Lewis Hamilton is an anomaly in Formula One. for several reasons other than his being the best driver and Formula One’s only Black driver.  Automobile Racing is expensive, which is why, even today, it is a rich man’s sport. But Hamilton was an exception…sort of. While he was born and grew up in a working-class family, early in his career, while racing an old Go Cart and winning against much more expensive Go Carts, Hamilton was seen by Ron Dennis, the very rich CEO of McLaren Racing. That led to Dennis signing Hamilton on to the McLaren Young Driver Program in 1997, backing Hamilton through Formula 3 and then Formula 2. He started racing for the McLaren Formula One Team in 2007.

Under Ron Dennis, McLaren had become, behind Ferrari, the second most successful Formula One Team. Dennis ran a very tight ship, and Hamilton was expected to conform. But the world was changing, and McLaren wasn’t. It was on the way down. Still, Hamilton won his first Championship and McLaren’s last, in 2008, becoming the youngest Formula One World Champion. In late 2012, Lewis Hamilton left McLaren and joined the Mercedes Team, leaving the very cloistered environment of McLaren for a team in which they only cared how he drove.

Hamilton blossomed. Between 2013 and 2020, he won six World Driver Championships for Mercedes. He also started wearing his hair in dreadlocks, and he covered his body in tattoos. In his spare time, he took up skydiving, snowboarding, and surfing. See below for gratuitous skydiving and snowboarding videos.

However, aside from driving a very fast Formula 1 car very fast, Lewis Hamilton’s biggest love seems to be clothing, especially streetwear. If what they wear to the racetrack is any indicator, Formula One drivers are pretty conservative dressers. Except for Lewis (of course).

Almost every year, Lewis attends the super-expensive Met Gala, which is a fundraiser for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. This year, the tickets were $70,000 a pop, and the theme was “The Garden of Time.” Inspired by a J.G. Ballard short story of the same title. Lewis wore an outfit inspired by the story of John Ystumllyn, a freed slave who became Wales’ first black gardener. Inside the coat was a poem by Alex Wharton, a black poet in England, about Ystumllyn entitled The Gardener.

Mercedes encouraged and played off of Lewis’es interests and activities. When Black Lives Matter became a rallying cry, Mercedes changed the color of their racecars from traditional silver to black. Still, Lewis Hamilton is now going to Ferrari, and Ferrari is very different.

Ferrari has been racing since 1950 and is the most successful and famous Formula One team ever. At Ferrari, everything is about Ferrari, and everybody, especially the drivers, is expected to conform. To me, that seems like a mismatch, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a diseased or malfunctioning aortic valve with a man-made valve. The procedure is performed under X-ray guidance and uses smaller incisions than open-heart valve surgery. Both the previous definition of TAVR and the following definition of Gemini are from Gemini, a multimodal model from Google DeepMind, is capable of understanding virtually any input, combining different types of information, and generating almost any output.

When I woke up in the recovery room after my heart valve operation, I felt great. Shockingly great. For the first time in months, I could breathe. It’s been 48 hours, and I can breathe even better now.

To start with, the biggest thing in our lives during the last couple of weeks, Michele has bacterial pneumonia. Well, she had it for about the last three weeks, but she is now on the mend. Even as an observer, I can tell you bacterial pneumonia sucks. It started as if it were the flu and then just continued to get worse. When we still thought it was the flu, Michele suggested I go to Richard and Tracy’s weekend home at Point Reyes Station without her to see Tracy’s parents, Arlene and Al Grubbs.

I agreed, and the payoff for the cold and wet winter was my drive through Marin’s acid-green hills. The payoff for the drive was a lunch of delicious pizza made by Richard and Tracy in their wood-burning oven and seeing Arlene and Al.

I had brought my camera and watching, through the viewfinder, Courtney and Arlene play Bocci Ball with Richard and Gina, I felt like I was watching a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, or, maybe, Fashionable Country Living. The grass was so green, and the background of the Point Reyes Hills was picture-perfect. For me, it was a perfect sweet spring day.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!” Stephen Hawking in the intro to A Brief History of Time.

Today was a beautiful Spring Day, warm under a clear blue sky. It seems like the long, cold, rainy winter is ending.

Both my email and my blog disappeared last week at about the time Michele left for Mexico, although there is no connection between the two. I know Michele went to Mexico to see the Great Eclipse, but I have no idea why or even how the blog and attached email disappeared; all I know is that, when I went to make an entry in the blog, it wasn’t there. All I got was a sign that said This site can’t be reached. Check if there is a typo in srstern.com.

Every morning, I would get up and go to my website only to see This site can’t be reached. I would text Michele, and she would tell me that she was working on it and that the site was still there. She would say, “They say, ‘They can see it.'” whatever that means. About a day after I gave up – but, obviously, Michele hadn’t – there it was…back.

Also, on the good news front, I am getting a new heart valve—or, to be more accurate, a Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement. This means that they will not have to open my chest to get to my heart; they will just fish a new bioprosthetic valve in through my groin and up a vein to my heart. In my imagination’s eye, it is sort of like one of those collapsable paper umbrellas you get with rum drinks, only safer. The cheery handout I got from the surgeon’s office said that it will Help you live longer, Helps you feel better, Less invasive procedure, Shorter recovery time and Almost 98 out of a 100 patients are still living within two years and more than 2 in 100 patients will die.

So, as far as I am concerned, it is good news All The Way Down.