PicoBlog

Hello from Starship Casual Engineer Corps! You may have seen on Susie’s Instagram that Jeff is recovering from hip surgery this week. Surgery went well! While Jeff rests, beloved Wilco Loft Studio Manager, musician, and gear talk extraordinaire Mark Greenberg is here to tell us about a very orange keyboard in the Loft’s collection. Welcome back to Gear Talkin’! This week’s episode focuses on an instrument featured in the brand-new Wilco video for “Meant to Be” from the band’s recent Cousin LP.

This egg yolk-rich gelato spiked with fortified wine and rum and embellished with booze-soaked raisins was popular in gelaterias across Italy in the 1980s. It’s sort of an Italian version of rum raisin, but much more luxurious and, IMHO, better. The gelato is named for its star ingredients: the muscatel grapes grown on the hillsides near Málaga, Spain, t… ncG1vNJzZmiapaS7orDOppynoZOWe7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZqCdnJbBsHnApaOaZZ2WuaKzwA%3D%3D

I think there are three facotrs which make a name very dateable. Firstly, any name which was top 20 popular in the 90s, but did not remain in the top 20s through the 00s and into the 10s is now going to become an old person name. This is because those names are more obviously dateable as they can be tied to a period in time. So for example, even though they're both in the NZ top 10 for 1998, Caitlin is much more dateable than Olivia (which has persisted in the charts to this day).

People often ask me what my favorite hot dog stand is, or what the best hot dog is in the United States. Impossible to say. There are too many deserving candidates. And, too, there are so many different regional styles of hot dogs that such a proposition would be akin to comparing apples and oranges. But, if the proverbial gun was held to my head, I might say Gene & Jude’s in Chicago.

Everyone’s new favorite financial term is generational wealth. People use the buzz phrase to describe a financial windfall significant enough to improve not just your life but the lives of your heirs, their heirs, and maybe your entire lineage to come. In other words, people want to be so rich that their kids get rich, too.  However, statistics indicate that generational wealth (by that definition) will not exist for most Americans.

Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as images, text, audio, or video, based on existing data. It has many applications in various areas, such as entertainment, education, health, and art. However, one of the most prominent and controversial fields where generative AI is making an impact is the movie industry. In this article, we will explore how generative AI is transforming the way movies are made, distributed, and consumed, and what are the implications for the filmmakers, actors, and audiences.

It was born from a desire I, and I think many others, have to feed ourselves in a kinder, gentler way that prioritizes listening to yourself, takes cues from what’s around us (the seasons, our farmers), and deprioritizes notions of how to perform “health” the way modern, toxic diet and wellness culture says we should. There are two versions of Gentle Foods: Free subscribers get: One to two brand-new recipes per month inspired by what I’m cooking right now

Irishness is an industry. Visit any major city on this island and you will see it yourself. In Dublin there is a famous chain of souvenir shops called 'Carroll’s Irish Gifts'. It’s impossible to walk 200 meters in the city without spotting one, there are ten of them in the city centre alone. These establishments are decorated with all the usual tat, “Kiss Me I’m Irish”, Guinness Fridge Magnets, Ireland Rugby Shirts, all the hits.

New years — whenever you celebrate them and the fresh-ish slates that accompany them — are the perfect time for manifestos. Hillarie Maddox of Black Girl Country Living reminded me of that last week, when I asked for online reading recs and she sent me this piece, and which has been rattling around in my head ever since. Leslie Kern’s Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies has also been rattling around there — a book I think of as a sort of dismantling manifesto: it argues, with great clarity and precision, not just against gentrification, but against seven over-simplified, often hackneyed ways it’s been understood, normalized, and inevitablized.