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Rotten Tomatoes |
Thursday, August 30, 2018
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
POTD: Hosier Lane
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Specifically, Hosier Lane, one of the lanes and arcades of central Melbourne that make it such a fun city to walk. "The graffiti-covered walls and art-installations have become a popular backdrop for fashion and wedding photography."
Bonus photo after the jump.
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
POTD: Melbourne's Lanes and Arcades
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Specifically, one of the many lanes and arcades that make the central business district so walkable.
Bonus photo after the jump.
Monday, August 27, 2018
POTD: Queen Victoria Market
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Specifically, the Queen Victoria Market, the largest open air market in the southern hemisphere. It has been operating since the 1860s.
Sunday, August 26, 2018
POTD: The Americans in Moscow
Spoiler alert: if you haven't seen the series finale of the television series "The Americans" you might want to stop reading here. Spoiler follows.
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Moscow, Russia, and was taken on Sparrow Hills, "a hill on the right bank of the Moskva River and one of the highest points in Moscow." But that's not what makes this photo special. Sparrow Hills is the place where the final scene of "The Americans" was set. Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings had returned to the USSR in 1987 after two decades working as undercover spies in the USA. Upon arriving in Moscow, Sparrow Hills is where they asked their driver to stop so they could get out of the car and gaze over the city they had left long ago. Ellen stands where viewers last saw Phillip and Elizabeth stand in 1987.
A screen shot from the series' final scene follows the jump.
Friday, August 24, 2018
POTD: Puffing Billy
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Belgrave Station of the Puffing Billy Railway, a narrow gauge heritage railway running through the hills and forests of the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, Australia.
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Wonder Wheel (2017)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
POTD: Sherbrooke Forest
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Sherbrooke Forest, a nature preserve in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, Australia, and home to the Eucalyptus Regnans, also known as mountain ash, the tallest flowering plant in the world, and one of the tallest trees, second only to the Sequoia, or California redwood. It's one of the reasons the Dandenongs are one of my favorite spots in Australia.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Ekaterina (TV)
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IMDB |
Monday, August 20, 2018
POTD: William Ricketts Sanctuary
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from the William Ricketts Sanctuary in the Victorian Dandenong Ranges in Australia. There, on a peaceful hillside nestled among towering mountain ash, from 1934 until his death in 1993, sculptor William Ricketts fashioned 92 ceramic sculptures of native fauna and flora, Aborigines and himself. Ricketts was an eccentric and a narcissist. He was an environmentalist with a New-Age spiritual attitude towards nature. He often shows himself as an Aborigine in his sculptures and in one case shows his own torso growing out of a kangaroo's hindquarters. In the 1930s, his was one of the few voices celebrating Aboriginal culture in Australia. He was ahead of his time, but today, his treatment of Aboriginal culture as primitive and childlike is considered as much condescending as ennobling. In any case, his heart was in the right place and his sanctuary remains a treasured retreat from the hustle and bustle of nearby Melbourne.
Friday, August 17, 2018
Review: Embassytown
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Amazon |
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Hosts, the indigenes, in whose city we had been graciously allowed to build Embassytown, were cool, incomprehensible presences. Powers like subaltern gods, which sometimes watched us as if we were interesting, curious dust; which provided our biorigging; and to which the Ambassadors alone spoke."
Embassytown is classic science fiction with something to say about Earth by imagining what language, consciousness, communication and colonization might be like at the edge of the universe.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
POTD: Sculling on the Yarra
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from the Yarra River in the central business district of Melbourne, Australia, where they have been sculling for at least 100 years.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
POTD: The Yarra River
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Melbourne, Australia. It shows the Yarra River at night. When I lived in Melbourne over forty years ago, the Yarra River was an industrial blight, flowing between rail lines on one bank and factories and warehouses on the other. Today, the Yarra River is the center of Melbourne entertainment and dining. The warehouses are all gone, replaced by a convention center, a casino, condos, offices, and restaurants all along the river through the central business district. By far, this change is the most noticeable difference from the Melbourne I remember from my time living there in the 1970s.
Bonus photo after the jump.
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Tig Notaro: Happy to Be Here (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Monday, August 13, 2018
POTD: The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne has the world's largest tram network, including some classic old cars converted into rolling restaurants. There's no better way to see Melbourne than while dining in a moving streetcar with vintage decor.
Bonus photos after the jump.
Friday, August 10, 2018
POTD: Deer Park High School
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Deer Park High School in Melbourne, Australia. In yesterday's photo of the day, I mentioned that I might have ridden one of Dallas's McKinney Avenue trolleys when it was still rolling the streets of Melbourne long ago. Today's photo explains what I was doing in Melbourne way back then: teaching high school maths in Deer Park High School. This year, on my first return trip in over forty years, I revisited the school. As expected, no one I knew then is still at the school. The last teacher I served with retired only a couple of years ago. Still, good memories.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
POTD: Tram Down Under
From 2018 03 15 Melbourne |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Appropriately for the land Down Under, it's a photo of a classic tram car emerging from the ground as if it's coming from the land up top. Maybe it's an homage to Amarillo's Cadillac Ranch from a city that values mass transit over gas guzzlers.
