Kayaking on San Domingo Creek, Saint Michaels, Maryland

While visiting the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we rented some kayaks from Shore Pedal & Paddle and explored San Domingo Creek, a waterway on the south side of Saint Michaels. We met with the guy at Waterfront Park. He had us quickly launched after a standard safety overview and recommendations for areas to see and to avoid.

We had two tandem kayaks. The kids decided they did not want to have their own kayak, so Mom went with our youngest while I went with our daughter. 

Getting used to the oars

Just off the dock is a small boat anchored in place. It has a bunch of vegetables growing on it in pots, as if it were a floating garden. 

No humans on board

We paddled out further into the creek, exploring the variety of side ways and their waterfront properties.

Choosing where to go

Fancy, older-looking house

Moving on

We only saw a bit of wild life. Most birds were streaking through the air, making them hard to photograph. We stopped for a break in the shade by one shoreline and saw a bunch of unoccupied shells.

Bird on the wing

Shell-ters for mollusks!

Another fancy house

We were surprised to see a ship out in the middle of the creek. There was no sign of life onboard. It was 10 in the morning, so either the crew was sleeping in or they had already gone off in a smaller boat.

Looks majestic

Is it really from Juneau, Alaska?

Maybe they could have parked over here

One of the things I like to do kayaking is going underneath structures. Most personal docks are very low to the water and even a kayak couldn't fit under. We did find a taller dock.

Going under, in the good way

Just past our passageway

Passing another property

Yet another house

Pilings are out in the middle of the creek for some reason. A few of them had nests built on top. This nest looks like it is still under construction.

Needs more work

Another bird that was moving too quick

I couldn't decide if this was a better shot, so I included both

The other kayak got into the "go under the dock" routine.

Almost like going under a bridge

We knew we were back to start when we saw the veg ship again.

Back at base

I spotted a bridge not too far away, so we went for one more adventure. 

St. Michaels Nature Trail Covered Bridge

While underneath

Houses on the other side of the bridge

Going back

Since we visited over Flag Day weekend, a lot of patriotic decorations were up. It was a fun area for kayaking.

Book Review: Popcorn with the Pope by D. Baird et al.

Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List by David Paul Baird, Andrew Petiprin, and Michael Ward

In 1995 the Vatican released a list of recommended films for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Lumiere Brothers' first public showing of motion pictures. The list isn't intended as a definitive "best of" or "Catholic Church approved" set, it's more an honoring of the medium. The intent is also for viewers to be more discerning and appreciative of movies. Rather than being passive viewers, movie watchers should engage with what they are watching in a more deliberate way. The list is divided into three categories: religion, values, and art. Each set has fifteen films. This book reviews the various films from both a Catholic and a film critical perspective. 

The book starts with an overview of the creation of the list and some commentary on the value of the list. Then each film is given an synopsis, a critical analysis, a review of its importance in cinematic history, and some discussion questions. The synopses are valuable to gage how interested a reader might be in each film, especially with films that are more obscure and less accessible, like the five and a half hour silent French feature about Napoleon (which is in the Art section because it innovated a lot of visual techniques). The historical contexts are also interesting and add some further understanding. I found the critical analysis wanting in some cases. They exhibit the typical film critic bias toward art house and foreign films, gushing with praise and insight for obscure films. More popular fare, like Stagecoach or Wizard of Oz, gets shorter shrift. The analysis is always interesting but I don't always agree with it. Also, part of the problem is the selections for the list itself. It has some films that seem like they were chosen just to have one in the genre, like the only animated film Fantasia and the only horror film Nosferatu, when other films in those genres are equals or better. The list has a lot of historical dramas and a surprising number of Italian Neorealist films. 

I found this informative but not always enjoyable. A healthy debate is a good thing, I suppose.

Mildly recommended.

Game Review: Deckscape: Dracula's Castle by dV Games

Deckscape: Dracula's Castle (2021) designed by Martino Chiacchiera and Silvano Sorrentino and published by dV Games

Deckscape is a series of games that imitate escape rooms but only use a deck of cards, not a room full of gadgets, gizmos, and gear. Each card is either a puzzle with a solution on the back or an item that can be used to solve puzzles. Unlike Unlock!, there is no app supporting game play, so only when players are sure they've solved the problem should they check the back of a puzzle card to see if they got it right. If the player is right, they just discard the puzzle card. If they are wrong, they put the card in the box to keep track of their score. At the end, fewer cards mean a better performance. 

