THIS IS SUPER SUNDAY

There are several articles touting 51 fascinating facts about Super Bowl LI.  Here is the top six from just one of them:

1. The Patriots have won four Super Bowls, all of them with Tom Brady and Bill Belichick at the helm.

2. This is only Atlanta’s second trip to the Super Bowl, and they’ve never won.  Right, QB Matt Ryan.

3. The Patriots have been to the Super Bowl nine times, which is an NFL record.

4. They have won four times, which is not a record.

5. That belongs to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who have won six.

6. Tom Brady has been to seven Super Bowls, the most trips by any single player. He has been in the NFL for 17 years, and may actually be immortal.  Here is an article showing he earns $31.3 million/year...except that his wife, Gisele Bundchen, a model, makes $47 million/year.

And a few more:

• Maybe the Patriots' best player, Rob Gronkowski, is injured, but out of nowhere came Hulk Hogan, whose first name is Chris.  He caught 9 passes for 180 yards in the AFL championship game.  No one knew of him till then.  He came from Monmouth University where he played both defense and offense, and was said to be their best punter ever.  He is 6'1", 210 pounds and 28 years old.  Watch for #15 today.
• Donald Trump roots for the Patriots, Jimmy Carter for the Falcons.
• Falcons owner Arthur Blank is one of the founders of Home Depot.

• Returning as the half-time show is 31-year old Lady Gaga, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germonotta.  She sang the national anthem in Super Bowl 50.  Luke Bryan will sing that song this year, plus, the cast from the original Hamilton will do American the Beautiful.

• Did you know Houston is the 4th most populated city in the USA?  The last time they hosted was 13 years ago, where NippleGate occurred.  Oh, the Patriots won that year.
• Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan went to Boston College, the heart of Patriots territory.  Kicker Matt Bryant is 41 years old.  The Matthews family has been represented in every Super Bowl since 1978.  Jake Matthews (#70) plays left tackle for the Falcons.

• The NFL Theme Song was created over the weekend way back in 1994 by Scott Schreer, who was able to fashion together a 48 piece-orchestra to play three jingles, where later, two were combined into that iconic theme.  However, you will hear today the official Super Bowl Theme, also known as the The Lombardi Trophy.
• The Super Winner will get the Vince Lombardi Trophy, produced by Tiffany & Co.

• When the Patriots won the 2014 Super Bowl, owner Robert Kraft personally spent $5 million for 150 rings, or $36.500/ring.

Me?  I started with a Super Sunday Brunch, with the food and flowers as gifts:

Chicken Mochiko curry over rice, with salmon and yellow-fin tuna sashimi.  That large green shrub is my basil plant.  15 Craigside has a Super Bowl showing in our theater, but I'll watch the game in the seclusion of my apartment.

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WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SUPER BOWL 51

There was a long period in my life when I watched every National Football League game shown on television.  I then usually had fantasy teams or participated in football game leagues such Stratomatic.  Way back in 1980 I bought a Mitsubishi 60" TV set, the best you could get in those days.  It just never broke down, so I finally gave it away, and two decades ago I paid $10,000 for Audio Lab to design and install a 100" TV system in my apartment, with surround sound.  The motivation was to better watch pro football.  How many homes today have a 100" set?

This year, I might have viewed a quarter of two, total for the season, when Marco Mariota (who is from Hawaii) was playing, but he broke his leg, and I stopped watching NFL football.  I missed all the playoff games.  But tomorrow is the Chinese Super Bowl, Super Bowl LI, which actually stands for #51.  So I'll be tuned in at 1:30PM Hawaii Time, but mostly for the commercials.

On this note, I might add that there is another complementary sporting event, and purposefully not competitive, for the Professional Golfers' Association Phoenix Open would suffer if they dared.  So before SBLI, tune in to CBS from 3PM to  6PM Eastern Time for the WMPO.  This is now called the Waste Management Phoenix Open, otherwise known as the Greatest Show on Grass and the Drunkest and Rowdiest Golf Event of the Year.  Forget the ending, watch the 16th hole.  While the stadium in Houston for SBLI has a capacity of 72,000, the Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale expects more than 200,000 (205,000 showed up for day 3).

