PicoBlog

Hi friends, This month marks the one-year anniversary for this newsletter! It’s been a truly sustaining practice to write to you each month, and I’m so thankful for all the positive responses I’ve received and the many pieces of published writing I’ve seen come out of the exercises. I’ve enjoyed writing these letters even more than I thought I would, and I’m excited to see what I can make for you in year two.

There is a boneyard in Rome, a place the locals call the “English cemetery,” where the ashes of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley are buried. His actual cremation had taken place almost two hundred years before, on the lonely beaches of Liguria not far from where his boat, the Ariel, capsized during a violent storm. Waves as tall as buildings had pounded down on the Ariel, snapped its masts, and drowned the three men onboard: Shelley himself, not yet thirty years old, his friend Edward Williams, whose wife Shelley coveted, and an eighteen-year-old cabin boy named Charles Vivian.

After the Winter Meetings were almost two thirds of the way through and the biggest thing to happen for the Pittsburgh Pirates was slotting in ninth in the 2024 Rule 4 Draft, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported late Tuesday night that the team acquired left-handed starting pitcher Marco Gonzales (and cash considerations) from the Atlanta Braves for a player to be named later or cash, the team’s first big move of the offseason and the first of what is likely several pitching dominoes to fall.

Beyond the 90’s Brent Mullenix reported this week and shared his thoughts on the fact that the Eleven Park proposal for Indy Eleven was dead in the water after a city-county council vote approved a new stadium site for a potential MLS franchise in Indianapolis on June 3. You can read that below. My Thoughts on the Indy Eleven Stadium Situation Background: I currently live in Indianapolis, Indiana and have lived in the Hoosier state since I was eight years old.

“Duane had so much technique, but it never got in the way of his inspiration. He could walk into anyone’s session, any kind of music, and make it better. And he didn’t have to do it by blowing a hot solo. Any time you added him to a situation, it got better. Duane was an innovator and he would have been doing amazing things if he were still with us. He would not be sitting still.

Open-Meteo is excited to announce the arrival of GraphCast, a groundbreaking machine learning weather model from Google DeepMind. You can explore its forecast data using the Open-Meteo weather API and compare forecasts from different open-data weather models. This development marks a significant leap forward, with GraphCast being the second AI weather model available on Open-Meteo, complementing the existing AIFS model from ECMWF. Artificial Intelligence Weather Model AIFSGraphCast is a weather forecasting model developed by Google DeepMind.

In April, a 13-year-old boy from Colombus, Ohio accidentally overdosed on over-the-counter Benadryl tablets. Shortly after ingesting the little pink pills most commonly used to treat allergen-induced runny noses and rashes, the teenager’s body began to seize in front of a handful of his horrified friends. After spending six harrowing days on a hospital ventilator, the boy died. According to reports, the severe reaction experienced by the boy – his name was Jacob Stevens – was not from some freak allergic reaction that couldn’t be avoided.

In previous stories, I have shown that the international father’s rights law firm, Cordell & Cordell, knows no limits to unethical behavior in support of their clients. In December 2022, I interviewed Dr. Elizabeth Hersey, who was chased by an ex-boyfriend not even on the birth certificate first in England and then in NY. Her ex-boyfriend, Dr. Andre DuPlessis, was represented throughout by Cordell & Cordell. Dr. Hersey was required to show up to court the next day, and she was not allowed to remove her children from the country.

I didn’t know about it when I dusted off my 1980 Dr. Mudd piece for republication on Substack, but on Friday (March 15, 2024) Apple TV will start running its series “Manhunt.” It’s described as a ‘conspiracy thriller’ about the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth after he killed Lincoln. The Wall Street Journal reviewed it. I’ll be watching it, I hope, to see how they handled Dr. Mudd and his role in helping Booth.