THE 2022 GOLDEN RASPBERRY AWARDS

One more condemnation of Russia:

Junk mail is of course now digital as well. Nearly 300 billion emails are sent and received every day, and spam messages accounted for more than 45 percent of email traffic in March 2021, according to Statista. Which country is most responsible for invading your inbox without permission? Russia, where nearly 25 percent of unsolicited emails originated. 

Most spam emails are benign if annoying, but a growing number of variants include spyware, trojans, ransomware, and other malicious agents designed to damage systems or compromise recipients’ personal information. It was a so-called “phishing” expedition by Russian hackers that famously led to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails in 2016 when a fake “account reset” claiming to be from Google sent to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta was opened.

By the way, did you know that SPAM is called SPAM because it is a contraction of spiced ham, invented by Hormel Foods in 1937?  It became widespread  because of World War II, and is particularly popular in the Pacific Islands and the Orient, including, of course, Hawaii.  Surely you've had a spam musubi.  You'd think that the latest dietary trends would eliminate Spam from the marketplace. But, no, sales last year hit an all-time high, for the seventh year in a row.

What an appropriate switch to the subject of the day.  One of the lowlights of the movie industry is the Golden Raspberry Award ceremony, to occur on March 26.  A few things you should know:

• 
  Members of the organization pay for membership, and number 650 from 19 countries.
• Both the nominations and awards are revealed the day before the Academy Awards, although they made an exception by having the session on April Fool's Day in 2012.
• Some recipients actually accepted their statuette, including Halle Berry and Sandra Bullock.
• Three actors received both Oscar an Razzie nominations for the same role:  James Coco (Only When I Laugh), Amy Irving (Yentl) and Glenn Close (Hillbilly Elegy).
• An Aerosmith song I Don't Want to Miss a Thing from Armegeddon similarly was nominated for both.
• 
  Wall Street is the only film to win both an Oscar and a Razzie.
• The Bodyguard won seven Razzie nominations, but was a huge box office hit.
• Rudy Giuliani was nominated for his role in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
• Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars the Phantom Menace won a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actor.

The Golden Raspberry Awards, known as Razzies, honoring the worst cinematic under-achievements, was co-founded by UCLA film graduates and several film industry veterans.  This will be the 42nd year.  This statuette is a golden raspberry sitting on a super 8mm film reel with an estimated street value of $5.  Sylvester Stallone has won 10 awards, beating out Madonna with nine.  He was named the Worst Actor of the Century, and Madonna same for an actress.

Nominees for 2022 were revealed on February 7.  You can read them all, but some of the worst include:

• Diana the Musical by Netflix.  RT:  12/33.  Wow, this is pretty miserable.
• Worst Actress, Amy Adams, The Woman in the Window, another Netflix loser.  RT:  26/23.
• Worst Actor, LeBron James, Space Jam, as himself.  RT:  25/79.  Could be okay,
• Worst Supporting Actor:  Ben Affleck, Nick Cannon, Mel Gibson and Jared Leto.
• Worst Supporting Actress, Amy Adams, Dear Evan Hansen. RT:  29/88.  Hmm, might worth watching.

Diana the Musical got 9 nominations.  A special category was announced this year:  Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 movie...and there were eight.

For two years now BTS has been #1 in the world.  The top ten for the year?

1. BTS
2. Taylor Swift
3. Adele
4. Drake
5. Ed Sheeran
6. The Weeknd
7. Billie Eilish
8. Justin Bieber
9. Seventeen
10. Olivia Rodrigo

Two meals featured this weekend.  Artichoke with foie gras pâté, cheese and salad and a splendid La Crema Rose.

Next tonkatsu (Japanese pork cutlet), provided by 15 Craigside:

I hardly eat rice anymore and avoid those veggies, so I fried the tonkatsu in butter:

Bought some otoro (ultra fatty blue fin tuna) at Marukai.  Have you ever paid $90/pound for fish?

Kirin beer, chilled sake, hot green tea and Toki Japanese whisky over rocks.  Lots of cabbage, sea asparagus and avocado.

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NUTS

Something to worry about if you live in Alaska:

Ever wonder what happened to Justin Bieber?  Discovered at the age of 13, he went through drugs, depression, Lyme disease, mononucleosis...then found God, wife...Hailey Bailey, happiness, is on tour and will turn 28 tomorrow.  Here he is with Baby.

So I picked crunchy nuts as my topic of today.  Turned out that the title is flawed.  Nuts works as a statement, but not as what you consume.  Did you know National Almond Day was February 16?

