PicoBlog

If you were watching along with me, I would be tempted to tell you to not, I repeat not, watch season one, episode nine, “Rod and Ebony.” If last episoderepresented the evolution of trash television into something kinder or at least subtler, this one is trash at its most irredeemable: smelly, covered in flies. Or maybe it’s just...bad TV? Max and Nev parachute into a mysterious situation. The result is a convoluted episode that feels like it’s been redacted in a dozen places.

Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow is one of our most requested books, and now we get it. In this episode, we chat about the important role that food, cooking and shared tables all play in this charming book. We meander from how a good meal can be like time travel to thoughts on mixing the perfect aperitif - “A cocktail is not meant to be a melange. It is not a potpourri or an Easter parade.

You could call Sabich a fried eggplant sandwich, which it is at its heart: but it also has lots of other things, movable things: hard-boiled egg, salads, and condiments such as creamy sesame-seed tahini, fiery zhug or harissa, and amba, a bright yellow sauce of pickled mango and fenugreek. (Though an Israeli friend says that her favourite Sabich place refuses to let her omit the egg and she hates hard-boiled egg, so lets say: in theory you can vary the other ingredients).

The last time I talked about ghosts, we talked about Ringu’s Sadako. The one, the only, the icon. The ghost known by lay people. She’s so quintessential she even made a brief appearance in the beloved original David S. Pumpkins SNL sketch.  Except she’s not the one and only.  Because there’s also Samara, the ghost from the 2002 American remake The Ring. It’s pretty likely that most westerners are actually recognizing Samara when they see either of them.

I could think of no saint more appropriate for the first post on Surprising Saints then the one and only Saint Guinefort (Geen, as in green, four), who was in fact a dog. Yes, a dog. A greyhound to be exact! I first learned about Saint Guinefort from artist Jessica Roux’s Woodland Wardens oracle deck in which the twenty-third card, which signifies loyalty, shows a hound dog and a pear. In her description of the card, Roux tells the story of Saint Guinefort, and I was stunned to be hearing about a dog saint for the first time.

America’s first nationally recognized rodeo star—who was born and raised near Salem, has passed away. Larry Mahan—who won six national all-around rodeo titles, and is in the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame and the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame—died on Sunday after a long battle with cancer at the age of 79.  Made famous by a feature on ABC’s Wide World of Sports and later an Oscar-winning documentary about his career in the mid-1970s, Mahan won five straight national all-around rodeo titles from 1966 to 1970, and nabbed a sixth crown after overcoming several years of injuries.

In 1963, a female singing group called the Jaynetts made their only hit called "Sally Go Round the Roses." It stood out from every other girl-group song of the era because of its haunting lyric and freakish sound. Though it could be heard on every pop station in America (it peaked at No. 2 for two weeks in early September, 1963), you didn't know whether the radio station was right next door with a 50,000 watt signal, or beamed through the static of a low-wattage station a thousand miles away.

I watched Saltburn, and quite liked it. There was a lot of lovely style in there: all of the actors really looked their parts (Barry Keoghan looks extraordinary as the lead), and the riffing on the class system was funny. It was quite a lightweight riff on Brideshead Revisited, but the main idea it throws at Brideshead is actually quite deep. God, it suggests, is a serial killer. In Saltburn, the Charles Ryder character is Ollie, and Ollie is shagging and murdering the beautiful aristos one by one, until he ends up taking the house.

Evening all, Tonight we had Sam from The United Stand join myself and Jai to preview the game tomorrow night! Sam is a big United fan and also gets some inside info on both clubs. We covered the big preview, score predictions, lineup predictions, a big bit on Mason Mount, the state of both clubs right now and how we are both as bad as each other, summer transfer noise, injuries, and much more!