PicoBlog

Earlier this week, the Kings acquired Filip Petrušev and cash from the Clippers after they received him as part of the trade that sent James Harden and PJ Tucker to LA. In return, Sacramento gave up the draft rights to Luka Mitrovic, a 30-year-old who was the last pick in the 2015 draft. As reports indicate, the Kings intend to evaluate the 23-year-old Petrušev as they have one roster spot open.

This past week saw the consecration of the Ram Mandir - the “prime” temple dedicated to Lord Rama, at his birthplace in Ayodhya. Plenty of ink has been spilled on the political battles that preceded the building of the temple; the mosque that stood in its place for 500 years; the history of conquest that preceded that. The material struggles to rebuild the temple culminated in a spiritual crescendo that’s unlike anything I have ever witnessed.

Well, I can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed...in your lack of legwork. You didn't watch the whole thing. Those clips were taken out of context. When he called himself "the catch" he was saying that in jest. He wasn't serious. He spoke of her in the highest regard, he clearly loves her, he just doesn't worship her, maybe she doesn't want that from her husband. Simone has also said that he didn't know who she was when they met.

Over the last few days a series of deeply unsettling TikToks have crossed my various feeds and group chats. Perhaps you have already seen these dispatches; if you haven’t, I suggest you make sure you’re seated and have a loved one nearby before you press play on the following video: This is one of a series of videos made by the account H00pify--the TikTok alias of Henry De Tolla, a college student and lacrosse player at UMass Lowell--about “Baby Gronk,” “Livvy,” and “the Drip King.

Note: The article below is an edited version of a series of articles I first posted in 2014. I’m sharing it again now because of the outcome of the World Cup this weekend, which involved an athlete (guess who!) discussed in the post. Who is the world’s best athlete? I admit it, this is a kind of a dumb question, because there’s obviously no correct answer. Most arguments on this topic involve very low levels of intellectual rigor, combined with very high levels of just making stuff up.

Forty-seven years ago today, on December 13, 1974, a 45-year-old bookkeeper named Betty Van Patter was nursing a drink and crying softly after work at a bar on University Avenue called the Berkeley Square. She had been fired from her job at the Black Panther Party by Elaine Brown, who headed up the party while co-founder Huey Newton was in exile in Cuba. Van Patter, an idealistic white supporter of the party, had witnessed irregularities and misuse of cash by party members and had warned Brown that they were illegal and if not stopped could bring unwanted attention from law enforcement authorities.

“Sir,” wrote James Neelly to Thomas Jefferson on Oct. 18, 1809 from Nashville: “It is with extreme pain that I have to inform you of the death of His Excellency Meriwether Lewis, Governor of Upper Louisiana, who died on the Morning of the 11th Instant, and I am Sorry to Say by Suicide.” Jefferson was disturbed to hear of Lewis’s death, but he wasn’t surprised. Lewis was a native of Jefferson’s own Albemarle County in Virginia, and after military field service he had been appointed Jefferson’s private secretary.

Welcome to Part 3 of our series on who the heck owns the Giants. This time, I glanced at the Big Board of owners: And, among all the unfamiliar names I never hear about, I picked Jed Walentas for today’s installment, mostly because I’m trying to avoid getting pigeonholed in that fourth column. Jed Walentas was born August 8, 1974, the day that Richard Nixon resigned. His father, David Walentas, was a New York real estate developer who had some modest success, ran into bureaucratic roadblocks in the ‘80s, and finally hit it big redeveloping the DUMBO area — it stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — in Brooklyn in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.

I initially wrote up the summary here, when I had closer to 40k responses. Since then the survey went viral, mostly on tiktok, and I now have over 400k responses and still growing. Here’s the updated demographics! I asked people “how did you find this survey”; I didn’t include tiktok as an option, so most of these went into ‘other.’ (I confirmed this by watching the ‘other’ category specifically balloon as tiktoks featuring my survey were gaining tons of views.