WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR UNIVERSE OF MONUMENTAL SIGNIFICANCE?

While our search for extraterrestrial intelligence teams have not yet detected meaningful signals from outer space, the Break Listen Project, with funding from Yuri Milner, did report on 20 August 2017 about picking up a series of 15 radio bursts from a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years away.  Then, more recently, data was re-analyzed, and the count is up to around 300.  However, the "best" they can determine is that the possibility of alien signals cannot be totally disregarded.

How close are we to alien invasion?  Stephen Hawking, who passed away earlier this year, and was on the Breakthrough Starshot (BS) initiative, last year warned that the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) could be the worst event in the history of civilization.  But AI is human-made.  BS, incidentally, another Milner supported team, will send light sail spacecrafts to Proxima Centauri b, an earth-sized exoplanet located a little more than 4 light years away.

But back to fear, what about a gamma ray burst to destroy life on Planet Earth?  Astronomers are keeping an eye on star system WR104, located about 6,000 light years away, which is a binary star system.  If those stars collide, a supernova could be the consequence, and there is a chance that a beam of gamma ray bursts could destroy our ozone layer, leaving us vulnerable to the Sun's UV radiation.  But not to worry, for these stars are not close enough yet to be concerned.

The asteroid that caused the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago was said to be between 6.2 and 9.3 miles in diameter.  There are 18,000 known near-Earth asteroids being tracked, and even a very small one of 50 feet diameter can cause tsunamis.  Interested?  Read this.

Closer to Earth, but 91 million miles away, you can watch Insight landing on Mars tomorrow (Monday) at 3PM EST (10AM Hawaii time):

NASA TV will be broadcasting the landing live online between 2 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. ET on Monday (Nov. 26). You can also watch the landing on other sites such as Facebook and Space.com.

There will be viewing parties the world wide, such as in Times Square, California Science Center in Los Angeles, Adler Planetarium in Chicago and Le Reunion.  Alas, this lander will not even search for life, primarily listening to native music:  vibrations or marsquakes.

Let me end just with a note that Osaka won the competition for the 2025 World Expo.  I'll follow up with a full report on these World Fairs later this week.

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THANKSGIVING IN PURGATORY

I have been at 15 Craigside for four Thanksgivings, and each time I've had two Thanksgiving meals.  While we have a decent dinner here, I always get invited out, so order take-out to enjoy later.

This year my brother invited me to join his bridge team at Little Village Noodle House for Thanksgiving.  He is from Las Vegas and they are in town for a major American Contract Bridge Tournament at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.

Here is his team:

From the left, Yasuo, Sooja, Sun-Hee, Kyung-Won and Dan, my brother.  They represent a total of 25,000 master points.  You want to know how awesome that is?

• Life Master                    300
• Gold Life Master         2500
• Diamond Life Master  5000

We had much, too much, to eat, starting with Peking Duck:

After all, this was Thanksgiving.  See those french fries above?  I arrived early and started with that delicacy so that I could drink my wine.  We went on to:

• steamed choy sum with oyster sauce
• ong choy
• eggplant with garlic sauce
• honey walnut shrimp

• volcano pork chops
• Hong Kong style seafood mixed vegetables
• special fried rice
• steamed branzino (which certainly looked like mullet to me)

Branzino is a European sea bass farmed in Connecticut.  It has recently become a well-regarded fish in high cuisine restaurants.  Swai, from Thailand, is a fraud fish with some dangers.

The turkey special for the night would have cost us around $180.  The whole meal only came up to $177.  What, however, made the gathering special were the wines, and the conviviality they generated.  I brought two of my Stanford wines, thinking that was, maybe, one bottle too many.  Little Village has a corkage charge of $1/glass.  You can have ten drinks and the cost is still $1.

Turns out Yasuo brought three bottles, and we opened all five.  Dan was the designated driver and had two ounces all night.  That calculates to just about one bottle per person.  

