PicoBlog

In the 1950s, a bunch of rowdy kids met up in Bauru, a town in Brazil, to start a football team. They were used to playing on dirt and rocks, using balls made of socks or newspapers tied with string. Now they named the team Sete de Setembro, a tribute to the day Brazil won independence from Portugal in 1822, and listed what they had to buy: shirts, shorts, socks, boots and a proper ball.

A newsletter about the history and present of American winemaking, and the impact wine has on our world and its future, featuring interviews with winemakers, farmers, importers, shop owners, and everyone in between. By Margot Mazur · Over 1,000 subscribersNo thanksncG1vNJzZmismJqzqsbZZ6qumqOprqS3jZympmc%3D

Happy Thursday, happy pie season! Today I really wanted to give you a primer, a deep dive, a step by step guide on making flaky pastry. The type of pastry you might use to make a classic fruit pie, something so flaky it’s effectively a sibling to puff pastry (but way easier to make). This is a recipe I’ve been using for many years and have tinkered with many many times, it makes perfect pies and has great flavour and most importantly incredible texture.

It's quite unfortunate (and surprising) to still see users employing the honeypot method for distinguishing between spam and legitimate human form submissions. For those unfamiliar, the honeypot method is a technique used to identify spam form submissions. It involves the addition of a hidden field, often referred to as a honeypot field, to the form. The value of this hidden field is deliberately set to empty, and since this field is invisible to humans filling out the form, it will be submitted with an empty value in the genuine form posts.

Ever since the start of the consumer drone boom in the early 2010s, serious people have been seriously worried about the prospect of drones crashing into the bodies of the innocent. The FAA’s drone regulations include wording that directly addresses the danger of drones coming down on people’s heads, including specific rules against the waiver-less flight of drones over people and motorways.   If we take all this modern-day public concern over drone crashes into account, then it’s shocking to read about a 1979 incident where a flying remote-controlled lawnmower killed a man and seriously wounded another.

“DeSantis calls it the Freedom State,” a friend from Florida recently moaned to me, “but that’s Orwellian. He’s taking freedoms away. It is frightening.” I remembered a quote from Orwell’s 1984, the slogan of the authoritarian political party of the fictional state of Oceania: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. The slogan is an example of “doublethink,” a purposefully contradictory public speech intended to cloud critical thinking and give the government control over people’s minds.

Robespierre, a major architect of The Terror, shown guillotining France, having killed everyone else. My obsession In my short story collection Old Babes in the Wood, there’s a story called “Airborne” about three old female academics, one of whom — Leonie – is a scholar of the French Revolution. She refers to it familiarly as “the French Revvie,” and has written a book about it, concerning the vengeful period right after the fall of Robespierre known as the Thermidorian Reaction.

We had our first freeze here this week. Before the pandemic, I loved my yard, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it, as I was busy traveling and going, going, going. Then everything screeched to a halt and I started spending a lot of time outside. Now I see all the little changes, every day, so it was startling to walk out the other morning and find so much, well, dead.

This is a bit of an unconventional topic for this blog, and if it’s not your cup of tea, I’ll certainly understand. If you have no interest in reading a niche academic meta-review takedown of a China historian, please just carry on with your day as usual. I’ll get back to the travel content soon enough. If you are unfamiliar with Frank Dikötter, he’s a well-known and high-selling Dutch historian based in Hong Kong with a broadly revisionist approach to modern Chinese history.