Everything you need to know about almonds:

• Not a nut.
• Filled with vitamin E, magnesium, phosphorous, riboflavin, biotin, calcium and fiber.
• Claimed by the FDA to reduce heart disease if  you eat 1.5 ounces/day.  
• Anyone tell you how many almonds you need to daily eat to meet that requirement?  35!!!  
• This weight of almonds has 20 grams of fat, but mostly unsaturated, and supposedly good for your health.
• Also combats obesity, diabetes and lowers the risk of cancer because of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefits.

• 
  First grown in Iran back in 4000 BC.
• Were found in King Tut's tomb.
• Became a farm crop soon after the Gold Rush began, and today, 80% of almonds are grown in California.  
• Worth nearly $6 billion/year.
• Did you know that this state produces a third of all the country's vegetables and two-thirds of fruits/nuts?

• 
  One major problem is that it takes 3 gallons (including natural rainfall) of water to produce one almond (including hull and shell).  Thus, your daily FDA intake would require around a hundred gallons of water.
• In comparison, it takes 15 gallons of water to help generate 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity.  Thus, a 100 watt lightbulb can be on for 10 hours to, in effect, use 15 gallons of water.

• 
  Agriculture uses 80% of Colorado River water, which has reduced its flow by 20% since the current 20-year megadrought, where the two largest reservoirs in the USA, filled with Colorado River water, this year has reached their lowest levels ever.  How low?  Lake Mead is 140 feet below its 2000 level when it was considered full.  This is the height of the Statue of Liberty.

What do you know about cashews?

• 
  Native to Brazil.
• Most of the production from the Ivory Coast and India.  No commercial ag in the U.S.
• Are not nuts.
• Cashews are non-toxic AFTER roasting, but the shell consists of urusiol, which causes dermatitis.
• Has to be processed by hand.
• Rich in vitamin K, fiber,  amino acids, omega-3 fatty acids and a range of minerals like iron, plus is good for digestion.  Good for your blood.  No sodium.  Lowers blood pressure.  Reduces cholesterol.  Strengthens bones.  Good for diet if you want to lose weight.  Strengthens immune system.
• Like almond, there is such a thing as cashew milk, which is a good dairy-free substitute for cow's milk.
• The "apple" surrounding the nut and shell can be consumed, and is a good source of antioxidants.  Can be used for jam and juice.
• Incidentally, did you know that omega-3 fatty acids are good for you, but that omega-6 fatty acids links to inflammation and other chronic diseases.  Cashews have less of the 6 than peanuts.
• Also, did you know that cashews are safe for dogs, but that macadamia nuts are NOT!!!
• 18 cashew nuts will satisfy 10% of your daily protein requirement.
• Can cause certain allergies and produce digestive gas if eaten to excess.

Pistachios also will surprise you.

• A member of the cashew family and is not a nut.
• Goes back to 6750 BC during the Bronze Age in what is now Uzbekistan.
• Has long been food for the royalty.
• Yesterday was National Pistachio Day.

• 
  Why is it relatively expensive?  Peanuts are ready to harvest in 150 days.  Pistachio trees take 15-20 years to produce the first crop.  Try Amazon.com.
• You click above to see how healthy pistachios are, so to the above add good for gut bacteria and lower blood sugar levels.

• 
  Some are allergic to this product, where the cause are fructans.
• California makes the U.S.now the second-biggest supplier of pistachio.  Iran still is #1.

• 
  Here is the story:
• I grew up with red pistachios from Iran.  I today worry that this was Red Dye #2, but I'm still alive and the taste of pistachios in my youth was so much better than today.  Whatever, red dye was applied because these shells looked stained.  In the U.S. the harvesting system was perfected to eliminate stains, so coloring them red was not necessary.
• 
  However, in 1979 came the Iranian hostage crisis and pistachios were embargoed, and now and then were still banned until 2011.
• So California came into prominence and now grows 98% of this product in the U.S.
• This pistachio lacks that Iranian taste.  Or maybe I'm just imagining this.
• The traditional Italian spumoni ice cream uses pistachios.

I should have stopped after almonds, but because I'm this far, let me end with my second favorite, Brazil nuts, which are seeds, like my #1, macadiamias.

• First discovered in Venezuela in the early 1800s.
• Then why Brazil?  Because this seed was exported from that country.
• You'd never guess the largest producer?  Bolivia.
• There are 250 different species.

• 
  The woody fruit the size of a cannonball falls to the ground, containing up to 25 edible seeds.
• The tree can be 150 feet tall and live for a thousand years.

• 
  Producers don't plant trees.  They depend on a rodent to do this, for they bury excess, which eventually starts to grow, and don't bear cannonballs for at least 15 years.  A good tree can bear 6000 nuts.

