PicoBlog

Have you ever noticed how some stuff looks like…other stuff?   Maybe I should be a little more specific.  Have you ever noticed how a walnut kind of looks like a brain? Or how grapes sometimes resemble lungs? Ocean waves can sound like an airplane cutting through the sky. Look at drops of sea water under a microscope and you can see a whole universe. And then there's this Swedish word: mångata.

"Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." For scouts, looking at their past evaluations is an essential practice. Prospect grading is a combination of art, science, research, and luck. The luck aspect can always factor in, where externalities or unforeseen developments derail or stymie a player's growth. Still, relying on luck is bad practice, especially when trying to come up with guidelines for how to engage in the science and research aspect.

I did it arse-backwards: before I heard Mo Troper’s music, I’d read him. It was an essay of his, published obscurely online, and which described his ambivalence about his own passion – and considerable gift – for power pop. Troper’s enthusiasm for his own genre was obvious in his encyclopaedic knowledge of it, but it was his ambivalence that interested me. “My relationship to power pop is characterized by [an] ouroboros of sympathy and revulsion,” he wrote.

In 1989, Disney released The Little Mermaid, following Ariel, a girl who, to King Triton's dismay, longed to leave the safety of the sea and explore life on land. 27 years later, Moana premiered, following the Polynesian daughter of chief Tui, who wanted nothing more than to leave life on land and explore the ocean. In many ways, the films feel like they parallel each other down to their disapproving fathers, whom the main characters inevitably disobey.

Consumer investing is a kind of alchemy. Determining which product or app is set to take over the world while another is slated for the scrapheap requires a rare blend of talents: an equity analyst’s understanding of the market and its particular dynamics; a marketer’s nous for assessing a brand’s particular charms; a psychologist’s reading of the founder in front of them; and an anthropologist’s grasp on the motives and machinations of our species.

It’s been a steady cycle of wind, rain and occasional sun here in Palm Beach. The other day was chilly enough I contemplated putting on socks. All the locals swear this is crazy weather and not normal. I refrain from suggesting the new normal may be the abnormal. You know, climate change and all. In any case, enduring the craziness is my own fault. This past week I bailed on a brief weather window to get to the Bahamas, partly because I have been hoping for a lengthier window that will allow me to make a jump south to at least the Berry Islands, or even Georgetown in the Exumas, as opposed to the quick jump to nearby West End on Grand Bahama.

A note to Fight Freaks Unite readers: I created Fight Freaks Unite in January 2021 and eight months later it also became available for paid subscriptions for additional content — and as a way to help keep this newsletter going and for readers to support independent journalism. If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription please consider it. If you have already, I truly appreciate it! Also, consider a gift subscription for the Fight Freak in your life.

My daughter allegedly turned two years old this week, but I’m skeptical. That’s impossible, because 2017 was two years ago, and she was born in 2021, which is two years from now.  After the holidays, according to the calendar, we need to start applying to preschools for next fall, which is allegedly the year 2024, which doesn’t make any sense, because preschool is reserved for children who are two and a half, and she’s going to be a baby for at least four more years.

Over the past couple months, I’ve been reading two older cookbooks — one published in the late 80s, the other in the early 2010s — that were both very popular when they first came out. Reading older cookbooks is sort of a trip because it reminds me of how much cooking and conversations around food have totally changed — even ones published a decade ago. The authors of these books tell you that the foundational building blocks of cooking can be learned from Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Jacques Pepin, perhaps Mark Bittman or Ruth Reichl.