PicoBlog

Hello! It has been a busy…month and a half? But I am back, and you can expect to see more arts and cultural news roundups and breakdowns going forward. Let’s say at least once a week. For now. In May, I had a milestone birthday and went on a solo trip to Vienna, where I mostly went to museums and live performances and developed a burgeoning fascination with the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Good morning. Let’s basketball. The Procuress; Dirck van Baburen; 1622 I watched the NBA All-Star Game offline and delayed. (I stopped to watch one commercial. See you in March, Kong and Godzilla.) As I watched the glory that is a lot of absurd threes and comic relief from Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic, I wondered what the discourse would be. Just kidding. As soon as the East hit 100 points in the first half I knew what the discourse would be: too many points.

In the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire ‘fell’. Exactly what that means is a matter of some contention; but while plenty of eminent historians have argued that power simply transferred from a central emperor to locally administered kingdoms, or from civil authorities to the Church, no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire never really fell at all, and that everywhere from Carlisle to Cairo is still secretly being run by an emperor hidden somewhere under Rome.

Quick note: when I first sent this, I embarrassingly had Matt’s name as “Matt Fraud” in the headline. This was truly a typo and not some catty snark-remark. I am legit so embarrassed—mea culpa. Many people have sent me the recent interview Matt Fradd did with anti-feminism author Carrie Gress. I don’t usually watch a ton of Catholic YouTube (sourdough YouTube, on the other hand…) but I did find the prospect of the conversation intriguing enough to watch it and see if I had thoughts.

Hi everyone, I love the word dignity, I love pronouncing it and it makes me emotional because it makes me think about what it means to be human. Work and dignity are words that are supposed to be related somehow. But how? Can you have dignity without sufficient money? Is dignity a product of work or is it something you must have in work?  Dignity is defined (by the Oxford dictionary) as “the state or quality of being worthy of honour or respect”, which involves both the respect of others and self-respect.

A quick announcement for Charlotte-area Shedheads: Nic Brown, the guest on my latest SOUTHBOUND podcast, is doing a book signing for his memoir BANG BANG CRASH at Park Road Books this Wednesday at 7 p.m. Nic’s as good a writer as he is a drummer … and he is a very good drummer. Come listen to Nic and buy his book. I’ll be in the audience somewhere—stop by and say hi.

I resisted for so long. I was pelted for years with questions about the air fryer. I wasn’t going to give in. I gave in with the Instant Pot, wrote a ton of Instant Pot recipes, then people got mad. Mad that they didn’t have an Instant Pot, mad that they DID have an Instant Pot but hated it. Mad that I had the audacity to write recipes for some new fangled contraption.

Every week here on this newsletter I keep meaning to get organized and make an index post. I have now published so many yummy recipes over the past almost two years, that I think that some gems are getting lost in the passage of time. So obviously, this isn’t the organization/index post that I intended it to be. Instead, I thought it would be fun to make and eat some deviled eggs using The Dill Seasoning from Eat Happy Kitchen.

Hello! Welcome back! Skip all the rambling and scroll right to the bottom of this post for a printer-friendly PDF of the recipe only. The sun was shining for most of the week here in LA, which had me thinking of one thing: pasta salad. Now I love pasta salad and eat it all year round, but there’s something so nostalgic about having it when the sun is shining. Brings to mind family gatherings as a kid, plates heaped full of macaroni salad and hot dogs and burgers, eaten between (ill-advised) belly flops into the pool.