How did the NFL manage not to call this the Anheuser-Busch Super Bowl, for just this company has invested $149 million in ads on this game since 2009?  No, that was a 2014 article.  The cost after this year will shoot past $200 million.    The NFL does not need a sponsoring company, like Waste Management, because sponsors fork over nearly $5 million just for a 30-second advertisement.  It is reported that the $10 million for a full minute has already cost the company $15 million to produce the commercial.

So let me do most of you a big favor.  I'll show access to all the SBLI commercials  here.  There will be just around 50 spots.  Here is one possible top eight:

• Budweiser will have a one minute "political" ad about their founder, Adolphus Busch, who in 1859 came to America from Germany with three brothers (there were 23 children in the family).  Donald Trump's immigration policy will come to mind.

• Joel David and Ethan Jesse Coen (True Grit and Fargo) will direct a minute homage to 48-year old Easy Rider, featuring Peter Fonda and Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild, for the Mercedes AM GT.

• Another 60-second ad will star Justin Bieber, with Rob Gronkowski and Terrel Owens, for T-Mobile.
• In a particularly sexy special, Procter & Gamble's Mr. Clean will charm the pants of a female.

• There will be a half minute action ad with Jason Stratham and Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman--soon to be released, already with  a 99% audience want to see rating) for Wix.
• Adam Driver from Star Wars will shoot a Snickers commercial during the game, live.  Wait a minute, how can this be shown now when the Super bowl is tomorrow?  Well, click on it.

• Hyundai will also record live at the Super Bowl, but will air the spot immediately after the game ends.
• Kia Niro and Melissa McCarthy will entertain you.

Here is another site providing their top ten ads for SBLI, and, interestingly enough, 10 banned Super Bowl commercials.  So you never saw these...they were never shown.  But here they are, and why they were disallowed.  This year you won't see the GNC ad because it included substances banned by the NFL, and 84 Lumber was denied because they featured a wall (hint:  Trump and Mexico).  However, not long after the Hyundai spot could well follow 90 seconds from this company.

Finally, they say that the Super Bowl is the most watched TV event of the year, and the over-under proposition this year is 116.5 million.  As an event, though, the Super Bowl only comes in at #4.  In 2011, the ICC Cricket World Cup might have been watched by a billion when India played Pakistan, but was officially reported at several hundred million.  The Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 drew 600 million.  #1 was the 2010 FIFA World Cup between Spain and The Netherlands, with 700 million.  However, FIFA reported that in 2014 3.2 billion watched their games and more than ONE BILLION viewed the final between Argentina and Germany.

Try getting a room in Las Vegas this weekend.  Super Bowl betting equals the entirety of money placed for all the NCAA March Madness basketball games.  Last year, $132.5 million, just in Vegas.  The propositions, though, capture my imagination. The Westgate sports book in Las Vegas has 400 props:

• Golden State's Stephen Curry combined first-half points and assists (for game to be played Sunday night versus Kings) will be 2.5 more than the combined first half points of SBLI.
• Patriots will beat Falcons by more than 21 points, and you can win $65 for a $10 bet.
• What color will Lady Gaga's hair be at her halftime show (blond 1/4, other 5/2--see right column for what this means).

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DID WE EVOLVE FROM CHIMPANZEES OR BONOBOS?

In the USA, evolution is hardly a given.  More Republicans don't believe in evolution than do:

Religious differences:

Religious Differences on the Question of Evolution (United States) Percentage who agree that evolution is the best explanation for the origin of human life on earth
Buddhist			81%
Hindu			80%
Jewish			77%
Unaffiliated			72%
Catholic			58%
Orthodox			54%
Mainline Protestant			51%
Muslim			45%
Hist. Black Protest.			38%
Evang. Protestant			24%
Mormon			22%
Jehovah's Witnesses			8%
Total U.S. population percentage:48% Source: Pew Forum[56]

Finally, another comparative poll:

Religions skew belief in evolution, and only about a third of Americans believe the scientific view of evolution.

But Americans are, relative to the developed world, very religious, and, next to Turkey, we are next to disbelieve in the concept of Darwin's evolution:

So the question of Homo sapiens descending from chimpanzees or bonobos is nonsense for a lot Americans.  Nevertheless, I'm taking the scientific path today and providing some analysis that has interested me for some time.

