Brown Motion

 This weekend was jam packed activities with my better half traipsing through a 100 mile radius from home and visiting a multitude of food and recreation spots outside Charlotte. Saturday started with visiting now revitalized digs of former tobacco and rail barons like RJ Reynolds and Duke and JP Morgan in the form of Winston Salem.  Having visited before we knew where some taste bud enticing menu was located and we immediately stopped there.  Food came in the form of pork buns and steamed shrimp dumplings along with some amazing beef noodle soup in a spicy broth.  The place, May Way, is a little shack in the Reynolda garden complex (part of the Wake Forest University close by).  The spring season was in full bloom and so a walk later on in the rose and flowering gardens was enjoyable along with stopping to chat with visitors from far and near also seeking joy in nature. After this heart beat racing stroll in the gardens we stopped for a little bit to admire art and poetry (erasure poe

 Human ingenuity has always surpassed what the prior generation achieved and continued its upward march to the present. 2024. Or has it?  Do you feel like I do that the capacity for true human innovation petered out somewhere around 1970? What has followed is perhaps a slow incremental progress in certain domains with the global availability to information in the form of world wide web being the only major breakthrough of the past three decades? Think about this. Man designed, deployed and successfully landed on our only natural satellite - the moon in 1969 and since then made 12 successful attempts. Then it stopped.  This was when the rockets used to send men to the moon had computing power that looks puny by comparison to what an average schmoe carries in their smartphone. What did we do with all that leap in computing? Created disasters like Facebook and Instagram. Mental depression as a direct result of use or overuse of these software has led to massive productivity loss and loss

Antibes, France.  Long believed to be a haven for some globally known brands like Pablo (Picasso for those who did not know his first name), Claude (Monet) to name a few, it is a spot on the Cote d'Azur or French Riviera that we happened to visit the first day of 2024. As part of our end of year pilgrimage (to seek culture, food et al not a spiritual kind although it can be uplifting just smelling new things) to places unknown (to us anyway) we decide to spend it on the south coast of France.  Along the Mediterranean sea during December is perhaps not the most ideal but it offered us a bit less crowds and not terrible weather. It rained a couple days out of 14 which is about 15% of the time so not bad at all.  Hotels were also not exorbitant except for new year's. The one day it rained we were touring a fragrance factory and came out smelling better than when we went in - so all was well. So like I was saying, the first of Jan 2024 we were in Antibes, having come in on a local