PicoBlog

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is a subscriber request! This throwback “classic” comes from my buddy Jake Thornton, one of my work homies that has become an actual real-life homie. It helps that he’s a bit of a man about town, so I’m always running into him at movies, concerts, and other events. But our best hangs are when he brings homemade kombucha to the office and I get to swing by his desk and indulge.

During an overnight group meditation a few weeks ago, I thought about Britney Spears. I had been reading her incendiary new memoir, which contains page after page of revelations about a woman we have all heard a lot about for the past 25 years, and yet have rarely heard her own truth. In The Woman in Me, she lays it all out—vilified on a mass scale for wearing sexy outfits, vilified more after an excruciating breakup with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake that included a secret abortion, hounded by tabloids and paparazzi, and separated from her children, she was then depicted as “crazy” and locked into a 13-year conservatorship that gave her overbearing father total control over her life.

Being an all-time great’s son raised expectations for James Jr. However, playing a different role than his father, it’s important to evaluate his game without the heaviness of his name. Entering his freshman year as a McDonald’s All-American, James Jr. suffered a sudden cardiac arrest during team practice. Thanks to timely action from the USC staff, his situation stabilized and led to James Jr. being cleared to play shortly after the season started.

It’s springtime and I’ve been thinking a lot about brooding. “Going broody” is what we call it when a chicken—a hen specifically—decides she wants to be a mother and starts sitting on her eggs to incubate them. She lays, or steals, enough eggs to make a giant clutch of them. She pecks out the feathers on her breast to make a brood patch that allows for skin-to-egg contact. The eggs warm better that way.

Sure, I am Always Talkin’ Food, but I teach NT2 (Dutch as a second language) on the side. Mainly to young foreigners who came to Amsterdam for or with love. For privacy reasons the names in these columns are fictitious. ‘I have lived in the Netherlands for two years. And I had a Dutch boyfriend for seven years. But it was only last weekend that I ate a kroket (croquette) for the first time in my life.

It’s been 54 years this week since Woodstock, one of the defining events of the psychedelic Sixties, took place. LSD was widespread, memorably including the notorious ‘brown acid’. Historian Andy Roberts dives into the question of where that acid came from… ncG1vNJzZmioo66wqbHDnqOim6CnsrS%2Fjaysm6uklrCsesKopGioX5e%2FsMPNZpicoZQ%3D

What comes after jeans? A tough question if you’re the kind of person who seeks the ease of a uniform style of dress because jeans are the pants of the everyman. They are practical to the extent that the fabric is durable: throw them in the machine, don’t wash them at all; it kind of doesn’t matter. They’re convenient in that they can match with almost anything. They’re approachable in that you can find a pair at any price point you’re after.

This is a fabulous research paper that explores the evolving shares of online/offline retail by analysing one of the sectors that saw the most profound shifts:  groceries.  Browsing the Aisles or Browsing the App? The paper and analysis is US cent… ncG1vNJzZmismJq7psHRqJuirpWntKa6056aqKafora0wI2srJurpJawrHrCqKRoqF%2BXv7DD0qKloGWknbJurciso56rXaS%2Fbq7RqK6soZ6cerW0xA%3D%3D

Fifty years ago, I was on my way to visit Bruce Lee when I learned of his death. He was 32, and I was 25. He had been not only my martial arts teacher but my close friend, and I was still young enough to not yet have experienced much profound loss in my life, which is why his death hit me so hard. I felt like I’d tumbled overboard from a ship that had sailed on without me.