Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

Rotten Tomatoes

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): Our hero saves Europe from evil Elementals...or someone else. European city backgrounds were my favorite part of movie. Also, the usual Marvel humor. And I guess the teen love story adds human interest. Full of plot holes. Overdone CGI. C+

POTD: Nikolsky Cathedral Bell Tower

From 2018 08 19 Uglich

Today's photo-of-the-day is from the Volga River in Russia. When the Baltic-Volga Waterway was constructed, the network of dams, reservoirs, and locks connecting a two-thousand mile long waterway sometimes drowned villages and towns. The bell tower is all that remains of the Nikolsky Cathedral.

Blocked on Twitter

The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a New York judge's ruling and found that [President Donald] Trump "engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by utilizing Twitter's 'blocking' function to limit certain users' access to his social media account, which is otherwise open to the public at large, because he disagrees with their speech." ... The judges on the appeals court concluded that "the First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees."

Source: CNN.

After the jump, my own experiences being blocked on Twitter.

POTD: Cruising the Volga

From 2018 08 19 Uglich

Today's photo-of-the-day is from the Uglich Reservoir lock on the Volga River in Russia. The bow of our cruise ship is just visible as we enter the lock behind another cruise ship. The Baltic-Volga Waterway is a network of dams, reservoirs, and locks connecting a two-thousand mile long waterway. The whole is an amazing feat of engineering.

POTD: My Uglich Watch

From 2018 08 19 Uglich

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Uglich, Russia. There's a story behind it. I haven't worn a wrist watch in years. But I was in Uglich. How could I resist buying a watch in Uglich? Uglich was known as a watch-making center in Russia. Nikita Khrushchev, while attending the 1955 Geneva Summit, bragged that Uglich watches were better than Swiss watches because, as the joke goes, Russian watches run faster. So I decided I'd buy an Uglich watch, as long as the price was cheap. I set a price limit of $30. I found a souvenir stall where the seller, when he learned my price limit, just happened to have a large supply of watches right at that price of $30. Who could have guessed my luck? I picked out the perfect watch at this souvenir stand. It featured "President of Russia" on the face, along with a tsarist double-headed eagle and Vladimir Putin's signature. Later that day, Ellen said it was time for dinner. I said we still had an hour. She said no we didn't. I double checked my new watch and noticed it had stopped running. So much for my Uglich watch.

Close-up after the jump.

Review: The Soul of America

Amazon

From The Soul of America, by Jon Meacham:

For many, the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment. History, however, shows us that we are frequently vulnerable to fear, bitterness, and strife. The good news is that we have come through such darkness before."

The bad news is that the same shit keeps happening, generation after generation. It's not Meacham's thesis, but like playing Russian roulette, eventually the bad shit is going to kill us.

An Ad that Didn't Age Well

Younger readers may need an explanation. It used to be that to make a long-distance telephone call, you'd have to use an operator. (And if you're too young even to know what long-distance means, or what an operator is, use Google.) It was an exciting innovation when direct long-distance dialing was introduced. In the UK and Australia, the feature was called "subscriber trunk dialing," abbreviated STD. STD was still a big thing in telephone service when this ad appeared in Australia in 1976. Now you know. Hopefully, I don't have to explain the other meaning of STD.

The Time to Travel is NOW

This article was originally published in "Richardson Living" magazine. Read it on that website or read it here. Or read it in print. In mail boxes now.

I don't want to talk about why you should travel. If the delight of seeing new places, undertaking new adventures, meeting new people and cultures and, in the process, learning more about yourself, if that doesn't appeal to you, well, turn the page. For those of you who are still with me, let me tell you why the time to travel is NOW.

Young and Just Starting Out

"I always knew that you would take yourself far from home
As soon as, as far as you could go."
— 10,000 Maniacs

POTD: House Hunting in Uglich

From 2018 08 19 Uglich

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Uglich, Russia. It shows a representative house of the area. The owner is a school teacher who likes gardening — flowers and vegetables.

A look inside the house is after the jump.

POTD: Grace

From 2018 08 19 Uglich

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Uglich, Russia. The church is the Church of the Transfiguration, which dates to the early 1700s, replacing an earlier church on the same site that dated to the 1400s. Uglich itself dates back a thousand years. History is rich here. In 1591, according to Advantour, the original church's "bell ringer announced the death of Tsarevich Dmitry to the Uglich people by a peal of bell. Later this ill-fated bell, which brought bad news, was given a flogging with a whip just like humans and, like a criminal, exiled to Siberia."