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
POTD: Whales!
From 2018 01 31 Cabo San Lucas |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. In winter each year Humpback Whales and Gray Whales migrate south to the warm waters off Baja California where they cavort for tourists like us.
Bonus photos after the jump.
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Eighth Grade (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Monday, August 6, 2018
Set It Up (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Friday, August 3, 2018
Review: Warlight: A Novel
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Amazon |
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In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals."
Great novels have great opening lines. They draw the reader in from the very first sentence. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje is no exception.
Thursday, August 2, 2018
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Wednesday, August 1, 2018
Repeat Tweets: Collins Won't Back Court Pick...
Repeat tweets from July, 2018:
- Jul 1 2018: Headline: "Collins Won’t Back Court Pick Who Overturns Roe v. Wade."
This would only preclude a nominee who is on the public record calling for overturning Roe. So, we'll get a nominee who refuses to say definitively but is all but certain to overturn. And Collins will vote to confirm. - Jul 1 2018: Goliath: Season 2 (TV): Plot is a mess. Villain is absurd. Why some people are killed and not others makes no sense. But the characters, especially Billy and Patty, are strong and unforgettable. Patty's speech to her FBI agent date is series' highlight. I'd watch a Season 3. B-
- Jul 2 2018: "Unfortunately civility was forcibly rebranded as "political correctness" and then taken out to the pasture and shot." -- Paul Michael Hodgson
- Jul 2 2018: Headline: "Plano's $3 billion Legacy West is getting its own CVS store."
When you can't decide if it's Steve Brown in "The Dallas Morning News" or "The Onion", bet on Steve Brown. - Jul 2 2018: Besides @marklamster's nit about the Maverick's logo ("when was the last time you saw a horse in downtown Dallas?") there's the nit that a Maverick isn't a horse in the first place.
After the jump, more repeat tweets.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
POTD: Cabo's Playa del Amor
From 2018 01 31 Cabo San Lucas |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It shows Playa del Amor, a beach accessible from both sides of the Land's End peninsula at the very tippy tip of Baja California via a narrow gap in the rocks.
Bonus photos after the jump.
Monday, July 30, 2018
The Americans (TV)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Friday, July 27, 2018
An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election
The New York Times has published an extremely detailed map of the 2016 presidential election that will keep mapping nerds and political junkies happily clicking away for hours. So go ahead. Click away. When you come back, I'll offer my own quick observations, some confirming my priors, some surprising me.
Thursday, July 26, 2018
POTD: Masterpiece, Framed
From 2018 01 31 Cabo San Lucas |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Three Identical Strangers (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Monday, July 23, 2018
The Delphi Method Bogeyman, Again
The City of Richardson or the Richardson ISD periodically seek public input on an issue. Often it's by means of a public hearing on a proposal already on the table. You know the routine, an open mic where individuals give their opinions, pro and con. But sometimes, usually early in the process, other types of meetings are arranged, where organized group discussions take place, maybe some kind of voting happens, and a sense of the community is determined, or not. Sometimes the community is split and these meetings reveal there is no consensus. That's good to know as well. In any case, different formats for public input are useful at different times. Or at least you'd think. Not everyone agrees.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Sister Act at RCT
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Repertory Company Theatre |
Friday, July 20, 2018
Review: Alexander Hamilton
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Amazon |
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He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit. We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned."
You want to see the Broadway hit hip-hop musical. First, read the bestselling 2004 biography that inspired it. Alexander Hamilton was the most fascinating of our nation's Founding Fathers, having risen from humble beginnings in the West Indies to somehow be at the center of every significant event from the Revolutionary War to the Constitutional Convention to laying the shaky young nation's economic foundation as first Treasury Secretary. And, he also fought duels.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
POTD: Of Vacation Homes and Yachts
From 2018 01 31 Cabo San Lucas |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where the vacation homes hang precariously on the hillside and the yachts rock gently in the harbor. It all has kind of an artificial feel to it, a manufactured paradise. Or maybe the ennui is just that I know this is the last port of call on a long, great cruise.
Bonus photo after the jump.
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Breathe (2017)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Live Tweeting the Budget Retreat
The City of Richardson is holding its annual budget retreat to provide preliminary budget planning information to the city council. It's all tentative. It's all preliminary. It's all subject to change. Nevertheless, it's more likely than not to reflect the budget that's finally filed on August 10, 2018 and approved after a subsequent public hearing. My notes from the budget retreat are presented as captured in my tweets from Monday night made during the meeting. (No review. No fact-checking. No filter. What I got wrong blame on my listening comprehension faults.)
