Vietnamese art mess

How many of the paintings displayed at the Vietnamese National Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi are originals and how many are copies? . . .

It is well known among Vietnamese artists that the museum has been hanging works of art that are in fact copies of very famous Vietnamese paintings as some of the originals were either sold or lost. . .

Now no-one is certain what has happened to the originals, but it is thought that some were sold by officials and are now in private hands or in galleries around the world.

Artists themselves were asked by the museum to copy their own paintings, and now no-one knows for sure which are original and which are copies.

Fast train travel: back to the 1930s

Train-buff friends have long regaled me with unflattering comparisons of the fast trains of the '30s with their present-day counterparts:

The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York's Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal's (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York's Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride. The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak's Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours. . .

Obama's bold vision obscures a simple fact: 220 mph would be phenomenal, but we would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration.