WHO IS THE REAL MOTHER TERESA?

 Everyone knows Mother Teresa, who in 1979 won the Nobel Peace Prize.  She was born in 1910, became Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 1986 and passed away in 1997.  I featured her five years ago and showed these photos:

I talk about her again today because the following photo has gone through a couple of viral cycles purporting to be that of Mother Teresa at the age of 18:

I was attracted to that shot because she reminded me of my wife Pearl at the age of 21:

This is Mother Teresa at the age of 69 when she won the Nobel Prize:

Here, Pearl's final photo when she was 69:

In that posting five years ago I said:

St. Teresa of Kolkata was born in Albania, now the Republic of Macedonia, left for Ireland at the age of 18, and then to India a year later.  She took her first religious vows in 1931 at the age of 20 while teaching at St. Teresa's School in Darjeeling.  She chose to be named after Therese de Lisieux, the patron saint of Missionaries.  

While the above is true, here is where people became confused, for some of the photos said to be that of a more youthful Mother Teresa were really that of Saint Therese de Lisieux (left).  As for example (younger Mother Teresa to the right): 

  

The left person is Sister Terese of Lisieux of the 1800's who became Saint Terese:

At the age of three:

And at age eight:

One confusion is that there are two Saint Teresas.

But that is not the full story, for what about the top photo?  This 18-year old does not look like either of the Saint Teresas.  That is because...

“God’s Gift to you is the Gift of Life. What you do with your Life is your Gift to God.” — Mother Teresa.

Our beloved Mother, Tran Anh Phuong, passed away on April 20, 2008 after a long illness. She was the eldest child of Reverend Te Ngoc Tran and Mrs. Tot Thi Nguyen. She resided in Arlington, VA for the past 33 years.

Our Mother attended Southeast Asia Union College in Singapore, majoring in English. From 1968-1972, while raising a young family, she served as a Vietnamese instructor at Ft. Bliss, TX preparing military officers to serve in Viet Nam. After a 19 year career as Executive Assistant for the Commission on Engineering and Technical System at the National Academy of Sciences, she retired in 1992.

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I'M THE LUCKIEST PERSON I KNOW

 

We grew up believing in those statements.  To some degree, my life has unfolded with some personal effort, while overcoming disasters.  Recent events, though, have convinced me that I'm reaching a point of peak luck by pure chance.  If I don't brag about this today, as all things have a way of balancing out, I might never again be able to say that I'm the luckiest person I know.

To begin, being born in Honolulu, Hawaii, the best place on Earth, in a period where the previous generation (World War II heroes) made it easer for me, provided the foundation for an incredible life.  Those events had nothing to do with hard work on my part.

I had an uneventful youth, growing up in what was then considered to be a relatively dangerous and low class environment, Kakaako.  In reality, this was a safe neighborhood, until now, when the homeless crowd has definitely made an impact.  But today, I live in a Nuuanu cocoon, where we escaped COVID-19 (we all had our second Moderna shot a month ago) without even one case.  I don't have all that many friends throughout the world, but I honestly don't know of one who became infected, so, obviously, no one died of this virus.  Better yet, I haven't caught a cold since the beginning of last year...for the first time in my life.

About health, I do live in a seniors' residence where everyone has suffered in some serious way.  I have never spent a night in a hospital, and did not take off one sick day at the University of Hawaii.  When I retired, I was given a bonus of more than a year of pay for this piece of luck.

But this so-called peak I'm currently in is a mathematical miracle.  We have two betting pools here at 15 Craigside.  

• The football version covered the Hawaii-Houston New Mexico Bowl, NCCA Championship of Alabama vs Ohio State, and the Super Bowl of Tampa Bay beating Kansas City.  I won all three.  I calculated that I had less than one chance in a thousand of doing that.  But that is only because for the Super Bowl, I had six numbers.  Why?  The people in charge somehow found out they owed me some money from a previous victory, so I told them I'll just pick more numbers.  I will donate these winnings to the Photo Club.
• There is also a basketball pool of University of Hawaii men games.  I won or placed in four out of five, the latest being last night.

But returning to my early life, my luck began to improve when I was a junior at McKinley High School.  I think I was most influenced by my older brother who was studying at the University Michigan, or perhaps too my English/Social Studies teacher Mildred Kosaki.  I suddenly determined that I would go to Cal Tech or Stanford.  No one from McKinley had recently gone there.