We all know what chimpanzees look like.  Surely, you're familiar with Cheetah, from Tarzen movies. He (yes, a male) acted from 1930 to 1968, and passed away six years ago at the age of 80.  Interestingly enough, Edgar Rice Burroughs never mentioned such an animal in his Tarzen novels.

Most of you have never seen a bonobo, face to face.  There are fewer than 50,000 of them, mostly in a small area of the Congo Basin

From a genomic paper comparing human, chimpanzee and bonobo:

We had a common ancestor from which we split 4.5 million years ago.  Then, about a million years ago bonobos and chimpanzees became separate, simply because they both don't swim, and the Congo River appeared.  As those circle diagrams show, we share common genes, and are only slightly different from each other.

I encountered my first bonobo at the Stuttgart Zoo thirty years ago.  I had never seen one before and I walked past a glass enclosure where a bonobo was sitting (actually sitting like we do on a chair), looking straight at me.  Stunned, I stopped and we communicated facially.  The bonobo has the physique of a human, relatively thin and gangly.

While genomic theory indicates we are linked to both, my sense is that we surely must be closer to the bonobo.  Chimpanzees just don't have the look and movement of humans.

Read this from Wikipedia:

Initial genetic studies characterised the DNA of chimpanzees and bonobos as being 98% to 99.4% identical to that of Homo sapiens.^[19] Later studies showed that chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related to humans than to gorillas.^[20] In the crucial Nature paper reporting on initial genome comparisons, researchers identified 35 million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertion or deletion events, and a number of chromosomal rearrangements which constituted the genetic differences between the two Pan species and humans, covering 98% of the same genes.^[21] 

While many of these analyses have been performed on the common chimpanzee rather than the bonobo, the differences between the two Pan species are unlikely to be substantial enough to affect the Pan-Homo comparison significantly.

A debatable position has been advanced that we humans should not be called Homo sapiens, but Pan sapiens.  A chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes and bonobo Pan paniscus.  More than a quarter century ago Jared Diamond published The Third Chimpanzee.   Here is an article on this forgotten ape.

Go visit a zoo and commune with bonobos.  Except, they are not easily found in captivity.    Only seven U.S. zoos feature them.

Your next option is to fly from your home town and end up in Kinshasa, then take a smaller plane to Mbandaka.  From there, it is a 2-3 day trip up the Congo, Lulanga, Maringa and Lomako Rivers by open canoe (actually called a pirogue).  Take a lot of sun block and insect repellents.    Then a 5-hour hike through the jungle, where the trail might be a foot wide, sometimes walking through knee-high water.  Be tightly dressed, for there are lots of biting ants.  And the rain.  After a night in a tent, you wake up at 3AM for a hike that could take 3 hours to Bonobo nests before they wake up.  You will wait in silence.

Keep in mind that the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.    However, 18 countries are worse:

1. North Korea and Somalia (tied)
2. Afghanistan
3. Sudan
4. Angola and South Sudan (tied)
5. Iraq and Libya (tied)
6. Haiti, Guinea-Bissau and Venezuela (tied)
7. Eritrea, Syria, Turkmenistan and Yemen (tied)
8. Uzbekistan
9. Burundi, Cambodia and Zimbabwe (tied)
10. Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar (tied)

Credit cards and travelers checks are useless.  Relative to Kenya and South Africa, the DR of C is a totally different kind of experience.

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PEARL'S ASHES: Journey to India

CHAPTER 5:  Taj Mahal

[Yes, I promised a new chapter of my next book, PEARL'S ASHES, would appear every Wednesday.  Let me retract that statement and indicate that I would try to post this on that day, but might need to do this either on Tuesdays or Thursdays, instead, and, surely, at least once/week.]

Pearl's Ashes #8, at the Taj Mahal, can be read in it's entirety by clicking on my 26 January 2013 article in this blog site.  Here is how it starts:

I've been around the world around ten times.  There was once an airlines called Pan American World Airways.   Pearl and I took our first around the world journey on PanAm01, westward, way back in the '70's.  On 17January2010 I began my global adventure to Vietnam, Cambodia, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, New Delhi, Barcelona, Munich, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, DC, New York City, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.  By this day 130 countries had clicked on this blog site and  I was averaging less than 100 visitors/day.  Today, I'm up to 211 countries and 500 visitors/day.

