PicoBlog

Versus Media by Stephen L. Miller By Stephen L. Miller Daily Podcast and supplemental posts on the cultural intersection of politics, media bias, and technology with a dash of irreverent humor by Stephen L. Miller, @redsteeze (Fox News, National Review, New York Post, and The Spectator Magazine) ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kja61y6Wcq66Vp8C2v8yem6KZ
Hello friends from ACROSS THE WORLD (so crazy that that’s true!) for your Friday night entertainment, may I present yet another installment of 3 Clicks & A Hick! This week our starting point was legendary Vaudeville and Movie Star Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry…. Better known as his stage name/character Stepin Fetchit! This takes us on a journey that eventually leads us into Norse mythology! As promised, after I finished the game, I went back and dug a little deeper on some links I found interesting along the way!
TWENTY YEARS AGO THIS month, I and my band spent a week at Steve Albini’s recording studio in Chicago. After some neighborhood children taunted me on the first morning’s walk to the nearest grocery store, I stayed indoors for the duration. There was no reason to leave the compound anyway. The building included cushy living quarters, a kitchen, rec room, and lots of nooks and crannies where I could stay out of everyone’s way.
Hello friends! I’m pleased to share another installment of the occasional series I do, in which I invite an author to tell us five things—not only about their most recent book, but about their life too. Those of you who’ve listened to the Dear Sugars podcast know that the wonderful writer Steve Almond is not only a dear friend of mine, he was also the originator of the Dear Sugar column back when it was published on The Rumpus.
TOKYO — Steve Parker was one of the more memorable individuals I interviewed in my long career in journalism in Japan. He was one of the first Tokyo denizens I met when I first arrived in the city in the early 60’s — introduced to him by a mutual acquaintance at the popular night club Club 88 — and he was, according to Corky Alexander, the  “unofficial mayor” of the American community in the city at the time, a community which numbered some 7,000 American residents — not counting the U.
The book is called Noticing. It collects some of Sailer’s essays over several decades. Sailer is known for being a “race realist.” That means that he notices differences in average IQ in statistics collected by race. In “It’s all relative,” published in 2002, he defines race this way: A racial group is an extended family that is inbred to some degree. All right. That is the definition of something, and you could probably make it scientific.
Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise traveled to promote Minority Report in advance of its June 2002 release, and I spoke to them at the Four Seasons in Chicago. As the Apple Vision Pro wends its way into the world, or at least inspires a mess of memes, it’s striking how most of the futurist notions in Spielberg’s sci-noir remain prescient. (There’s a reason for that, which he talks about.) An edited version of this exchange was published in the UK and Poland at the time.
It was a thick Austin night in the summer of ’86 and Stevie Ray Vaughan looked bad. Without acknowledging the applause of the sunburned multitudes pressed up against a chain link fence, Stevie emerged gingerly from a big black limo and used a silver-tipped cane to pick his way to the side of the Austin River Fest stage. His 31 years had been multiplied like dog years and almost suddenly he was old, frail and out of breath.
Not knowing your history leaves you rootless. Jane Blasio dug into her hidden history, found her roots, and is now planted. Jane writes her story in Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Find Home. She worked with TLC as an investigator on the TLC Docu-Series, Taken at Birth. The series was interesting, but I wanted to know more about Jane. Her book fills in the blanks but leaves you wanting a little more.