This is neither here nor there, it’s just a look at panoramic skyline photos of the past—now restored in wide-screen Technicolor! Last year I went to Chicago and took a skyline picture from Navy Pier. Sadly, my wide angle lens is not quite wide enough, so I ended up with the cramped photo I posted here. But yesterday, while I was looking for something else, I realized that I had taken two photos at the time but didn’t realize I could stitch them together in Photoshop. Now I’m older and wiser, and Photoshop produced this for me:

This is far better than the original. The skyline looks better with some more air in it and the clouds are better too.

The previous year I was in New York City and took a sequence of photos from the top of the Empire State Building. I tried to stitch them together myself and posted the result here. Yesterday I went back and had Photoshop do the job instead:

Much better! Not only is the stitching invisible, but I got a wider view as well. I don’t have any profound point to make here. I just happened to discover these old photos and realized I could improve them by letting Photoshop stitch them together. I liked the results and thought I’d share.

Erin Scott-Pool/CNP via ZUMA

Rudy Giuliani explains why the media has been reluctant to promote his bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop:

Sure, the U.S. Treasury Department may have declared one of his former associates—Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach, who worked with Giuliani on his hunt for dirt on the Bidens—to be an “active Russian agent.” But that’s some Deep State talk, he added. “The chance that Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50.”

“My guess is that George Soros is behind this counter-offensive… because he wants to create a socialist country,” Giuliani baselessly alleged. “He’d like to see us collapse and see us taken over by the international… whatever.” Giuliani said that Derkach’s eventual sanctioning was the result of “an intelligence ploy to try to create problems for Trump—because Derkach could probably bury Obama.”

Oh . . . kay. In related news, Giuliani says he plans to continue dribbling out dirt on Hunter Biden for the next couple of weeks. Apparently he has faith that eventually the New York Times will crack and start putting it all on their front page.

It wasn’t really much of a mystery, was it? As many of you figured out, yesterday’s catblogging picture was a sketch of the cathedral at Chartres as seen across the Bouju bridge. What’s amazing in this era of the all-knowing internet is that I could go into Google Streetview and conjure up a photograph taken from nearly the same spot:

The sketch was done by a fellow named Barday, who apparently became well known as a postcard artist in the interwar years. He mostly did drawings of Paris, but occasionally made his way out to the provinces to tackle other postcard-worthy subjects. A quick search suggests that he did several drawings similar to this one, but I think mine is the best of the lot.

This lithograph was purchased by my grandparents during a trip to Europe in the mid-1930s. Barday seems to have taken some liberties with the perspective, and there are a few other odd places where he decided to move things around a bit, but for the most part it looks like the present-day neighborhood surrounding the bridge is pretty much the same as it was 90 years ago. To find it on Google Maps, just type “Pont Bouju Chartres.”

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is Hilbert, protecting Marian’s desk from possible intruders. Like Marian, for example. For bonus points, can you identify the drawing to Hilbert’s right? To get any credit, we need details. Which bridge is that? What river is it crossing? Answer tomorrow.

Retail spending ticked upward in September, growing 1.9 percent from the previous year:

We’re not even close to making up the huge loss in spending from the first few months of the pandemic lockdowns, but we probably never will. However, that downturn produced pent-up demand which is now starting to turn into higher spending levels.

As always, however, this is an average. It shows that on average the economy is doing OK. But as we know from other metrics, this means the middle class and the affluent are spending more while the working poor are spending less. They’re the ones who have suffered most from the pandemic, and they’re the ones who need the most help. That’s why Congress needs to pass a coronavirus assistance bill.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Rudy Giuliani demonstrating something or other to the press after a television interview.Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

The bombshell story of Hunter Biden’s computer goes something like this: Rudy Giuliani was strolling around in Wilmington one day when he noticed a hard drive lying on the sidewalk. When he hooked it up, it turned out to be full of incriminating evidence about Hunter Biden’s lobbying for a Ukrainian energy company, along with some risque photos. What luck! So he gave it to the FBI and turned over a copy to his pals at the New York Post, who put it all on their front page.

OK, that’s not exactly how it happened. But it might as well be, since the actual story is hardly any more believable. Tonight, the New York Times provides some hints about what probably really happened:

The intelligence agencies warned the White House late last year that Russian intelligence officers were using President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential run, according to four current and former American officials.

….Mr. Giuliani has made multiple trips to Ukraine to gather material that is damaging to the Biden campaign, and his December visit came as he tried to shift the political conversation from impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump to unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Biden’s wrongdoing.

Conservatives are apoplectic that mainstream news organizations are mostly ignoring the hard drive story (so far) and that both Twitter and Facebook initially acted to limit the spread of the Post story. And I hardly blame them for being disappointed. After all, this kind of thing has always worked so well in the past, so why not this time too?

That’s hard to say. The optimistic take is that everyone has learned a lesson from 2016. The less optimistic take is simply that (a) Giuliani is a nutcase these days, and (b) he’s been publicly searching for precisely this kind of thing for over a year. It’s hardly believable when he comes up with precisely what he wanted just three weeks before the election.

Republicans are mostly hanging back on this story, since they know it could blow up any moment. However, the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to open an investigation of Twitter, apparently as a safe way of keeping this story in the spotlight without actually taking a stand on it. Stay tuned.

Did someone say sugar?

Jason DeParle reports that poverty is on the rise:

After an ambitious expansion of the safety net in the spring saved millions of people from poverty, the aid is now largely exhausted and poverty has returned to levels higher than before the coronavirus crisis, two new studies have found.

Here it is in chart form:

I’m unsure whether to count this as good news or bad. Technically, DeParle is right: poverty levels have risen to above their March level. At the same time, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the poverty rate is still lower than it’s been for all but a few months of the past several years.

It all depends on what happens next. If the poverty rate flattens out at around 11 percent, that would be better than nearly anyone had predicted. But if it keeps going up—as it probably will if Congress fails to pass an aid package—millions of people will be forced into needless suffering. The obvious solution is to pass the damn aid package. There’s not much downside and there’s a ton of upside.