• 
  Same health benefits as the above, but distinctive in also providing selenium, an antioxidant to reduce inflammation.  Apparently one billion people worldwide have selenium deficiency, so consuming Brazilian nuts would be a cure.  Also helps improve your hair and build stronger muscles.  Boosts testosterone and reduces anxiety.  Aids in memory loss.
• Store in refrigerator.

So what are nuts?  Can you believe that peanuts are not nuts?  They belong to the pea family.  Macadamia nut is also not a nut, it is a seed.  Some true nuts include acorns, chestnuts and hazelnuts.  Cashews and pistachios are drupes.  The difficulty comes in the classification of walnuts and pecans, which are said to be be nut-like drupes, or drupaceous nuts.  Drupes are prominent.  We eat the apple part of drupes, peaches and mangoes, and throw away the seed or "nut."

So I'll keep the title and won't change it to DRUPES.  And, incidentally, did you know that a watermelon is a berry, like bananas?  Also strawberries are not berries, they are pseudocarps.  Now you're totally confused because eggplants, tomatoes and avocados are botanically classified as berries.  Coffee is a drupe.

I'll end this posting with something on Unchained Melody, which was written for a 1955 film, Unchained.  There were four prominent early versions by Les Baxter, Al Hibbler, Roy Hamilton and Liberace.  There have been 1500 recordings by 670 artists.  The one that became most popular was by The Righteous Brothers in 1965.  Made yet another appearance in the 1990 Ghost.  Was named #27 on AFI's 100 songs list.  Here is a more recent performance featuring 600 military musicians from 11 nations in Bremen, Germany.

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CHESS

About the Ukraine matter, here is another explanation, by VOX, of why Putin invaded.  In short:

Putin believes that Ukraine is an illegitimate country that exists on land that’s historically and rightfully Russian. Zelensky’s willingness to move away from Moscow and toward the West is, in Putin’s mind, an attempt to legitimize the “false” regime in Kyiv. The existence of an anti-Russian regime in what he views as rightfully Russian territory populated by rightfully Russian people is unacceptable to him — so unacceptable that he is willing to wage a costly and bloody war over it.

I haven't been paying much attention to chess for quite a while, so with nothing better to do this sparkling (the view of Honolulu from where I sit is fabulous) Saturday morning, I will attempt to crystallize the essence of the field.  Click on this to see the world ranking:

• 
  #1 Magnus Carlsen of Norway is only 31 and has already been World Chess Champ for five years.  His peak rating of 2882 is the highest in history.  This has dropped to 2865.  At 15 won the Norwegian Chess Championship, and reached #1 in one of the world rankings at the age of 19, the youngest to ever do this.
• Three of the top eight today are from the USA.

Then there is India's 16-year old chess grandmaster, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, who beat Carlsen in an online rapid chess tournament.  Pragg became the youngest person to ever defeat him.  Carlsen did reveal that he was suffering the after-effects of COVID-19.

Said to be the greatest chess champion in history, Carlsen has admitted that he'd regularly lose to a computer.  Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer, beat then world champ Garry Kasparov in 1985, and again in 1996.  Today there are several chess engines, with AlphaZero having a rating of more than 3000.  That you can't buy, but the next best is Stockfish, which is a free app.  AlphaZero beat Stockfish in a 100-game tournament.

How's this for gender inferiority.  There has never been a female world chess champ.  Currently, there is only one woman in the top 100, Hou Yifan of China at #89.  There is an argument, though, that this is because there are so few females playing chess, so the reason is not biological.  Yet, there are other opinions.

There are 39 female grandmasters, and only one from the USA, Irina Krush.  A check of the current status shows 1688 male grandmasters and only 37 female.

You might have watched last year the 7-episode Netflix series, The Queen's Gambit.  Anya Taylor-Joy became famous in this role.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave this production a terrific 96 rating.

Nothing to do with chess, but I did say this was a sparkling morning in Honolulu.  Then a friend sent me this video of a mega tsunami inundating the city.  I have an upcoming posting on this subject.  About four years ago I wrote about a historical 1500-feet mega tsunami that struck Molokai and Lanai. 

