PicoBlog

While life on the plains has been fraught with twisters, Cinco de Mayo and the return of Loud City, the dining news has marched forth. Before we get into the news, a huge thanks to everyone who showed up to the Okie-style Cinco de Mayo party chef Kurt Fleischfresser hosted at The Tasting Room on Sunday. We shimmied in between the foul weather to have a tasty little fiesta on the patio.

Hi Dry Downers!Welcome to a new edition of The Six, in which we each pick three perfumes around a theme. This week, we are diving into the wild world of aldehydes. What in the world is an aldehyde? Glad you asked. Fragrantica defines the aldehyde family as “a vast group of components of organic origin reproduced in the lab,” which is basically another way of saying they are kind of magical chemistry reactions that reproduce elements like oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, but for use in scent.

[This profile contains discussion of eating disorders, abuse, and sexual assault.] When I arranged the order of these profiles, I knew that Blair Waldorf’s would go last. She wouldn’t have it any other way. Not only is Blair the show’s most beloved character (type her name into YouTube and take in all the video compilations of her “best” or “most iconic” moments) but she’s also its most fashion conscious. The daughter of a designer, Blair speaks in fashion references and metaphors.

There was something making its way across the Internet yesterday that caught my eye. I don’t know who originally wrote it, but it’s great and I want to pass it along. The eagle does not fight the snake on the ground. It picks it up into the sky and changes the battle ground, then it releases the snake into the sky. The snake has no stamina, no power and no balance in the air.

Here is a tree that goes by many names. Portulacaria afra is a shrubby succulent native to South Africa, where it’s called elephant bush, porkbush, and spekboom in Afrikaans. The fast growing foliage is an important source of food for local elephants, and as the animals graze, they inadvertently propagate the plant by spreading cuttings that root into the soil. Isn’t that nice? The leaves are edible to us humans, too; they’re faintly sour and crunchy, like a dialed-down granny smith apple.

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It is ironic that the discipline of aesthetics, one of whose topics is beauty, has been treated as an ugly stepchild by analytic philosophy. Pressed to defend this neglect, one might complain that aesthetics in the analytic mode revolves around a limited menu of ideas, recirculating since the 18th century; and that writing about art is best left to critics, who can be no less theoretical than philosophers but are better equipped to interpret actual works of art; they also tend to write more elegant prose.

The news all sucks, but barring some new disaster, we’ll be heading out for Christmas with my parents and sister tomorrow, so let’s talk about something happier, like escapist genre fiction. Specifically, the last novel of The Expanse dropped recently, and I finished it over the weekend; the TV show is also in its final lap, with a shortened sixth season running on Amazon Prime right now, but I’m way behind on my watching, so will confine myself to talking about the books here.

After Neo is shot and seemingly killed by Agent Smith, Trinity confesses her love for him and claims that he cannot be dead. In a fairytale-esque way, Neo miraculously revives and now has God-like powers, with Morpheus noting that he is “The One.” Neo proceeds to obliterate Smith – an act thought to be impossible – before returning to the real world. Some time later, he makes a call to the Agents, vowing to show the people what the Agents don’t want them to see.