PicoBlog

Don’t forget to activate a paid subscription at the reduced rate or refer your friends for a chance to get a few months for free! Now on to today’s post! As I’ve been writing this series, I realized that I have never talked about Leslie Higgins. I think perhaps he has had a name drop in passing, but I have never focused on him directly. His most important on-screen relationship is with Rebecca and while I will likely take a look at that at some point, today I want to write about how AFC Richmond had a Ted in their midst for years without realizing it.

Are we all recovering okay from the finale? Was Ted having another panic attack at the end? Does this post mean that we’re getting another season of Ted Lasso? Or at least a season of some Ted Lasso-adjacent show? So many questions. While we wait for answers (and cheer on the writers who are currently striking to be compensated appropriately for giving us stories we can chew on well after the fact), let’s get back to the Relationship Guide with one of my favorite set of friends - Rebecca and Keeley.

“Be curious, not judgmental.” ~Walt Whitman In one of the most iconic scenes from season one of Ted Lasso, Ted is meeting Rebecca at the local pub, The Crown and Anchor, to schmooze with some of the owners of the Richmond club. When they arrive, instead of finding the Milk sisters, they are met by Rupert Mannion, Rebecca’s ex-husband, and the reason behind her desire to destroy the team. It turns out that he has purchased the sisters’ shares in his new wife’s name, allowing him another way to torture his ex-wife.

“Beverly Hills, 90210” may be the teen drama with the most spinoffs, but it’s not the only one. Several of the core six teen dramas sparked new television shows or the possibility of them. Before we’re treated to the new “Gossip Girl” later this year, get the low-down on all the teen drama spinoffs to date. “Beverly Hills, 90210” officially became a franchise of sorts with the introduction of “Melrose Place.

Until they vanished around 1150 CE, the Anasazi—known by anthropologists as Ancestral Pueblans—thrived in the arid American Southwest for over eight centuries. Much of what they left behind are grand monuments to humanity—such as Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon—which contains 800 rooms and required more than 30,000 tons of sandstone block to build. They also left pottery, tools, and bones—lots of bones, and these bones have led to some amazing findings.

Happy Sunday! It’s exciting to be here. Our scheduled break is over — and we’re back with the first Animation Obsessive issue of 2024. We got to relax in the past few weeks, but lots of prep and research happened, too. Books arrived from places like Japan and Czechia, and we ordered one from Croatia that we’ve been tracking down for more than a year. There was time to study Night on the Galactic Railroad and the early works of Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, and time to organize our research material to make it easier to use than ever.

Note: I had a Substack hiccup earlier today. Substack sent out an email for a post that is scheduled, but not yet live. If you got the email and can’t read the post, don’t worry! You’ll be able to in about two weeks! And onward… Last weekend, a MGTOW dude spent about six hours of his Saturday leaving long diatribes on every single blog post I’ve ever made outlining all the reasons he’s so happy without women and so glad he doesn’t have to interact with them.

Several years ago now, I wrote a book about the universality of science, Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, which I’m still really proud of, but which was a commercial bomb. I spent a good deal of time around its release talking about the nature of science, and how scientific thinking turns up in all manner of activities we don’t think of as scientific, but sort of burned out on the topic, so haven’t flogged it as relentlessly in the years since.

The first just means something like “these days.” Modernity is that which is contemporary to us. You can see it in phrases like “modern technology” and “modern medicine” and “the modern age.” Into this category go all the forces of “modernization”, i. e. globalization, electrification, urbanization, industrialization, and all the other metrics and trends that we use to measure how “developed” a nation is, how modern.  The second way we use it is to describe what came before postmodernity and after premodernity, roughly the cultural, societal, and intellectual movements in the West between the years of 1600-1950.