• 
  I should have immediately given up when I took the practice Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in my junior year, and while very good in math, scored embarrassingly poor in verbal.  I recall two hundred something, placing me in the bottom tenth percentile.  But this only validated a similarly low score I had when they gave us the national comprehensive aptitude test in the 8th grade.
• In a stroke of luck, I broke my wrist playing basketball and therefore couldn't work in the pineapple cannery during the summer as most of us did between our junior and senior years.  With nothing better to do, I essentially memorized the vocabulary words in the SAT book.  Just that and the help of Mrs. Kosaki tripled my verbal score into the higher 600's.

• 
  To pad my college application, I needed some social activity, so for the first time in my life I ran for an office, vice president of the senior class.  My three opponents were female and classmates felt sorry for me because of that cast on my wrist.  I won.  That office made me chairman of a variety of committees.  One selected Mrs. Kosaki's husband, Richard, who was then a new political science professor at the University of Hawaii (they had just returned from the University of Minnesota), for our commencement speaker.  He went on to become chancellor of the campus when I joined the faculty 15 years later, and he picked me to work in his office.  She also zoomed up in importance as a planner and was on the board of Hawaiian Electric Company when I became director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute.  Now is that luck or what?

• 
  Further, for that college application I needed an athletic link.  My best friend was the top player on the school's tennis team.  I had never played the game before.  He taught me.  Luckily my broken wrist was on my left hand and all you need in tennis is one good arm.  The team essentially played every day except for Christmas and New Year.  Punahou always beat us up, for they gave scholarships.  The four best players on the team played first and second singles and first doubles, so I was the 5th best at third singles.  Punahou gave four scholarships, so their fifth best was nothing special.  Our team beat the other private schools and Roosevelt.  I might have had an undefeated record, which looked good on the application.

• 
  One of my particularly popular postings had to do with a pumpkin pie fiasco while I was in high school.  Essentially:  Unique, successful, sincere, and creative philanthropy was KEY to getting in.

• 
  I should have added that my family was poor, so there was no way for me to go away unless I won a full scholarship.  Both Cal Tech and Stanford accepted me, but the school I really wanted to go to, Cal Tech, only offered a pittance.  Stanford provided not only a scholarship, but waived tuition fees and added full room and board, plus a part-time job working in the library.  Lucky?

• 
  Upon graduating, my close classmates mostly joined the new Peace Corps.  I had to do something somewhat similar, so I chose to return to Hawaii to help the ailing sugar industry.  While working in Naalehu, I met my wife who was a nurse in the next town of Pahala.  We were together for 47 years, and if not for her I would not have had my professional success.  Luck?

• 
  The Vietnam War was heating up when I decided to join the Army Reserve.  However, after a few years in sugar, I decided to go to graduate school.  C. Brewer paid my salary to get a master's degree in sugar engineering, and the only such school in the world was at LSU in Baton Rouge.  On my first day of school the Defense Department activated all the reservists who were not actively training (I had just joined a unit in Louisiana) and sent most of them to Vietnam.  I might not be alive today if I remained in Naalehu.  While there I did not have to go to weekly gatherings in Hilo because it was too far away.  So I was in that fateful national control group.  C. Brewer allowed me to stay on for a PhD.

• 
  That led to my joining the University of Hawaii, which could serve as a whole new posting on my luck there, for it flourished.  Maybe some day in the future I'll continue this story.

Here is something someone sent me today about an event that will not occur this year, but perhaps in 2022 after the pandemic:

Can you believe that song, It's Now or Never, was Elvis Presley's best selling single?  Released in 1960, Elvis was inspired by Tony Martin's There's No Tomorrow from 1949.  Elvis, during his Army days in Europe was also fond of Mario Lanza's O Sole Mio.  

They're all the same song, which was written in 1898.  Here is Enrico Caruso's version.

One final bit of info, O Sole Mio actually means My Own Sunshine.  And this is a Neopolitan song, not Italian.  It is generally considered, though, to be the most famous tune from that country.

