PicoBlog

For some cuisines, Salt Lake is becoming a downright decent spot to get respectable food. The East Asian community, long represented in small numbers in Utah, is growing, and the availability of very good, very authentic food is really pretty remarkable in recent years. This week it’s dim sum. A cultural event of its own in Southern China, going out for dim sum is more commonly called yum cha, a phrase that literally means “drink tea.

Perhaps the most prolific online video mapper of the war in Ukraine is a fellow named Dima in Belarus, whose Military Summary Channel on YouTube and Rumble posts 2 updates a day (morning and evening), jam packed with geo-located videos and news from the front line. The main takeaway from Dima’s coverage is just how enormous in scale this war has become. For example, Dima reports Ukraine’s daily casualties as claimed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, which have consistently remained for the last few months at many hundreds of soldiers per day, often over a thousand, and dozens of NATO provided equipment, again, daily.

This week, auto nepo baby, Dale Earnhardt Jr., picked a fight with the children’s cartoon Bluey. And look, as someone who has a seven-year-long beef with Paw Patrol, I understand the inclination to get irritated at kid’s shows. After all, the pants situation on most of those characters is chaotic at best. And why is it so often that a kid of indeterminate age with a pack of wild animals has to run entire cities?

I was busy assembling a very sad, very boring salad for lunch when I heard my phone ring in the living room. The onslaught of telemarketer calls have been so bad lately that I assumed it likely to be one and promptly ignored it. After consuming my lame salad, I answered some emails, walked the dog and folded a load of laundry. I wrote for awhile, ate some chips to cancel out my healthy lunch and booked an appointment I’d been putting off.

[This is a cross post from JFK Facts, where I am an occasional contributor. My post is the second in a new series there that considers songs influenced by the assassination of JFK. Check it out, and please consider subscribing. Long before I learned to research and check facts, I was just a kid in New York City who loved to dance. My thanks to the team at JFK Facts for letting me write about the music and my home town.

“Dior Glow Lip Oil has been viral since its 2020 inception,” Biz Sherbert reports in System Beauty. “It has a distinctive look, producing a shine so intense and smooth that it’s almost like a CGI-rendered version of a glossed lip.” The whole piece — “It’s nice to feel the shine” — is fantastic, and I’m not only saying that because I was interviewed for it. You can read the full thing in the latest print issue of System Beauty (order here).

Hello, If you’ve been following any of the great content being put out by the community for Disability Pride Month, you might have seen a smattering of posts about how difficult it can be to feel disability pride when so much of disabled life is so hard. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand this sentiment - I really do; when you’ve spent four days in bed wishing you could get up and do something, feeling proud isn’t exactly the first thing on your mind.

Everyone knows the basic trajectory of “Little Steven” Van Zandt’s life story. Born in Massachusetts in 1950, he moved at age 7 to the state where he would spend his entire life closely associated, New Jersey. Italian-American, he took the last name of a stepfather, hence the incongruous Dutch surname.  He formed his first band at age 14 and soon became a key figure in the rock scene in New Jersey, first with Southside Johnny and eventually as a guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, a position he still occupies all these years later.

This is When **it Gets Real, part two. “When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.” —Hunter S. Thompson Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its latest assessment report, concluding that the largest peer-reviewed scientific process in history shows that humanity is in the midst of the greatest planetary crisis we have faced since we came down from the trees. If you’re wondering what this is going to do to your life, here’s one place to start—with what it’s going to do to your job.