I wrestled with whether I should ask permission from the Indian government to allow me to lay Pearl's ashes at the Taj Mahal.  Then, rationality prevailed and I decided to do all of this surreptitiously, for they would have said no anyway and taken forever to do this.

I might add that as of today, three years later, I'm up to 220 countries and, over the past couple of months, averaging perhaps 1000 viewers daily.  To get to PA#8 in 2010 I passed through South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.  I did not drop her ashes at any of these places because my original focus was to do this only at the Taj Majal, Mount Kilimanjaro and Machu Picchu, sites Pearl wanted to visit, but didn't, mostly because I don't particularly like India, Africa and South America.  These other two would come on future world journeys.  Since then, however, I expanded the ceremonies to locations Pearl had or would have enjoyed, and am up to 50 or so.

A few highlights of my the way to India:

• Incheon International Airport was the #1 airport in the world.  Operational from 2005, it has historically been among the very best, last year #2 to Singapore's Changi Airport.
• I joined Curtis Lee (right) on a Southeast Asia Tour.  He was in the Vietnam War and wanted to see the changes.  He and Laverne were good friends of Pearl, and more recently, they have inquired about moving into 15 Craigside.  Unfortunately, at the China Beach (Danang) stop I caught Ho Chi Minh's Revenge.  Ciprofloxacin worked well, indeed.

• Angkor Wat in Cambodia was a worthy stop, although not as spectacular as I expected.  It was in the Raffles Hotel at Siem Reap that I learned the difference among people's of this region:  Vietnamese were hard workers, Cambodians were hard watchers and Laotians were hard sleepers.  Also I was surprised to hear that they all don't like the Russians, fear the Chinese, still have negative thoughts about the Japanese and very much favor Americans.

• Thailand is a wonderful country, and the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai is one of my three best world hotels.  I had  authentic Japanese wagyu beef for dinner two nights in a row, paid for by the tour, which was a Tauck.  While almost always hot, the temples are incredible sights and I show this Emerald Buddha because it is seriously forbidden to take photos here and I happened to take this shot because I wasn't totally aware of this restriction.
• Read my top ten topics of interest so far of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.  The most remarkable was China Beach:  100 yards of white sand extending a distance from Waikiki to Wahiawa, 19 miles.  Eight years ago they were thinking about casinos.  There are now ten hotels with them just in Danang, which is China Beach.

Then came India.  Amazingly enough, my initial report from Delhi, INDIA SUCKS, posted seven years ago, is the current #1 article being pinged on today.  Click on that and read the comments.  So I find my way to the Le Meridien hotel, which was truly an oasis.  There are two more articles worth your perusal:

  -  INCREDIBLE INDIA

  -  INDIA IS AN EXPERIENCE:

To again quote:

The drive of 4 hours to Agra was a nightmare. Early in the morning, a red light means please consider slowing down, but, if there appears to be no crossing traffic, whiz through as fast as possible. The 130 mile ride was mostly down a four lane highway, with a few complications. Ox, goat and horse driven carts; wandering cattle and water buffalo; way overloaded trucks; tuk-tuks that carry not two people, but up to 20; congested towns; people running across the street and horrendous air pollution (it was smokey the whole way). For transportation buffs, you will see every possible mode of transport since the dawn of civilization, including trains that seem to move along well and, above, airplanes, which I only imagined were there, for the haze is worse than when the volcano emission envelopes Honolulu.

We finally arrive in Agra and the Taj Mahal:

No, I'm not dropping Pearl's ashes on the Taj Mahal.  I found a convenient spot and without fanfare tossed that gelcap in a safe location that even the Indian government might have accepted.  Wait till you read of my incident at Machu Picchu.  On the return:

The most exciting part of the whole trip was the ride back to Delhi, all 6 hours of it. This was the equivalent of the road through hell, again, but worse. They say that just at the moment of a catastrophe, time slows, like, say, your car meeting another head-on at 60 miles per hour. To survive in this traffic, the driver needs to be intrepid, no, make that, reckless. He needs to fearlessly pass cars and animals and toot his horn as much as possible. Time virtually stopped for me at least a dozen times today.