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I WENT TO THE DOCTOR YESTERDAY

  From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242       835      130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136      1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571       703       85

Nov    25     2304    12025        620       518      118

Dec    30     3880    14748       1224       299     465

Jan     14     4142   15512        1151       189     712              

Feb      3      4005   14265       1209       107     398

          17       2537   11383        1195        89     165 

          23       2404   10293       1370       100     263

          24       2525   10814       1433       144     110 

          25       2414   10578       1582       119     144

Summary:  What is looming is a fourth wave, this one caused by those variants.  From the New York Times this morning:

The country has averaged about 1.5 million shots per day over the past week. My reporting suggests that the right goal is at least three million daily shots by April.....the peak number of flu vaccine shots in a normal year is around three million per day. President Joe Biden reached 50 million inoculations in 36 days.  100 million is a given.  It will be a disappointment if the USA does not reach 200 million in his first 100 days.  Also from the NYT:

“Wear a mask. Avoid crowds. And get vaccinated when it’s your turn.”

Note the absence of hand-washing.  According to Professor Cris Janetoupoulos:

• So, while hand-washing is good hygiene that should be encouraged, this is a respiratory virus spread largely by aerosols, and the probability of getting live virus from your hands or a surface into your respiratory tract appears small.
• Also:  Interestingly, it is now well accepted that asymptomatic individuals are contributing to the spread of COVID-19, with estimates suggesting that nearly 60% of all spread occurs in this manner.

It's now a month since I took my second Moderna dosage.  I should be safe.  However, for the past decade or so I've now and then experienced piercing pain emanating for inside my ears.  Never both at the same time, and only a couple of times/year.  I correlated those incidents to when the inside of my ear got wet, so I thought some kind of infection was the cause.  

So I went to an ear doctor.  Turns out that this pain (and for me it is not as bad as that image to the right) is common, and it has nothing to do with ear wax and the inner ear.  Mostly old age.  He said it was common neuralgia, an ailment the medical profession professes to know very little about.  For the severely impacted, there is some medication, but you need to take it all the time and there are side and long term effects.  So that's not the solution.  His advice, hope it does not get worse.  

As I was in his office I also inquired about two more discomforts:

• I suffer from mild tinnitus.  Again, he said that is common and, yes, just hope it does not get worse.  More importantly, you know about all those supposed cures for tinnitus?  Like for example Silencil, a kind of neuropathic solution.  He said to ignore all of them.  There is nothing anyone can do.  If someone actually developed a cure, that person would be a billionaire and he would know about it.

• 
  My final question.  How do I safely clean out the wax in my ear?  He said DON'T.  There is no safe way.  The wax just naturally falls out of your ear.  However, he did proceed to use a tool called a curet to remove what little I had, and the process was a whole lot more painful than the Moderna injections.  It almost was like he was telling me...don't do this.

• 
  My experience yesterday kind of reminded me of when I last went to see my ophthalmologist.  I asked this question for the first time ever:  How can I easily get an eyelash out of my eye?  He said, well, nothing much you can do.  Thats it?  Yes.  Turns out that these lashes do not accumulate in the back of your eye and disintegrate over time.  Evolution has found a way for the eye to naturally remove them out without your doing anything.  Amazing but true.

Here science is on the verge of finding a solution for COVID-19 so quickly, and otolaryngologists are treating patients as they did half a century ago.  At least my eye doctor took care of my cataract problem.  I now can see a golf ball roll on the green 200 yards away.

Next week I go to my dentist (but this is for preventive maintenance by a dental hygienist).  As I tally up all the pain my body suffers from each year, my twice a year visit for this torture overwhelms anything else.  Yet, it's tolerable, almost masochistically so, and worth the agony.

Finally, I also have a new knee doctor on my list next week.  This is something I've been postponing for a year during this quarantine period. However, self therapy morning exercises have made such a positive difference that I should cancel this appointment.  Yet, why not, as this will cost me nothing, and perhaps I'll receive some useful advice.

I'll close with:

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HOW MANY STRINGS DOES A ZITHER HAVE?

  From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732       1185        246       82

July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120      572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242       835      130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136      1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571       703       85

Nov    25     2304    12025        620       518      118

Dec    30     3880    14748       1224       299     465

Jan     14     4142   15512        1151       189     712              

Feb      3      4005   14265       1209       107     398

          17       2537   11383        1195        89     165 

          23       2404   10293       1370       100     263

          24       2525   10814       1433       144     110

Summary:  Somewhat stabilized, but better than early in the month.  The USA still had 75,299 new COVID-19 cases yesterday.