This game has Count Vlad D. inviting the players to his castle in Transylvania to deliver a secret tome that he claims is his. The game starts with the invitation delivery and proceeds to the castle and all the surprises inside. Naturally, players don't want to give the book to the Count and must evade all his traps and fight all his minions. Escape from the castle requires a lot of creative thinking and problem solving.

Non-spoiler look at some cards

The puzzles were the typical assortment of easy, fun, difficult, creative, and inexplicable. Using only cards to run the game is okay but limited. Sometimes we were unsure of solving the puzzle but just went ahead and flipped the card anyway because we didn't want to spend more time coming up with new ideas that seemed more off-base than our current solution. So we had a lot of unsatisfying moments. One card does have hints on it but we never used it.

Compared to Exit: The Game or Unlock!, this was lacking. The app in Unlock! is often used creatively and the frustration isn't as bad with tough puzzles. Exit uses a lot of different types of puzzles, with physical manipulation of components in addition to using the cards. The Dracula theme was interesting and well-used but the execution was not our favorite.

Mildly recommended--this wasn't terrible but it didn't sell us on the Deckscape system either.

Book Review: Marvel-verse: Spider-Woman by M. Wolfman et al.

Marvel-verse: Spider-Woman written by Marv Wolfman, Mark Gruenwald, Gerry Duncan, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Jen Van Meter, and art by Carmine Infantino, Steven Grant, Salvador Larroca, and Barry Kitson

Spider-Woman isn't just some Peter Parker clone. Jessica Drew was the daughter of scientist Jonathan Drew who teamed up with another scientist, Herbert Wyndham, to conduct unlimited research in an isolated area. Young Jessica was exposed to radiation. Combining Drew's expertise in spiders (who are highly resistant to radiation according to this book) and Wyndham's knowledge of evolution, they are able to preserve her life. Jonathan mysteriously drops out of the story and Wyndham goes crazy, calling himself "The High Evolutionary." He evolves lower animals into humans, though they don't get along with the human/spider hybrid that Jessica becomes. She escapes, only to fall into the clutches of Hydra. She's brainwashed into being an assassin for Hydra but leaves that behind, trying to strike out on her own. Jessica has a hard time finding a regular job (with no background or references) but she resists the temptation to turn back to evil. 

This book contains a couple of different stories. The first is her origin as a superhero in the 1970s. After all the backstory, she's in London starving. She struggles with stealing to eat and finding any work at all. She's being followed by a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who, naturally, falls for her. They don't get along. The next story jumps ahead to Spider-Woman in Los Angeles, where she runs into Peter Parker, who happens to be on a press junket to some scientific labs. They tussle as Spider-Woman and Spider-Man. Jessica is not up on her superheroes and assumes he's an imitation of her! They come to a peaceable end without revealing their identities to each other.

The book then jumps to stories from the 2010s. In a bit from the A + X saga, she teams up with X-Man Kitty Pride to thwart the Absorbing Man from stealing a bit of non-terrestrial metal that will make him overpowered. The next story is set during a big crossover battle. The Avengers (which Spider-Woman has joined) head to outer space with a coalition of of goodies and baddies to fight the Builders who have a seemingly unstoppable fleet. The Avenger split into two spacecraft, with Spider-Woman on a different ship from Clint Barton/Hawkeye and Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel. Jessica dated Clint at one point and had a bad breakup. He's now extra-friendly with Carol, who is also a former close friend of Jessica. So Spider-Woman has mixed feelings about them. The action is exciting and the side of soap-opera is much less interesting. The story has some nice personal moments, especially with Black Widow.

I enjoyed the earlier stories better. They are self-contained and look at Jessica as she seeks a new and better life, a redemption from her past. An evil character turning to good is a favorite storyline for me. The later stories are parts of larger narratives and feel incomplete taken out of their contexts. I like the art better in the later stuff but the story is more important to me.

Mildly recommended.