Clearly, they're foodies, for their familiarity with Michelin 3-star and Pelligrino Best 50 was obvious.  We also talked about BTS, Rain and Gangnam, for the three ladies are from Seoul and Dan spent a few years there.  Yasuo, an electrical engineer, is from Japan, but lived in San Jose and now is from Los Angeles.  This restaurant must be popular with international bridge players, for they saw a couple of friends with even more points than them.  They all loved this dinner so much that they plan to return next Sunday.  The tournament goes on for another week.

So Friday night after walking 18-holes at Ala Wai, I had my 15 Craigside turkey meal, which also served as tailgate #1.  The game on TV was in a snowstorm, where Washington beat Washington State:

Note the bottle of 2002 Ventana Estate Chardonnay.  I wondered what this cost, and the best I could do was find a 2014 Chardonnay for $150.  I have never before tasted a 16-year old Chardonnay.  The nose was crisp without any offending odor.  There was no hint of corkiness (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) or spoilage.

Tailgate #2 was my best brunch tailgate ever, with most of the ingredients coming from Marukai.  I wanted to test the severity of Black Friday, so, after golf, went there and found no parking problem.  Then, for the first time that I can remember, went straight to check-out without any line.  This was the day when you could use the scratch-off sent through the mail, and I got a 10% discount.

Of the three, which do you think is the most expensive?  If those shiitake mushrooms were matsutake, then, perhaps.  However, no matsutake.  So my brunch tailgate:

That bowl to the left is my aquarium:

I reprised the Ventana Chardonnay, a junmai daiginjo sake and Kirin beer:

My aloe has a tall blossom:

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Typhoon Usagi is headed for Vietnam:

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF BLACK FRIDAY

Today is Black Friday, and to quote TheBalance:

Black Friday is November 23, 2018, the day after Thanksgiving. It's traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year because it kicks off the holiday season. This season is crucial for the economy because around 30 percent of annual retail sales occur between Black Friday and Christmas. For some retailers, such as jewelers, it's even higher, at almost 40 percent.

For some, it is an outing tradition.  I might actually now challenge the horror of Black Friday, for the internet is transforming the scene.  Black Friday weekend peaked in 2012.  Could shopping centers go the way of book stores?  It is said, though, that Hawaii, as an island state, is unique, for we need to pay more for transportation, many items cannot be shipped here, and it takes far longer to get here for Christmas.

But there is a transition period, so remember that there will be more than 100 million shopping tomorrow, 65 million on Saturday and 33 million on Sunday.  The question is:  Will online shopping begin to materially reduce crowds?

Last year, the National Retail Federation said that of the 174 million Americans who did their Black Friday shopping between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday, 58 million of them exclusively shopped online. An additional 61 million shopped both online and in store.

Black Friday was coined as early as 1952, but did not become prominent until the 1980's.  The term black usually is applied to horrible events, but there is something to stores coming into the black from the profit standpoint.  The black still applies to hordes of people, impossible parking and traffic.  Now retailers sometimes open after Thanksgiving dinner.  Many of the best bargains can be had this weekend, items will run out, so that is the hysteric draw to shop as early as possible.

From DealNews:

Despite the high number of sales on this shopping holiday, you won't see fantastic prices on every product. And even though we posted the most deals on Black Friday itself in 2017, both Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday featured more Editors' Choice deals.

Still, that doesn't mean you should ditch Black Friday entirely. Throughout the Black Friday season, there are clear trends as to when different products go on sale. Black Friday will likely be the best day to get deals on kitchen goods, clothes, tools, beauty products, toys, laptops, and appliances.

But if you're looking for most types of electronics, Thanksgiving tends to have better deals. We're predicting Turkey Day will have the best deals on smartphones, speakers, tablets, headphones, and video games in 2018. And if you want to buy a television or book your next vacation? Cyber Monday is probably the best time to shop.

One final date worth noting is Cyber Monday, which was coined in 2005.  There were record sales last year of $6.6 billion.  Black Friday.com shows the following:

But TheStreet reports that Cyber Monday attracted 122 million shoppers, while Black Friday drew 116 million, of which 67 million did it online.  So to repeat, the telling transformation of Black Friday might well be an obvious clue to the fate of shopping centers. 