The miracle of it all is that not once did our van even scrape another vehicle. I did not see an accident all day. However, an hour into Delhi we ran into an electrical storm. If you never have been through one of these, you're in luck. In one town there was a siren blowing. Maybe tornadoes? Lightning hit a pole in front of us and sparks fell on the road. But, I landed at the Le Meridien, which, I said yesterday, is an oasis.

But, aha, I still had to get out of the country, starting with:

I left the Delhi Le Meridien at 6:30AM and was taken by a hotel car (free) to the airport.  Check in was terrific, for Lufthansa upgraded me to first class.With some trepidation, I nevertheless passed through customs with ease.  I was about to have a croissant and capuchino breakfast in the Lufthansa lounge when a uniformed officer asked to see my boarding pass (BP).  He then ordered me to accompany him, for there was a problem with my check-in baggage.  Maybe another extortion scheme?

I imagined all sorts of worse case scenarios.  Maybe someone had somehow snuck in a pound of heroin or a bomb into my baggage.  We passed through one security gate, where they stamped my BP.  At this point another uniformed officer with a rifle accompanied us.  We went through two more security areas, where they again stamped the BP, into the bowels of the airport.  Then I thought, oh no, my “India Sucks” blog really pissed off someone and they were going to execute me. However, Cambodia, maybe, but certainly not India.  We made it to where bags accumulate, and there was my suitcase.

Well, if you're interested in reading further, click on 

FROM DELHI TO MUNICH TO BARCELONA

I did escape from India, but flew into a serious Munich snowstorm.  This final adventure for the day itself was dramatic.

PA#9 next week?  Haleakala, the House of the Rising Sun.

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GOLD / HIDDEN FIGURES / ELLE

I went to three films this past week.  They were all very different, but I kind of enjoyed the trio.  I don't really do movie reviews.  I point out interesting things that should make the experience more meaningful for you. As such, sometimes I give away the story.  Watch out.  I avoid vampire, zombie, animated, comic-book hero and similar productions.

Here are the Rotten Tomatoes scores, weekend Box Office Mojo rankings and my qualitative rating:

                         Reviewers  Audiences   Weekend  My Rating

  Gold                     40               52               10       Okay, surprise ending

  Hidden Figures   93               94                 3       Okay, deserving

  Elle                       89               76               37       Okay, erotic

The love interest for Gold is Bryce Cannon Howard, daughter of Ron, once known as Opie.  Really good looking, she starred in Jurassic World, and will again in the sequel, Jurassic Park 5, but that will not be until 22June2018.

Gold, the film, is stolen by a suave scoundrel who at the end shows his heart.  No, that character is played by Edgar Ramirez, who really shines.

Matthew McConaughey lost 43 pounds for Dallas Buyers Club by mostly consuming diet coke, egg whites and chicken.  Won an Academy Award for Best Actor.  For Gold, he gained 47 pounds on pizza and cheeseburgers, and looked terrible, physically.

Hidden Figures has been around a while, and is worthy of your time.  It's no surprise there are brilliant black women in this world, but our society did not think so in the early days of NASA.

The 23rd annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday selected as best film Hidden Figures.  The three featured ladies, Taraji Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae were also honored.  Mahershala Ali, who won for Male Actor in a Supporting Role for the movie Moonlight, is in the cast.  Jim Parsons from Big Bang Theory has a wasted role and Kevin Costner again played the good guy.  My sense is that SAG went overboard on correcting for color, so I don't see Hidden Figures encroaching too much into La La Land at the Oscars on February 26.

Elle is an R film in French of a successful video game company head, who kept getting raped, but the ordeals are somehow sensual.  However, she had a difficult childhood, as her father butchered several in the neighborhood, and, there were those who still held it against her.  Thus, while seemingly stable, there are some very dark corners in her mind.

Isabelle Huppert is the Meryl Steep of France with a record 15 nominations for the Cesars (the French Oscar) and one win.  Huppert has already upset Natalie Portman by being selected Best Drama Actress at the Golden Globes this year.  This is Paul Verhoeven's first film in a decade.  The movie garnered eleven nominations for the Cesars.

The other two films had their tough moments, but Elle was truly rough and erotic.  Yet, as escapist fare, worthy.

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