Movie Review: Malnazidos (2020)

Malnazidos (2020) directed by Alberto de Toro and Javier Ruiz Caldera

Set during the Spanish Civil War, Captain Jan (Miki Esparbe) fights for the Fascist side though he is a lawyer by trade and not a very good soldier. His uncle is a friend of Franco and gets him out of trouble (i.e., execution by firing squad) for the third time. To prove that he's a worthy and trustable soldier, Jan is given a secret letter to deliver to another unit, a unit far enough away that the mission is one he likely won't come back from. He takes the job rather than being summarily executed. He picks up a young private as a driver (Manel Llunell) and they head off through enemy territory. It's not long before they are captured by a bunch of Reds who are about to off them when they all discover that the dead are coming back to life. The dead don't care if people are fascist or communist, to them everyone is food. So an uneasy alliance is struck to get out of the titular Valley of the Dead (at least, that's the English version of the title, if not a translation). 

This is a fairly standard zombie movie. The historical setting is the only original bit of it. The rest of the film has all been made before--the rakish, authority-flaunting hero, the young, inexperienced sidekick (there's a running gag about the driver being a virgin), the hostile, competent female who winds up with the hero, the evil, scarred scientist who gets his comeuppance, etc. Even with the lack of originality, the movie is still entertaining in a "rainy Saturday afternoon" way. The gore is surprisingly mild for a zombie film, which I didn't mind. The actors do a good job with the semi-cliched roles they inhabit. I was entertained but not wowed by the film.

Mildly recommended, and not to be confused with the 1946 movie with the same English title.

Easton Maryland Ghost Tour

Last Thanksgiving (that's Thanksgiving 2025 for any of you reading this long after it was published) we went to Maryland's Eastern Shore for the extra-long weekend. We had booked a ghost tour for Friday night but the weather was awful and a couple of us were sick. The company was gracious enough to let us reschedule, so I picked a date at the end of the school year when the kids were supposed to have a half-day of school. That meant we could leave home early and be on time for our appointment. So we had a mini-vacation that featured the tour (finally).

Eerie Echoes of the Eastern Shore: Easton Ghost Tour starts at the Talbot County Free Library. When we arrived, we saw our guide coming toward us holding a lantern. The tour started by the library, which has a haunted item inside. Patty Cannon was an Eastern Shore resident in the late 1700s and early 1800s. She was also a serial killer. Her story was recorded, well, embellished in a book called The Entailed Hat, or Patty Cannon's Times. The library has copy 496 of the 500 printed in the initial run. The book is in an atmosphere-controlled room under glass. A librarian once touched the book and her fingernails blackened and fell off. Our tour guide had the opportunity to touch the book and was quite nervous about it. They didn't even offer her gloves! Her fingernails were okay, though.

Talbot County Free Library

Back to Cannon's story. She ran a kind of anti-Underground Railroad. She had a home where she hosted travelers. She had a freed black man as a compatriot who would encourage escaped slaves to seek shelter in her home. But then she would chain them and threatened to sell them down south. She did not restrict her crimes to black people. If rich people came, like slave traders, she would often poison them or have them shot and then steal their money. She buried a lot of people in her basement and some in the yard as well. Once, a man was traveling by and his horse got stuck in a hole outside her house. He started digging to get the horse out and discovered human bones. He got the sheriff who arrested Cannon. She wound up in jail for two weeks and then died from poisoning before going to trial. Did someone try to take a short cut to achieve justice? Did she off herself to avoid the coming ordeal? No one really knows.

Across the street from the library is the old prison. Easton was originally called Courthouse Town, because it had the only courthouse on the Eastern Shore. It was inconvenient to take criminals across the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis or Baltimore, so this was a nice solution. The prison at one time housed Frederick Douglass, the famous freed slave who spoke about his experiences all over America and beyond. In the Easton jail, he was threatened with return to his owners. Slave traders would come and taunt him. The building was rebuilt in the late 1800s, including the installation of an elevator. The elevator is said to be haunted, traveling between floors on its own. A woman in a blue dress sometimes rides the elevator or walks the halls of the prison. The guide said it might be the wife of one of the jailers (who lived on the first floor of the jail), or it might be a prisoner.

