Greetings from Pelion

🏞 We spent the weekend in Pelion (Πήλιο). It’s a region half way between Athens (Αθήνα) and Thessaloniki (Θεσσαλονίκη) where you can be in the mountains one part of the day, then drive down to lovely beaches for the second part. There’s not a lot of people around this summer, and it’s easy to keep our precautions up.

🛳 Maybe it was a bit premature to think that even small cruise ships should start operations again? More than 40 people have tested positive for COVID-19 from the MS Roald Amundsen’s two voyages in July. You couldn’t pay me to go on a cruise ship right now.

😷 If wearing a mask in a public school is a personal choice, as a district in Georgia is saying, then I have to ask about so many things — not the least of which are the school dress codes I remember being strictly enforced for all sorts of trivial things.

🌍 What’s worse than COVID-19? Climate change. Bill Gates thinks that the effects from climate change will be just as deadly as the current pandemic by 2060. Five times as deadly by 2100.

🏜 That future has already arrived in some places, including on the Western Slope of Colorado where average temperatures have already gone up by 2ºC.

📷 Shifting gears to something nice for a change, I love that Fuji has released a promo video for their 8 year old XF 35/1.4 lens. David Hobby’s take on it is right on: launching an homage video to a lens that has an 8-yr track record of producing gorgeous images makes WAY more sense than the nonstop hype-a-thon of every shiny new piece of kit.