Street Art: Portugal

Should she squint, she'll surely see Sugar. Parque das Virtudes, Porto.

Cascais


Belem, Lisbon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Taking Another Gamble

Image
Note: red sparkline bars indicate aggregate losses on IEM vote share contracts by month. Blue sparkline bars indicate aggregate gains.  Since my last post  about the discreet charms of gambling on election outcomes, I was kindly directed by IEM to its historical vote share contract prices for the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The table above shows that with these additional data, traders had still tended to overvalue Democratic candidates from August through October, while undervaluing Republican candidates. The extreme overvaluations of Hilary Clinton in 2016 still exert an influence, but it is much less pronounced. Excluding 2016 prices, Democratic candidates would still be overvalued in each month, but never by as much as 2%. Republican candidates would not be undervalued at all, except in August by about 3%.  Hence from a gambling perspective, the IEM market appears reasonably accurate to the extent that there are not many information gaps left to exploit. Let...
Read more

Sugar Gets Around: Jardin du Luxembourg

Image
It wasn't long after we hit town in September that we started looking for neighborhoods with good spaces to walk dogs. Turns out, Paris parks are pretty dog-unfriendly. One exception is the Jardin du Luxembourg in the 6th Arrondissement. Marie de Medici, widow of Henri IV and mother of Louis XIII, added these gardens to her Palais du Luxembourg in 1612--part of which is now given over to dogs and their walkers (tourists and other Parisiens appear to be welcome as well). Le Palais du Luxembourg. Fit for a dog. Disturbingly, like at Ranelagh , the garden depicts yet another act of classical savagery. At la fontaine Médicis, a sculpture shows the giant cyclops Polyphemus moments before descending on lovers Acis and Galatea and crushing the former with a rock. Polyphemus, hanging junk and all, moments before his jealous rampage. Not fit for a dog. It's actually a grand and beautiful sculpture in bronze, stone, and marble. And if you bear any resentment against Polyphemus for destr...
Read more

Jardin du Ranelagh

Image
It's not entirely easy having a dog in Paris. On one hand, dogs seem to be everywhere. You can pretty much take them into most stores and even some restaurants allow dogs inside. On the other hand, very few neighborhood parks permit dogs. It's hard to say I blame the city for this. Parisiens are notorious for not picking up after their dogs. At least the parks offer some outdoor space where you don't have to be on your guard constantly against stepping in dog shit. One of the dog-friendly exceptions in the 16th Arr. is the 15-acre Jardin du Ranelagh. Modeled after the Earl of Ranelagh's London gardens, le jardin welcomes dogs (and others) to stroll the footpaths surrounding its lawns, landscaping and playgrounds. Better still, it has a large, fenced-in, off-leash area along the Petite Ceinture (part of a reclaimed railway path that ran along the outskirts of Paris until the mid-20th century). Like most neighborhood parks in Paris, le jardin is also home to great public ...
Read more