The town's prison (at least it used to be)

Across the street is a fine restaurant that used to be a hotel. The hotel was on the carriage route and not far from the railroad that came later. With its proximity to the jail, a lot of disreputable types stayed there. Those were the men who taunted Douglass. The building has the usual haunting problem--upstairs lights, the sounds of people walking around when no one is there, the sounds of chains.

Can't stay here anymore

Further up the street is Tidewater Inn, a fine establishment that hosts events and has had many famous people stay there, including the likes of Elvis, Bing Crosby, and John F. Kennedy. The hotel, with so many patrons and such a long history, has its own ghosts. Staff don't linger long in the basement because they can often hear the sounds of a party--old-time jazz music and clinking glasses and the hubbub of the hoity-toity. They also have a haunted elevator, this one with a woman in a yellow dress who folds her hands in prayer and disappears when the elevator doors open.

Tidewater Inn

Across the way is the Avalon Theater. The theater served as a movie theater but is now a performance venue. It too has a haunted elevator. A young actress sometimes gets off and vanishes. An actress was murdered in the theater with her body discovered in the elevator. The building owner once spotted the ghost. Later, he saw a picture of a line of actresses and recognized one of them as the ghost he had seen. The upstairs bar has also had some odd activity with knives. A bartender once brought his young daughter to work and left her by the bar while he went on an errand. He came back to find her terrified and a large knife plunged into the bar. She was ten or twelve and would not have had the strength to impale it so deeply. Another worker was surprised when a knife flew behind her head while she was working alone at the bar. Our guide speculated it might be the ghost of the fellow who murdered the actress.

Avalon Theater

Our final stop was at Thompson Park. The guide told us about seven different fires that happened over the span of 150 years. Each fire burned down one or two blocks of the city with no fatalities. Another circumstance that holds the instances together is the presence of a woman in a red dress preceding each fire. In the 1900s, someone bought the property and happened to be walking along when a lady in red passed and said this would be a good area for a park. Not knowing the history of the fires, the owner considered the idea and went ahead with it. There have been no fires since.

The park in daylight the next day

The tour guide took our photo

So the moral of the story for this ghost tour is clear. Don't ride elevators in Easton and avoid women in anachronistic dresses, especially when they come out of an elevator (which you should have avoided in the first place).

Book Review: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl was a practicing psychotherapist who was sent to Auschwitz during World War II as a prisoner. He took a manuscript for a book which he tried to sneak it in but it was quickly discovered and taken away, presumably destroyed. His wife came in with him, they were separated, and he never saw her again. He became a number, a day laborer, in a system where the odds of survival were bleak. Prisoners were overworked, underfed, never given new clothes (they had to check over dead prisoners to see if they had better shoes or coats and do a quick swap). They were subject to the whims of the capos and SS running the camp. The life, if it could even be called such, was miserable and hopeless. Frankl, in the first part of this book, describes his experiences in excruciating detail. 

His time there had a tremendous impact on Frankl. The crucible of suffering showed how different men reacted in many different ways to the conditions. Out of this, Frankl developed a distinct field of psychotherapy that he calls "Logotherapy." In Logotherapy, the main motivation people have is to find meaning in their lives (as opposed to seeking pleasure or power). In the concentration camps, the only thing left was the hope for something external to oneself. For Frankl, it was preserving the book and the hope of seeing his wife again (though she died in the camps). He had something to live for, a reason to survive the horrible circumstances of his situation. For others, it was family or friends or goals unfulfilled. Happiness is not the object of pursuit, it is the by-product of finding something or someone you have valued, by having a purpose. Frankl quotes Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Frankl developed his therapeutic practice from these insights.

Being able to reframe suffering from a "woe is me" attitude to a "what is my purpose in this situation" is not just a way to mental health, but to personal wholeness. Guiding people to that point is not easy. The second, smaller part of this book is a brief overview of Logotherapy. It describes various techniques used and provides examples of how they are applied in concrete situations, mostly taken from Frankl's own life and career (with names changed, of course). Therapy is future-focused, taking patients to the point where they can understand their problems better and have ways to minimize or eliminate them altogether.

This book is genuinely great and eye-opening.

Highly recommended.

Sample quote about life in the camps:

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life--daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. [p. 85]