PicoBlog

Cookie Mania is off to a strong start this year, and I’m happy to add to the fun with a few examples of my take on holiday cookies (a new recipe is coming on Friday!). The more I develop recipes for cookies, the more I think about the qualities that I look for in a good cookie and why we all love them so much. They are the perfect little package; beautiful, tempting, and delicious all in one (or a few) bite(s).

I recently asked ChatGPT to tell me about some interesting events in history that I may not know about. It gave me a list of things I’d mostly heard of, and a few I hadn’t. But in the middle of the list, it had the most peculiar thing: The Great Emu War of 1932. Surely, I thought, this must be a case of ChatGPT hallucinating. It’s known to make things up that sound plausible.

Hey hungry world-savers, and welcome back to Cool Beans. This week, in our ongoing quest to help you trim your daily demand for dairy products, I’m digging into the world of plant-based butter. My childhood fridge was full of mysterious margarines, from family-sized tubs to spray bottles of fluorescent yellow mist. Thankfully, nondairy butters have come a long way. While the vegetable and seed oil varieties are still around, you can also get versions made from things like cultured nuts, coconut cream, and even beans.

Sometimes, I run across a note or phrase or reference to something that just makes me sit up and go, “What’s that now?” Case in point - a mention by a horse-loving friend on social media of the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. So, I had to look it up. I hope you’re not having lunch, as here’s an amalgamation of what I found based on some articles and other sources, primarily (supposedly) a 1894 newspaper article from the Time of London that predicted in 50 years, “every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.

In 1503 a man in Nuremburg, Germany, made a watercolor of a patch of dirt and the ordinary plants growing there. This is The Great Piece of Turf and he was Albrecht Dürer, and the plants are still legible: great plantain, and dandelion, and burnet, and germander speedwell, and yarrow, and smooth meadow-grass, among others. Those plants can be found right there in the front yard or on the strip of median on a busy road.

Welcome to It’s A Shanda, one Northeastern Jew’s quest to find a decent bagel in Seattle (and beyond). If you’re interested in taking this journey with me, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a review. If you want to ensure I review any specific bagels (or want to let me know why I’m wrong), you can email me at seanmatthewkeeley@gmail.com. “What's the deal with pumpernickel bagels? They're just about my favorite, but it seems like they're fairly uncommon here.

Merry Christmas! What better way to celebrate the season than looking back on some old movies? And if we’re talking classic cinema, how about another Oscar winner? “The Great Ziegfeld” is the penultimate essay in my ongoing quest to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture. I’ll say right from the start this was not one of my favorites encountered during the project. The early Golden Age musicals tended to rely on the songs all on their own, along with not a little spectacle, to entertain audiences.

The most memorable moments in reality television's long and storied history have all started with a seemingly innocuous item. Keeping up with the Kardashians had a Bentley. Real Housewives of New Jersey had a memoir. High Society had an unnamed, historical fiction book tucked away in the stacks of a branch of the New York Public Library—and one mother’s relentless quest for the truth. I’m speaking, of course, about the short-lived, eight-episode CW reality show High Society, the network’s attempt to mimic the runaway success of its melodramatic tentpole series: Gossip Girl.

Everyone knows that fuck is the most versatile and useful word in the English language, which is why it’s been repressed all these years. It can be used as just about any part of speech, from a noun to a verb to a modifier, in just about every tense or construction. And it’s adaptable, so we’re constantly getting new innovations like fuckery or Fucko or fuckling, which I just made up and will part of the vocabulary in .