- CoR open mic: No one here to speak. It's the budget retreat. You know, the one where surging property appraisals are discussed along with tax rates and spending. But no one cares...to speak.
- Dan Johnson forecasts a 7.5% to 8.5% increase in property values. Preliminary budget assumes only 6%. In other words we can expect an "impactful" budget for 2018-2019. Each 1% equates to about $1 million for operations.
- Dan Johnson proposes phasing out short-term debt issuance for equipment purchases. Maybe all that's why taxpayers weren't lined up to speak at the open mic.
Monday, July 16, 2018
POTD: Welcome to Cabo San Lucas
From 2018 01 31 Cabo San Lucas |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where the pelicans in the harbor entrance welcome cruise ship passengers ashore.
Bonus photos after the jump.
Friday, July 13, 2018
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Thursday, July 12, 2018
POTD: You Can Buy Me That
From 2018 01 29 Acapulco |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from the Las Brisas neighborhood in Acapulco, Mexico.
Bonus photos after the jump.
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Rotten Tomatoes |
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
David Tyson Strikes Again
In January, former Richardson ISD trustee David Tyson sued the RISD over its at-large voting system, claiming it is a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA). While that case is still pending, David Tyson struck again, filing yet another lawsuit last week.
Monday, July 9, 2018
Richardson's Central Park
Henry David Thoreau
In 1851, when Henry David Thoreau was making his plea for environmental conservation in Concord, Massachusetts, half a continent away in Texas pioneer Jacob Routh was already putting the call into practice. When Routh built his homestead on land that would become present-day Richardson, he set aside some of his woods for preservation in its natural state. Thanks to good stewardship by his descendants and then by the City of Richardson, which eventually acquired the land, that bottomland hardwood forest remains wild today as the Spring Creek Nature Area, the city park that one city council member called "Richardson's Central Park."
Friday, July 6, 2018
POTD: Cliff Divers of La Quebrada - II
From 2018 01 29 Acapulco |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from La Quebrada in Acapulco, Mexico. I remember watching the cliff diving on television when I was boy, on shows like "ABC Wide World of Sports", usually in winter when the sports calendar was limited. When the snow was falling outside my Wisconsin home and NBC was showing something like bowling, I would switch to ABC. Nothing could be more exotic than dreaming of being in Acapulco, Mexico. Now that I've seen it in person, I wish I could tell my youthful self, it's just as exciting in person.
Bonus photo after the jump.
Thursday, July 5, 2018
POTD: Cliff Divers of La Quebrada
From 2018 01 29 Acapulco |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from La Quebrada in Acapulco, Mexico, where cliff divers entertain tourists by diving from a height of 45 meters. By comparison, Olympic high diving is done from a 10 meter platform. And the La Quebrada cliff divers have to time their dives so a wave below is at its maximum depth when they enter the shallow water. The cliff divers do it for tips. Tip well, my friends.
Bonus photo after the jump.
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Flashback Fourth - 2017
A year ago, Ellen and I watched the fireworks from the eleventh floor of Clements Hospital near downtown Dallas. We were hopeful and anxious, as I imagine the Founders were on our nation's first celebration of independence in 1776, when the outcome of the grand experiment was still unknown.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
POTD: Acapulco Bay
From 2018 01 29 Acapulco |
Today's photo-of-the-day is of Acapulco Bay and shows what made it a strategic port. It's large, it's sheltered from the Pacific Ocean, it's easily defensible.
"Hernán Cortés established Acapulco as a major port by the early 1530s...Spanish trade in the Far East would give Acapulco a prominent position in the economy of New Spain. Galleons started arriving here from Asia by 1550...The galleon trade made its yearly run from the mid-16th century until the early 19th."
Bonus photo after the jump.
Monday, July 2, 2018
Repeat Tweets: "The Entire World Right Now"
Repeat tweets from June, 2018:
- Jun 1 2018: RT @marcorubio: "The entire world right now is in a battle between authoritarianism and democracy. It’s happening right here in our own hemisphere."
Hey, @marcorubio, it's happening right here in the US, where you are an enabler. - Jun 1 2018: Headline: "Oil industry joins with solar and wind industry to condemn Trump admin plan to prop up coal industry by forcing electric grid to buy coal power."
Picking winners and losers? - Jun 1 2018: Talk about meta. Or irony. Or something...the first news article in my Facebook "Trending" topics feature right now is... "Facebook is killing the controversial 'Trending' news section it showed on its homepage."
- Jun 2 2018: Sorry, @StateFarm. I only buy insurance from companies that advertise on @iamsambee's Full Frontal.
After the jump, more repeat tweets.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Goliath (TV)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Friday, June 29, 2018
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
Thursday, June 28, 2018
Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
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Rotten Tomatoes |
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