Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Put ‘Great Sex’ on Your Vacation To-Do List image (not from article) from Vacation sex can be an excellent way to reconnect with your partner, but sometimes expectations don’t meet reality  By Elizabeth Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal , July 31, 2023 9:00 pm ET  Matt Hughes  wanted everything to be perfect to celebrate his 10th wedding anniversary. He took his wife to an oceanfront suite at a luxury resort and had flowers, chocolate and Champagne delivered. That night, the couple went to dinner at a French restaurant.  When they returned to their room, Hughes dimmed the lights, leaned in for a kiss—and heard a great, big woof. Several dogs started barking in the next room. The couple tried to carry on, but the pooches proved too distracting. The front desk wasn’t much help; the room’s human occupants were nowhere to be found.  After several hours, Hughes, 53 years old, a technology executive from San Clemente, Calif., drove to a pharmacy and bought earplugs. ...

Propaganda is appearing in Minecraft and other popular games and discussion groups as the Kremlin tries to win over new audiences.   Steven Lee Myers and Kellen Browning, The New York Times , July 30, 2023   Image A recreation of a Soviet Union military parade in Moscow in 1945 in the video game World of Tanks. Credit... via YouTube Russian propaganda is spreading into the world’s video games. In Minecraft [jb - see ] , the immersive game owned by Microsoft, Russian players re-enacted the battle for Soledar, a city in Ukraine that Russian forces captured in January, posting a video of the game on their country’s most popular social media network, VKontakte. A channel on World of Tanks, a multiplayer warfare game, commemorated the 78th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in May with a recreation of the Soviet Union’s parade of tanks in Moscow in 1945. On Roblox, the popular gaming platform, a user created an array of Interior Ministry forces in June to celebrate the nati...

Red Square in Moscow this month. A state-led spending boom has propped up Russia’s economy, despite the country facing the most far-reaching campaign of sanctions imposed by Western nations in modern history. Credit... Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images By  Anatoly Kurmanaev The New York Times , July 31, 2023 Updated  9:07 a.m. ET After Russia invaded Ukraine, Anna, a Russian entrepreneur, made a snap decision to open a real estate agency, hoping to create a safety net from the economic fallout of the conflict. The career change has paid off. Within weeks, she landed a deal for a stately 18th-century apartment, with parquet floors and high ceilings in the prestigious center of Russia’s former imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Since the war, the owner had stopped coming to Russia, allowing her client to buy it for roughly 40 percent below its current value. “We in Russia have become accustomed to living in a state of permanent crisis,” said Anna, who decl...