PicoBlog

This week saw me interviewing, if not Britain’s nicest chap, then certainly a National Treasure, namely Sir Michael Palin, all about his latest Channel Five travel show, a three programme series on Nigeria. The highlights of that will be coming to you via the Radio Times in due course, but after the interview I hung around for a chat, as you do, largely because he was so delightful and his airy study so comfy that it seemed wrong to simply rush away.

Go Outside subscribers receive advice, stories, trip reports, interviews and outdoorsy goodness in their inbox on Wednesday mornings. If you enjoy and value our work, we invite you to become a paid subscriber. Contributions from readers like you make this newsletter possible. Upgrade to Paid It’s the most wonderful time of the year! We (and many of you, our dear readers) have found larches! Based on our recent hiking in the Lake O’Hara area (pictured below) and the photo evidence you’ve been tagging us in, the larches are just starting to turn.

Today, Joining the Dots begins a new offering: This Week Reminds Me Of Those Books. It’s weekly, obviously. And it’s meant to do what it says on the tin. To explain which books seem to resonate with the news and developments of a particular week. Why? I read a lot of books you see. And I’m a news junkie. If you like this weekly post, please share widely.

I was one of the 1,250 people who lost their jobs at DoorDash last week. It was a Wednesday morning, and I was in my multitasking-mom mode—filling up water bottles, waiting for the toast to pop, one eye on the nearly-brewed coffee pot—when I scanned my work email. Two new emails, the first from the CEO, Tony Xu, with the subject line, “Changes to our DoorDash team.” I thought something like, too bad, some people must have been let go.

School started this week for our boys, but I am holding onto memories of summer something fierce! In my attempt to make the most of the (too short) break before the (too soon) start of the academic year, we did a mad dash around Southern California last week. Our travels included our *first* family trip to Disneyland. As someone who has lived in California for six years and Los Angeles for two, it’s more notable at this point that we had NOT made the trek to see Mickey Mouse’s house.

"Last night was a disaster from which Biden cannot recover,” said Senator Tom Harkin, retired.“ He stood there with his mouth hanging open, head bowed down much of the time; it looked like someone put flour on his face for makeup.” Harkin expressed his opinion in a private note to friends. With his permission, I share what he had to say. These are his words: Although not as important as appearance (TV is all about visuals, not verbiage-all the way back to Kennedy-Nixon), Biden’s sentences were mainly incoherent.

A week ago there were a lot of conversations on Twitter about trauma porn. As a lover of Black happily ever afters, I have a lot of feelings about trauma porn, all of which can be summed up here in a story I wrote for The Mighty back in 2020.  Before I start, I want to mention that I intentionally don’t interact with very heavy media, especially Black media. I’m aware that some of the media talks about our history, culture, plights, etc.

60 Minutes is known for their investigative journalism, and bless them for allowing me to call the outputs of generative AI “authoritative bullshit” on network television. But not every interview they do hits the mark. The interview they just with Geoff Hinton has some positives, but there are way too many softballs, and there was essentially zero effort to press him on any of his alleged facts. Even in its title (which I call out in the postscript), CBS gave Hinton more credit than he deserves .

Psalter: Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26 Old Testament: 2 Samuel 6:12-19 Epistle: Hebrews 1:5-14 ___ Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glo… ncG1vNJzZmiZnKGur77Bnq2eqpVjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89orqGZpGLEor%2BMrZ%2BeZZGnuG67xWaroZ1dmLy3sc2apa0%3D