PicoBlog

My two alarms chirp, harp and piano play. I stumble around in the dark for a few moments, lights on. It's 4am and I'm back in the land of the living in rectangular dongas, dry and wet messes, 6am flights to the desert, 12 hour days, rosters that sound more like basic fractions (2/1, 8/6, 3/1) hi-vis uniforms and flies. Lots of flies. Welcome to a day in the life of a mining fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) worker.

Melancholia arrived in U.S. theaters ten years ago this month, but it’s taken a while to be able to see it clearly. That’s partly because its Cannes debut in the spring of 2011 had been such a disaster, not because of the film itself but because of director Lars von Trier. During a self-destructive press conference, von Trier, sporting knucklesfreshly tattooed with the letters “F-U-C-K,” said the movie “may be crap” and jokingly spoke of harboring Nazi sympathies (though, understandably, many didn’t find the joke funny).

Back when I was deep in #Rushtok, a different sort of video made its way into my FYP. It was from a professor who studied #Rushtok for her dissertation — and who, for fun, made her own version of a Bama Rush dress (and filmed herself wearing it. After I emailed her (how could I not) I realized our paths had crossed before back when I lived in New York and she was teaching at The New School.

Welcome to Friday beer friends, It’s become a sadly regular event to unpick what went wrong when a major brewery fails, as is the case this week with Deep Creek. There’s so much to unpick here — and more will be revealed when the liquidators’ initial report is released next week. I feel that the past four months have been overly-dedicated to analysing “what went wrong” and I thought I’d written all there was to write — but the Deep Creek situation adds a new twist to the tangled ball of beer economics in 2023.

Another week, another NFL deep dive. Honestly, I didn’t plan to make this a weekly series! But after I spent the last two weeks plumbing the depths of the Seahawks’ silver-and-blue uniforms and the Buccaneers’ creamsicle uniforms — both of which are being revived this season as throwbacks — the Eagles’ new Kelly green throwbacks leaked, so I figured we’d better take a close look at those as well. Some quick background: The Eagles didn’t wear green for their first two seasons.

Before we get a started, a quick note: Regular readers of my Substack may notice something new this week: Hyperlinked text, which had previously been black, like the rest of the text, is now green, to match the Uni Watch color scheme. I’d been requesting this change for ages, and for some reason it was surprisingly difficult to get done, but it was worth the wait! Big thanks to Substack engineer Ben Cohen for making it happen.

At the end of last week’s article about the Vikings’ original uniforms, I wrote, “I’m pretty sure that the Vikings are the final NFL team to be announcing a new throwback for 2023.” Shows what I know! No sooner had I written that than we had a video leak hinting at a Jets throwback, which was confirmed a few days later when the Jets unveiled their new retro uni set. And you know what that means — time for another deep dive on the uniforms that inspired the new throwback!

As if one could somehow exhaust Tolkien’s stories from the dawning of the First Age to the closing of the Third, many of us still have an appetite for what might happen in Middle-earth following the demise of Sauron and the coronation of the rightful king of Gondor. If you fall into this category, you are not alone, as Tolkien himself began to tell this story - at least for about 13 pages.

When my debut came out in 2019, I wrote a little guide to finding an agent and included my exact query letter — before and after, in fact, showing its too-long first draft and then the edited version I sent out. Years later, querying authors still reach out to thank me for it. Which got me thinking…why not create a whole compendium of successful book pitches? Elevator pitches are hard, whether you’re crystallizing a new book idea, pitching your manuscript, or trying to convince readers to buy your book.