PicoBlog

Iran and the Houthis have been tapping into the Automated Tracking System (AIS) to locate and attack ships in the Red Sea and, since Saturday, December 23rd, ships in the Indian Ocean.  Where AIS lacks information on military ships, Iranian radars do the job of finding them.  The entire operation is sophisticated and is managed in real time, requiring significant assets to identify targets.  There is no doubt that Iran and the Houthis are working together.

In this second installment of my conversation with Avalon Kalin, we discuss the formation of Christopher Robin and the influence Heroin and other San Diego bands of the time had on the band. Be sure to check out the sounds Avalon is making presently over at his Bandcamp page. Tony Rettman: How did you end up playing music in bands?  Avalon Kalin: I was in the rhythm section of the Jazz Band in high school.

In the mid-1990s, Bill Gates wrote a major bestselling book called The Road Ahead. If it mentioned the internet, I must have missed it. Around the same time, Jeff Bezos visited The Washington Post to tell the personal tech columnist about his plan to sell books online. The columnist later acknowledged that he had shown Bezos to the elevator. In that decade, Mark Zuckerberg was still in grade school. At Harvard, “The Facebook” was how incoming students glimpsed pictures of other freshmen, an early form of today’s practice of swiping photos on dating sites.

On May 3 The Securities and Exchange Commission dramatically announced it was cutting public accounting firm BF Borgers off at home plate. SEC Charges Audit Firm BF Borgers and Its Owner with Massive Fraud Affecting More Than 1,500 SEC Filings No namby-pamby word mincing for this press release. The headline uses the "f" word and amplifies it with the descriptor "massive" while telling us exactly how many SEC filings were now in jeopardy.

How’s it going? It seems like everyone is getting ‘pinged’ at the moment and having to isolate. If that’s affected you - and particularly if it has affected a show you were connected to - then I really feel for you, and hope you’re coping okay. Welcome to the fourteenth issue of The Crush Bar, my fortnightly newsletter about theatre and the people that make it. If you haven’t subscribed yet, then now is your chance!

I was SO happy to see how well received these blinchiki were on IG + Tiktok. Because if they weren’t, that would’ve been a direct attack on my babushka and then we’d be fightin. But really, it meant to much for me to share a little bit of my childhood and ~culture~ with you. So slay blinchiki. If you missed the video, blinchiki are like eastern european crepes (but I think they’re better)

Friends, enemies, and hedgies, Hi! I’m listening to Harry Styles’ album from 2022, “Harry’s House,” while I sit on the second floor loft of my neighborhood coffee shop and peer down on everyone ordering their bevvies like a witch atop her mountain. Cute! Scary! The vibes today are TBD because I didn’t get a lot of sleep and I’m famously a sleep hog (ideal amount is 10 hours—so sue me!)

This week, as I worked on chapters for my upcoming book — SORT OF FUNNY FIELD GUIDES (2025) — I got to return to an earlier interview I did with Corrie Moreau, a super cool scientist who studies ants at Cornell University. And as always, when it came time to write the chapter, I couldn’t possibly include every cool thing Moreau said. But this is actually good news, because it means I get to bring those cool things to you now!

I co-wrote with Tania Sanchez two perfume guides published in 2008 and 2018. After writing the second guide, we both felt that the general tone and quality of perfumery had changed. The big brands, with some exceptions, were steadily producing too many unremarkable fragrances. The niche brands, on which rested so much early hope for a renewal of perfumery, turned out to be just as conformist as the big ones. The artisans, aside from some natural-born geniuses, suffered from a lack of access to raw materials and proper tuition.