PicoBlog

It’s been a hell of a week for this country. I hope you all are hanging in there. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what you can do to keep your kids safe from gun violence, but the elephant in the room that I didn’t address was lockdown drills. Lockdown drills are something I’ve long wanted to investigate. My assumption has been that they are useless and bad — that they unnecessarily traumatize children and don’t actually teach students anything useful.

Welcome to Gibson Johns’ pop culture newsletter — subscribe to get recommendations of what to watch, read and listen to in your inbox every week!There’s been a lot of smoke over the past week or so around Scooter Braun, the famed manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande who became public enemy No. 1 in the Swiftverse when he bought the record label Big Machine and, thus, the masters to Taylor’s first six albums.

The SCREAM Test has been around for a long, long time. It is a critical tool for any computer programmer or system administrator. Don’t know what a particular server does? Turn it off. Don’t know what some code does? Comment it out. Then sit back and wait for the screams. Not exactly sure where I first heard of “The SCREAM Test”, but I believe it was some time in the late 1990s while working at Hewlett-Packard.

While researching prehistoric plants of Western Pennsylvania, I was chatting with paleo-botanist Peter Wilf and I asked him whether the local tropical forests that existed 250 million years ago would look similar to any current environment on earth. His answer was a definitive no. Those forests would look totally foreign to us, he explained. As an examp… ncG1vNJzZmiqn6TBo7vUp5tnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wwMeeZKydkaewqXnFqKlmmV2ptq%2FFjKmpnqCZqMGwvsic

It was hot and humid when we gathered outside on Sunday night, in the courtyard of the community center about 100 yards from our house, for Kol Nidre. Despite the heat, the singing was nice and the mood was lovely—Yom Kippur was off to a good start. And though no one mentioned it, we all felt it—hovering above everything transpiring there was the knowledge that this was the fiftieth anniversary of the war.

[I have two reasons for republishing this particular essay, which first appeared in October 2009. The first is that I have been a little under the weather for the past several days, having contracted something somewhere from something or someone somehow, and so my next regular article may be a day or so late. The second is that I am considering a piece on fairy-tales to appear here at some point in the next few weeks, and so a reflection on fairy-lore might not be out of place.

People think rendang is a beef dish, but it’s a coconut dish. You rendang it with coconut milk. And you add the desiccated coconut. The same pack of desiccated coconut I used in Diem’s mango magic cookies. I was staring at it yesterday night, and somehow during this long weekend, I ended up making beef rendang. The recipe calls for 250ml of coconut milk. I was staring at the remaining 150ml in the can, and somehow during this long weekend, I ended up making nasi lemak with beef rendang.

On December 17th 1903, the Wright brothers made the first successful motor-powered flight in history. They beat out people all over the country who were experts in engineering, aeronautics and even funded with grants from the government. So how did they do it? It all starts with their knowledge of bicycles. The standard bicycle was invented in the late 1800s and kicked off a bike craze across the country. It was an enormous upgrade from the “penny-farthing” bike, which routinely launched riders head-first over the handlebars.

It’s Old Fashioned Week, so let’s talk about Old Fashioneds.  Like Negroni Week, Old Fashioned Week is a brand-sponsored event — in this case by the excellent, reliable Heaven Hill bourbon Elijah Craig — but it’s also just an excuse to make and drink Old Fashioneds. The Old Fashioned looms large in this newsletter’s mindspace: The very first edition was about how everything can be an Old Fashioned, and the Old Fashioned is almost certainly the cocktail I have made most often over the course of the last decade.