Ah Nemo. Well he’s not hard to find in this aquarium, in fact he and his cousins are all there. And there are plenty of other colorful fish to see as well, in these well constructed artificial reefs… And there’s a fish that wins the best Halloween costume award… see if you can remember the name of this one…. The idea that all this variety and colors of fish could just happen by an impersonal abstract process called natural... Read more
Way out beyond Carolina and Kurie Beaches is a road to nowhere, well the end of this part of N.C. where Fort Fisher once was. What’s there now is a very nice aquarium which has been getting continual upgrades over the years. So, though we visited this many years ago, it bore another look, especially since, our relatives thought it was spiffy to have their wedding there, but that’s a story for another day. The Museum is not large, and... Read more
If you are old enough to remember a novel called The Firm, which lets you millenials out, since it showed up in 1991, only the second lawyer thriller by John Grisham (a Time to Kill) being the first, then this provides a long over due sequel. But it stands on its own well too, as the continuing saga of Mitch and Abby McDeere, from good ole Kentucky. Grisham must have some kind of record for having more than 20 novels... Read more
Lindsey Davis is now the most prolific of all the novelists who focus is on ancient Rome, and that is saying something, considering we are also talking about Colleen McCullough, Stephen Saylor, and Robert Harris to mention a few. There are now an even dozen novels about the sleuth Flavia Albia, adopted daughter of Falco, and counting. I did not much care for the first of the novels in the series as it portrayed Flavia anachronistically as some sort of... Read more
The Lego Victor Hugo Read more
On our first day in Paris we went for a walking tour in the Luxembourg Garden and adjacent streets, with the plan to end up where Yuliya teaches, namely the Sorbonne. This is an enormous garden/park, and Parisians spend a good deal of time in these places– doing exercise, playing soccer, reading a novel, eating lunch etc. Here’s the fountain.. At the other end of the park there is what once was a palace. There is even a triumphal arch... Read more
O.K. So there was more at the Louvre that I had good pictures of, particularly the work of Delacroix and Corot. For example, here’s Delacroix’s St. Sebastien– And Corot’s A Monk Reading.. Or Corot’s The Prisoner of Chillon.. Or Delacroix’s Turk seated by a saddle… Or his Turk Smoking a Pipe Or the Crusaders entering Constantinople in 1204.. And here’s Corot’s looking at the Coliseum through the arch of Constantine… In the following pictures we are looking at the... Read more
Let’s start off with celestial glory, which is the name of this work by Michel Corneille… Originally a much larger version of this was in the ceiling of a church called Val-de-Grace. This beautiful picture by Camille Corot done in the 19th century is of Chartres Cathedral. This is the painting of the three graces– joy, elegance, and beauty, said to characterize the three daughters of Zeus. There are many paintings of ancient ruins, some real, some imagined. This one... Read more
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