Gathered

-- Later in life artist Steve Ditko's personality and devotion to Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy made him a rather quirky, iconoclastic and reclusive character. But during his heyday, the quirky iconoclasm made his work Spider-Man definitive for the character, and his incredibly wild and trippy visuals made Dr. Strange's mystic world seem like a real place. In addition to that work with Marvel, he created the Creeper, a DC hero whose borderline sinister and deranged persona prefigured some of the grim and gritty antiheroes of the 1990s. Ditko passed earlier this week at 90.

-- One of the many sins of the radically vapid "Purge" movies is that if you are trying to find the poignant 2008 short film of that name by Brad Kammlah, or perhaps either the Finnish book or movie adapted from Sofi Oksanen's 2007 play of that name, your search engine work will take you instead to the brutally stupid work of series creator James DeMonaco. "Creator" is not an accurate word to describe either the process by which these movies emerged from DeMonaco or the quality of their content, but this blog's posts also appear on Facebook, where they are read by my mother.

-- I know a lot of people who are freaked out enough by spiders -- the idea that some spiders actually fly, and they do so by means of electric fields, would probably make them catatonic. Except of course for Dave Barry fans, who realize that Electric Flying Spiders would make a great name for a rock band.

-- London's mayor Sadiq Khan gave permission to a group that wants to fly a 20-foot balloon depicting US President Donald Trump as a whiny orange baby while the president is visiting the city on July 13. London Metropolitan Police and air traffic authorities will have a say-so on whether or not this comes to pass, but $21,000 people have contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to purchase, fill and float the balloon. Coverage of this silly idea has been extensive. Meanwhile, reporting on possible trade legislation the White House would like introduced and passed -- which would take pretty much all tariff-making authority away from Congress and give it to the President and end US participation in the World Trade Organization -- has been slight. And much of it is focused on the unfortunate acronym the proposed bill has acquired. You know, the important stuff.