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HAPPINESS IS THE ART OF DOING NOTHING

  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

Mar     2        1989     9490        1726       110      194

April   6         906     11787         4211       631       37

May    4         853     13667        3025      3786      59 

June   1         287    10637         2346      3205      95

 July   7          251      8440        1595        817     411

Aug    4          656    10120        1118         532     423 

Sept  22       2228      9326          839        279     124

Oct    6         2102      8255          543        315       59

Nov   3         1436      7830         186         458       23

Dec    1        1633      8475          266        477       28

Jan    7         2025      6729         148        285      140

       14          2303      7872         238        430      128

       21          2777      9091         396        489      103

       26          3143   10,554         606        575        94

Feb  2           2990   12,012         946        991      175

        9           2785   11,827        1295      1241      213

      10           2465   11,110          922        659      203

      11           1917   11,193        1121        804      146

      17           2184   11,440        1129        496      435

      23           2440   10,731         956        302      110 

      24           1823     9,809         996        304        40

Summary:  

• Certainly looking better for the USA and World.  I expect both to show significantly lower new deaths numbers next week.
• Europe remains an epicenter, and some countries of the Orient are catching up:
• Japan had more new cases yesterday than the USA:  77,810 to 70,885.
• Germany was still #1 with 218,431, but #2 was South Korea with 170,006.
• Iceland had 15,597 new cases/million population.
• World  226
• USA  212 (we are lower than the world average for the first time in a long time)
• Idaho  1338
• California  359
• Hawaii  206
• New York  138
• Japan  618
• South Korea  3314
• Singapore  3151
• Germany  2600
• Russia  911
• Latvia  5994
• Norway  2835
• Brunei  8380
• Taiwan  3.3
• Hong Kong  1158
• China  0.13

Well, Putin performed a Hitler-like blitzkrieg and essentially took over Ukraine.  What did the U.S. and our allies do?  A few sanctions.  True, the Moscow stock market dropped by 30%, and the European Union accounts for 37% of Russia's global trade and receives 30% of the energy consume.  However, Putin has won round one.  The West is moving cautiously so as not to hurt the future peace, or something like that.  The truth is that short of troops on the ground and active air action, what else can we do?  What is Xi Jinping now thinking about Taiwan?

Donald Trump praised Putin.  Fox News played down the invasion.  Steve Bannon argued that Congress should impeach Biden for instigating this war in Ukraine.   Trump Republicans are mostly unsure about what to say and more traditional Republicans are mostly quiet.  Read more here.  There is now a new Cold War, and our nation is not united.

Since moving into 15 Craigside, I've found that solitude is restorative.  There is an art to doing nothing, which can bring happiness.

• There is an Italian term about the sweetness of doing nothing:  dolce far niente.
• Niksen is Dutch for do nothing.  This philosophy encourages you to stare at nature, laze around and listen to music.  Koe knufflen, or cow hugging, has become popular.  Something to a big, comforting body and warmer temperature, which can lower your heartbeat.  Has spread to Arizona and New York for $75/hour.

• 
  In Denmark, hygge...Sweden, lagom = finding joy in moderation.
• Kolkata (once spelled Calcutta) uses the term lyadh:  lush laziness in a state of inactive indulgence.
• To counter what is happening to Brazil's jungles, indigenous communities and conservationists are going local in a slow food movement.
• After decades of rapid urbanization, even China is slowing down to embrace slow living and restricting fast food.
• Japan has a word, karoshi, which means death by overwork.  The government, combined with the pandemic, contributed to low-key relocation and working from home.  Once-dying villages are growing.

• 
  In Turkey and Central Asis, ebru art is catching on. This is painting on water with dyes, featuring swirls like Van Gogh's Starry Night.
• This we've all done, stone skipping over water.

• 
  Ever visit a sound bathing studio?  Derives from Buddhist monasteries, crystal singing bowls and chimes.

• 
  Use the internet for dolphins to sing you to sleep.
• You can come up with your own ways to do nothing and better enjoy life.

With this pandemic making travel unwise and faced with the reality of the end being too, too close, coming to a conclusion that there will be no Heaven for me, and most likely everyone else, I was faced with how to maximize the time left for me.  I found much of the above and more to be satisfying and sufficient.

Mind you, I've actively dreamed of my next global adventure, and last year showed an itinerary for the Fall of this year.  Looks like that is now no longer possible, and this trip will only take us through Okinawa, Japan and on a ship to Singapore.  

Thus that next around the world journey will occur some time in 2023.  

• Will it be a Crystal cruise?  Probably not because the itinerary is not optimal and they never go fully global.
• Travel+Leisure reviews ten of them.
• Price range:  $20,000 to $100,000+.
• Most would take more a 100 days, and one for 180.
• 
  This would be on the Oceania Insignia, and fares start at only $42,599, which calculates to $237/day.
• However, I need a balcony room.

• 
  More likely, it will be combining air and sea, with perhaps a Crystal European river trip and Cunard from Southampton to New York City.
• Worked in will be the World's 50 Best Restaurants, once spearheaded by Pellegrino.  For sure also a few 3-Star Michelins.
  
• One option is to follow the path of the movie:  Around the World in 80 Days.  But I would hate to travel east.  So this is out.
• I'll give this more thought.

In any case, this is my life today.

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