory of everything.  Funny, but history seems to agree that since then this whole field has been a bit of a mystery, for science found vast new bits of information that could not be bottled into a unified theory.

Physics is at a stage where there are two incompatible foci:

• general relativity, which looks at gravity
• quantum field theory, which considers everything but gravity, and has weaned the Standard Model

The ultimate theoretical framework needs to combine both.

First came String Theory around half a century ago:

More recently, what has evolved from this pathway is something known as M-theory.  In any case, we  all can imagine 3-dimensional space, plus time, and, perhaps gravity.  Bosonic string theory has 26 dimensions and M-theory 11.  Add duality and banes and chirality and matrix models and....you know why the whole field is a mass of contradictions.

In the 70's came supergravity and supersymmetry, or superstring theories from the mid-80's  Then a decade later arrived the second superstring revolution.

In the mid-70's the Grand Unified Theories began to appear, which were not at all grand, for they only attempted to unify electromagnetism and weak/strong forces.  But linked to supersymmetry, the combination shows some promise.  Call them Supersymmetric GUTs.

Then there are scholars like Kurt Godel, who in 1931 already predicted that any attempt to construct a TOE is bound to fail.  Stanly Jaki in 1966 similarly indicated that the mathematics will doom the search.  Freeman Dyson seemed to agree, and Stephen Hawking concluded that a TOE would not be possible.  Frank Close argues that the layers of nature are like an onion, but the number of layers might be infinite.

What do I think?  There will be even larger physics experiments over the next century.  Some light will be shed on Dark Matter and Dark Energy.  Nothing much will develop toward a Theory of Everything until a lot more is known about what we now know not.  Then?  Don't know.  The debate only will get more and more philosophical rather than mathematical.

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BAD BOYS and QUEZON'S GAME

I recently saw two films, and the motivation had to do with the disparity of scores between Rotten Tomatoes' reviewers and the audience:

                                      Rotten Tomatoes         Box Office  My Rating
                                 Reviewers  Audiences

Bad Boys for Life           77             97                 #1                 B

Quezon's Game              33           100                ??                 B+

Bad Boys for Life was an enjoyable film.  It was better than what one would imagine from Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.  After the first two, beginning in 1995, I expected #3 to be flippant...which it was to some degree.  I was not looking forward to all those car chases and gunshots...which occurred.  However, the dialogue, the quirky surprises, the maturity...quite an evolution.  

The song, Bad Boys, incidentally, was released in 1987 by the Jamaican reggae band Inner Circle, and was picked up by the TV show Cops.  It is now the theme song for the Bad Boys franchise, which will see a #4, for the closing credits said so.  For example, there is already a trailer.  When?  Perhaps in 2022, or, if history means anything, probably as late as 2023.  I'll stop here, for you will hear about the film from various sources.

Quezon's Game is not even on Box Office Mojo's weekend list, and there are 71 films being tracked.  Release has been limited, but, as it is a smash hit in the Philippines, with excellent audience responses, you can expect to more and more see this movie in your artsy theaters.  When I went to it this past weekend, I was one of only three in the audience.

The movie is a 2018 production directed and everything'd by Matthew Rosen about the quest of ailing Philippine President Manuel Quezon on his attempt to shelter in the Philippines German/Austrian Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938.  This was a period when the USA was either not fully aware of Hitler's plan to exterminate prominent Jews, or was so anti-semitic then as to almost not care.

In the late 1930's both Quezon and the highest ranked American civilian in Manila, Paul McNutt (a prominent law professor who was tabbed to run for U.S. President) were on the cover of Time.  The Holocaust heroism matter, however, never made any international headlines.

A third important individual in this constellation of heroes was to-be-5-star general who led World War II in Europe, Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower.  What confused me about his presence was that in the movie Ike's wife looked Filipino-ish, not at all like Mamie.  Turns out that David Bianco played Eisenhower, and his real wife is Jennifer Blair, who is Filipino, also served as his screen wife.  Confusing casting.

Rosen has lived in the Philippines and is married to one, Lorena.  One day he wondered why a young Filipino girl was singing Hava Nagila, having no idea what it meant, leading to the whole story.

Like 1917 being a crusade of director Sam Mendes, Quezon's Game is solely due to Rosen, who was responsible for the whole production, and his family.  The premiere date was matched to the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz.  This is a screenplay that was produced in the style of Casablanca, and enlightens most of the world about an embattled and sick (with tuberculosis) Philippine President, who did what he thought was right at a time when his supporters were anything but and the United States blind to what was happening.

The bottom line is that he saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler (left).  While only a little more than 1200, the goal was 10,000, which had to come to a stop because the Japanese conquered the Philippines in 1941.  Many Jews left because of the attack, but a few become prominent citizens.

The film has won 23 international awards.  The odds are high that you were not aware of all this happening.  Go see the film.  Here is current President Rodrigo Duterte visiting the "Open Doors" Monument at the Holocaust Memorial park in Israel in honor of Manuel Quezon:

ALERT:  A 7.7 earthquake just occurred in Montego Bay between Cuba and Jamaica:

Tsunami?
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