From the New York Times:

Here’s a useful way to think about Israel’s numbers: Only 3.5 out of every 100,000 people vaccinated there were later hospitalized with Covid symptoms. During a typical flu season in the U.S., by comparison, roughly 150 out of every 100,000 people are hospitalized with flu symptoms.

And yet the seasonal flu does not grind life to a halt. It does not keep people from flying on airplanes, eating in restaurants, visiting their friends or going to school and work.

Nursing home deaths have plummeted.  Seems to be related to early vaccinations. World daily new cases are also definitely declining: Like the two vaccines that are already being administered in the U.S. — from Moderna and Pfizer — Johnson & Johnson’s eliminated both death and hospitalization in its research trial: About 20,000 people received the vaccine in the trial, and not a single one was hospitalized with Covid-19 symptoms a month later. Further: J&J vaccine needs only one shot. Can be stored in a standard refrigerator.  The Pfizer version needs to be kept at minus 94 degrees F, and Moderna's at minus 4 F. While Pfizer and Moderna effectiveness is well above 90%, J&J is at around 66%.  The selling point is that it is 85%  effective in preventing serious cases. This is old info (August 2020), but J&J vaccines are cheaper (while free to most, someone is paying for them): Moderna:  $32 to $37 per dose (so needs to be doubled) Pfizer:  $19.50 per dose (so needs to be doubled) J&J:  $10 per dose....so cheaper by a factor of 7.5 compared to Moderna and 3.8 compared to Pfizer Note that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is even cheaper, but needs two doses, so about equal equal to J&J. Finally, again from the New York Times: A Morning read: No flat map of our round world can be perfect, but a new one aims to be better.

I don't play any instruments so have almost no knowledge about them.  I do know that a ukulele has four strings, and so does a violin and cello. 

This morning I was watching Classic Arts Showcase with Anton Karas playing The Third Man Theme on a zither, and I saw a whole lot of strings.   Did you know that a European zither can have 30 or 40 strings?  But 16 in Vietnam, and up to 70 in a country or two.

Maybe the earliest string instrument is the lute, which goes back to 3100 BC.  Started with maybe 4 strings, went up to 10 by the Renaissance, then 19 during the Baroque era, and now can be found up to 35 strings.  Peter Paul Rubens painted Lute Player in 1610.

Want to know what materials are used to make strings?  You can buy a handbook for the details.  Plus, many are wound and have other intricate designs.  However, here are some examples:

• Synthetic like nylon.
• Metals, nickel, steel, aluminum, etc.
• Gut
• intestines of animals, with sheep wrapped with silver or copper wire prominent in the past
• a whole range of other animals have been used
• rarely from cats

• 
  horsehair is still used for violins, but only dead horses from cold climates, and can cost up to $8000 per bow
• should not be cut from a live horse because it is used to shoo away flying insects, which can suck a cup of blood without the tail and leave diseases
• can be longer than 4 feet and weight, when dried, 25 pounds from just one horse
• note that most animals have a tail...for that reason

A harp has 47 strings, with 7 pedals.  Pedals?  Plus some strings are colored:

• C strings are red.
• F strings are black or dark blue
• All other strings are white or without color.

In the Orient, the Japanese koto (left, sometimes also considered to be a zither) has 13 strings, Chinese zheng 21 strings and Korean kayagum 12 strings.  The Japanese samisen has three strings and the Chinese erhu two.

The American diddley bow has only one string.  The banjo came to the U.S. from Africa, and  started with 4 strings, went up to 5, and the popular version today has 6, although the more proficient go up to one with 10 strings.  There is also a 12-string banjo.

While the 6-string guitar is the most popular, the bass guitar has only four, or five.  Then, you can find guitars with 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 18, 20 and 36.  The mandolin has 8 strings, although 10 and 12 versions can also be found.  The Russian balalaika only has three.

The piano is quite complicated, with 88 keys, but usually around 230 strings, although some go up to 330.  It can be considered to be both a string and percussion instrument.  I've never quite been able to understand how this works, because I've never taken a real music course, but the white keys represent musical tones A, B, C, D, E, F and G, while the black keys are half-step intervals, known as sharps and flats, between notes.  Together, they make up the 12 notes, called an octave.

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