PicoBlog

Welcome to To Vegetables, With Love, a celebration of a vegetable life, less ordinary. Every week, I share a new recipe, along with links to recipes online and news. If you would like to see your subscription options, click the link below. As always, I appreciate all of you being here! This week’s recipe is unlocked for all subscribers. If you would like to see your subscription options, click the link below.

On the 7th of June 1926, a couple of weeks before his 74th birthday, Antoni Gaudí was quite violently interrupted in his journey to church for his daily prayer. He was hit by a tram. If you were there, witnessing the collision, I can fairly confidently say you wouldn’t grasp the significance of the event happening in front of you. That’s because I’m pretty certain you wouldn’t recognise that the old man being hit by a tram was Antoni Gaudí.

I was fortunate to have my third visit this June to one of my favorite wine regions of the world: Spain’s Priorat region. The Priorat wine region is located just two hours southwest of Barcelona and sits at the foot of the magnificent Montsant Mountains (Serra de Montsant means “Holy Mountain Range.”) The wines of Priorat are considered some of the world’s finest. The landscape begs for a leisurely hike from village to vineyard on the well-marked trails.

I first met John Michael, the creator and star of “Spank Bank Time Machine” in the Know Underground on Friday night. He unabashedly started chatting me up and telling me about his show. His energy washed over me like a tidal wave; I was certainly intrigued. His 60-second preview again piqued my interest as he talked about the word “inappropriate” being a term used to keep people from having to discuss things that make them uncomfortable.

BAR HARBOR—Imagine fingers picking out fast notes on a standing bass that’s scratched and loved and about the same height as the debonair man who is playing it. The notes sizzle into a beat spawned by fingers moving so quickly that they’re hard to photograph in dim light. The fingers connect to a man smoothly singing out melodic lines that run counter to or accompanying the trippy, rhythmic beat. People at Havana’s bar area, watch, sway, get a little swoony.

Hi y’all, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so conflicted in reviewing a book. It took me three tries to get through Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I first started reading it about a year ago, got to page 50, and gave up. I thought it was boring. About 6 months ago, I tried again, to the same results. And I guess Einstein or whoever was wrong about insanity, because I tried a third time and, low and behold, I finished the book in a few days.

Theorygram is a subculture of Politigram. On Theorygram, you are likely to see memes about philosophers and nonsense internet in-jokes. (Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between the two.) Part of this subculture emerges from the maturation of teenage meme posters, who, as they grow into adulthood, become more intellectually curious about the theoretical side of politics. Another contributing factor is the narrowing parameters for online speech that result in shadow bans or deplatforming for accounts who continue to post political content.

For the second time in a row, I’ve decided to write about coffee—an escapism of sorts.  Luckily, there have been several interesting developments, particularly concerning Starbucks (which you must know by now is one of my favorite topics…). One such development, although not the most significant, is the 20th anniversary of the pumpkin spice latte. While opinions on this milestone vary, it holds relatively little relevance for today’s post. A recent article from Bloomberg highlighted that Starbucks is undergoing a significant shift in its operations: 

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