PicoBlog

Have you thanked the universe lately? I highly recommend it. For one, it’s a Nice Thing To Do for the ever-expanding assemblage of space and matter that supports your very existence. But also, gratitude is cool now. Just ask Chanel’s official brow artist, or the founder of cult-favorite beauty brand Summer Fridays, or celebrity-loved skin expert Dr. Murad.  Yes, like many spiritual tools before it — crystals, reiki, meditation — the beauty industry has glommed onto gratitude.

If you’re a subscriber here, then chances are you’re interested in getting jacked, both mentally and physically. So today, I wanted to take a look at the links between fitness, specifically bodybuilding, and philosophy, looking at what renowned philosophers of the past believed about the topic. I’m sure you’ve heard the quote, “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

By Ross Kagan MarksAdam Sandler reminds me of so many Jewish friends growing up in Highland Park, Illinois in the 1980s. He just looks and acts, well, Jewish. He’s got the curly “Jew-fro” hair, pronounced features, energetic wit, and goofy mannerisms. Adam Sandler’s comedy is like comfort food to me. Watching his movies transports me back to my childhood, a time when everyone in my community was seemingly Jewish and fun.

“Thanks, but I don’t like spicy food”.  My husband and I hear this almost every week at our Indian curry paste stall in the local farmers' market. When we started our business, I never quite knew how to answer this question. Because the Indian food I grew up eating and now serve to my New Zealand-born kids has never been spicy.  Does it have flavour? Yes. Do I use more than salt, pepper and garlic to season my food?

Greetings! I’m happy to report that Jasper and Max seem to both be doing well. It’s been 11 days since Max used the corner of our front room as a litter box. Jasper has mostly been very much JASPER - interactive, demanding, shadowing my wife, and not putting up with any cr%p from Max. We had a couple of days where he was off but we figured out right away that we’d accidentally fed him cat food containing salmon.

The three-day Martin Luther King weekend—which extended to four days when Houston, somewhat embarrassingly, allowed a mild, ten-degree dip below the freezing point to shut down the city—gave me the time to finally sit down and read Is Atheism Dead? Written in a scholarly-but-breezy, entertaining-but-challenging style by the polymath author and cultural commentator Eric Metaxas, Is Atheism Dead? is, like Lee Strobel’s “Case” books, a synthetic work that draws together powerful arguments from a number of different fields.

The idea that some trans people are acting on fetishes was promoted by Ray Blanchard and later by Michael Bailey in his book “the man who would be queen,” which divided trans women into so-called “Homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS), who were attracted to men, and “Autogynephiles,” (AGP) who were supposedly attracted to the concept of themselves as a woman, which Blanchard said was merely an “erotic target location error.” Blanchard created a scale to measure AGP, and the idea has been extraordinarily successful in right wing media where it has been advanced as justification for denying medical care to trans people.

When I first started writing in the known blogosphere (as opposed to personal sites virtually no one but my friends knew anything about) I used the pen name “Nickel Rover” over at barkingcarnival.com. Everyone had pen names there and so I did likewise, never really pausing to consider whether an aspiring writer should work anonymously. Nickel Rover sounded like a good name for someone who was “roving” around offering extra coverage on Texas football news.

If you’ve been interested in fashion for any length of time, then you’re almost certainly familiar with the concept of cost-per-wear. If not, here’s the gist: a pair of pants by The Row might cost $1420, but if you wear them twice a week over the course of five years, they’ll ring in at just under $3.00 per wear. Total bargain, right? The purpose of cost-per-wear is that it purports to help people understand the true value of their clothes and make better decisions when it comes to purchasing new items.