Chris Arnade’s travelogue from Senegal (Part 1, Part 2) is well worth your time, especially if you can also spare a minute to read Tyler Cowen’s notes from Kenya and a Masai village. To put the two in (somewhat uncharitable) contrast:

This past weekend there was a conference at the fanciest resort in Dakar, the one with its own golf course. The title was something like, “Solving all of Africa’s problems, 2023!” and representatives of various global non-profits, charities, and NGOs were flown in to spend four days talking about what Africa needs. Presumably something only they and their friends can offer.

Verus:

Kenya Is Poised to Become the ‘Singapore of Africa’

Papermoon Diner, Baltimore’s finest eye spy establishment.

The food is good, too! Best bread pudding in the Mid-Atlantic.

Our first day of vacation:

• Basement flooded for the second time in as many weeks.
• Washing machine unusable until further notice.
• Needless to say, we’ll be traveling light!

The downside of living in a city others come to visit is that it never feels like a good time to be a tourist. Yes, D.C. is lovely just walking around — flaneuring, if you will — but all those buildings around the National Mall are still worth visiting.

Which is to say, our tickets for a tour of the Capitol are booked. It was now or never, since this year will probably be our last in Washington proper.

Let this unsolicited 2014 cartoon of me sipping coffee in Havana sit here for posterity as I replace it with an actual photo for my micro.blog avatar. Slash account photo slash profile pic. I can’t keep up with the nomenclature. Other than the hunched back, the often unkempt sideburns, and the cup of coffee that is always close by, it never truly was a good likeness, even for 2014.

The new photo is a cutout of this particular moment in time, as I browsed through used books in front of an Athens, OH bookstore during one of our first post-pandemic trips. Yes, that feral child doing God knows what on the sidewalk is ours, and obscured by the sign just enough to be included without a privacy blur.

Athens itself ⊕ And yes, having a photo from an institution unironically named the Athens Lunatic Asylum serve as my Twitter profile backdrop was a joke that up until now only I uderstood, but we are both in on it now, aren’t we, dear reader? was a delightful surprise, from the walkable downtown to its partially-abandoded Lunatic Asylum. The latter was the source of my Twitter cover photo, also saved here for posterity pending the site’s likely demise.

Eeast coast beach vacations in December are underrated (Virginia Beach, VA)

The next time you crack your backdoor to let your cat outside for its daily adventure, you may want to think again. For a cat, the outdoors is filled with undesirable potential. Like the risks of catching and transmitting diseases, and the uncontrollable drive to hunt and kill wildlife, which has been shown to reduce native animal populations and degrade biodiversity.

So starts a University of Maryland press release about this paper, which analyzes interactions between domestic cats and “eight native mammal species common in urban areas” in Washington D.C.

Now, if you ever stepped foot in D.C. you will notice that the most abundant mammals are neither cats, dogs, nor humans, but rats. But these District mascots do not make an appearance among the species analyzed, which were eastern chipmunk, eastern cottontail, eastern gray squirrel, groundhog, white-footed mouse, raccoon, red fox, and Virginia opossum.

Ah yes, the red fox. So very common in Washington D.C.

Look, I don’t doubt that domestic cats roaming around the suburbs are the scourge of bunny rabbits and chipmunks. But downtown D.C. has a bit of a rat problem and this study could have been a way to learn more about them.

An homage to M.C. Escher’s Three Worlds, shot at he US National Arboretum, which is another one of the spots in DC you shouldn’t miss.