None of these shopping days have any appeal to me anyway because, first, I'm old enough, so I've stopped giving Christmas gifts.  People still drop things off for me on occasion, but by now they should know that I don't reciprocate.  My wife Pearl would  have continued the exchanges, but she's no longer around.  Second, I have everything I could possibly want.  Sad to say that I have nothing left to buy.  But I remain in a pleasant state of euphoria.

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WHO IS RUI HACHIMURA?

This blog site has previously alerted viewers to Yu Darvish  (6'5") and Shohei Otani (6'4") from Japan.  Darvish has become a prominent major league pitcher, while Otani was recently named Rookie of the Year in the American League.

Now comes Rui Hachimura (6'8") of Toyama, and now Gonzaga University.  They all have Japanese mothers, but Yu's father is from Iran and Rui's father is from Benin, a tiny country in Africa.

Yesterday on Maui #3 Gonzaga beat #1 Duke 89-87 in an epic battle of the two most exciting NCAA basketball players this year, Hachimura and Zion Williamson.  Duke has four starting freshmen, and all are incredible.  Rui is now a junior, but has suddenly become the talk of college basketball.

Read about how Rui got to Gonzaga.  In any case, he will be the star of Japan's olympics team when Tokyo hosts in 2020.  First, they need to qualify. They do have a few other worthy players: 

• Naturalized-citizen Nick Fazekas (6'11") was born in Japan, and became three-time player of the year at the University of Nevada.  He is now 33 years old,

• Yuta Watanabe (6'9", right)) plays for the Memphis Grizzlies and was the first real Japanese player to secure an NCAA Division I basketball scholarship, from George Washington University.  He last year was defensive player of the year in the Atlantic 10 conference.
• Hyu Watanabe is 6'9" tall and plays for the University of Portland.  He is otherwise known as Hugh Hogland, who graduated from Iolani High School in Hawaii.
• Tahirou Diabate, also from the University of Portland, is 6'10", born in Mali (Africa) and shows potential.  He has scored 101 points in a game.

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BUTTERFLIES IN PURGATORY

As those familiar with this blog site know, the location of Purgatory ranges from 15 Craigside to the entirety of Hawaii.  Today, the latter.

How many of you know that we have a state insect?  Nine years ago some Gifted and Talented 5th-graders at Pearl Ridge Elementary went beyond the usual learning process of how legislation is created by actually influencing the Hawaii State Legislature to introduce a bill to select the first state insect.  Their two finalists were the Kamehameha Butterfly (pulelehua, Vanessa tameamea) and Hawaiian happy-face spider.

Let me digress a bit to mention that the Department of Education has a program for the Gifted and Talented, and mostly because of George Carter, who with the help of Ed Jurkens, both from SERTOMA, in 1972 badgered the education leadership to start the effort.  They actually formed a club for the very gifted high school students, and 46 years later, it is still going strong as the George B. Carter Serteens Club of Hawaii.  

George actually wrote a book on the above.  I was there at the beginning, and remember meeting with them the Hawaii school superintendent, who was against such an effort, for this would have been promoting elitism.  I also fondly recall the first Serteens class, for they mostly went on to become doctors, TV news anchors and military leaders.  Every so often I still provide a lecture, and are awed at how much smarter most of them are compared to me.

In any case these 5th-grade students noted that the Hawaiian happy-face spider was only found in Hawaiian rainforests, and nowhere else in the world, while the Kamehameha Butterfly was one of only two endemic butterflies to Hawaii, somehow getting here millions of years ago. 

Good thing the class voted to select the butterfly, for a spider is NOT an insect.  Anyway, it was only last year that the first 94 were released into the Kawainui Marsh.  Watch this 12-minute video.  This kind of Butterfly Effect will for sure only omen well for the future of Planet Earth and Humanity.

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