musings

In 1991, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, took to the screens. This would become William Shatner’s final voyage on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise as Captain James T. Kirk.

The premise of the movie is that the Klingon moon Praxis, a key energy production facility, explodes, leading to radioactive contamination which will destroy the ozone layer of the Klingon home world. As a result, the Klingons propose opening a dialogue for peace with their long-term enemies, the International Federation of Planets.

I tend to collect random bits of data which I parse at a later date in my quest to seek enlightenment.

Today’s candidate is a report from the American Heart Association titled 2022 Heart Disease & Stroke Statistical Update Fact Sheet Black Race & Cardiovascular Diseases .

Here are 5 things I learned:

Around 2017, One of my closest friends and I planned a road trip. The idea was to fly to Vladivostok on the east coast of Russia...

...But I needed to travel to experience that first hand.

I got gently berated by a reader today:  “Kanthan I love your tweets but ...”

Yesterday was World Pangolin Day and here’s what’s going down with our neighbor, Namibia.

An upsetting story from Reuters yesterday. “Two years after she went missing, a 6-year-old girl has been found alive and in good health in a makeshift room underneath a staircase in a house in New York state…”

Now you might well ask why I find this upsetting? You need to read on:

I'm wistfully saddened at the news that P.J. O'Rourke died today — wistful because I always wanted to meet him but never got down to doing something about it.

His writing was the single reason I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine in my student days at Princeton in the 1980s — a path which introduced me to Gonzo journalism which in turn led me to discover Hunter S. Thompson.

I'm not going to go into his life story as there's enough of that documented elsewhere. I'm just going to briefly quote some of his work.

An acquaintance of mine has become the southern African partner for nice piece of European technology in the off-grid energy space. He asked me whether I would be willing to spread the word to potential customers, and I responded: "Sure. What's the entry-level price per unit?"

So here we are, on a Saturday afternoon, having a conference call with his German partner who proceeds to tell me about how brilliant his product is and its life expectancy is 20 years or more versus 5 years for the competition before I finally cut him short.