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.

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.

Wonder Wheel (2017)

Rotten Tomatoes

Wonder Wheel (2017): Coney Island in 1950s. Love triangle. Looks and reads like a stage play, down to saturated stage lights. Usually Woody Allen plays a lovable neurotic. Here it's a woman and she's not lovable, just pathetic. Best line: "Oh, God, spare me the bad drama." C-

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.

Ekaterina (TV)

IMDB

Ekaterina (TV): 2014 Russian TV series on rise of Catherine the Great. Straightforward melodrama. Easy introduction to Ivan VI, Elizabeth, and Catherine and Peter III, St Petersburg's palaces and 18th century palace intrigues. Perfect preparation for a Russian vacation. C+

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.

Review: Embassytown

Amazon

From Embassytown, by China Miéville:

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.