PicoBlog

“You need to sell this,” said my Thai friend after taking one bite of my new crispy pork belly. I happened to be testing the recipe during his visit, and he was so enamoured by it that he started fantasizing about how a street cart selling this pork and some sticky rice would be amazing as a Thai street breakfast. Introducing: Moo Saam Chun Tod Nampla, fish sauce fried pork belly.

We’ve been told for years that the future is female, that everyone benefits from female leadership and everything improves when women take charge. Any man on a college campus who has ever objected to the plethora of special university programs and women-only scholarships and pro-woman propaganda was told he had a problem with gender equality. But now it turns out that some women themselves are not entirely happy with the deal feminists engineered for them, which sees them outnumbering men at close to 3-2 at most English-speaking universities, and thousands of words have already been devoted to the idea that college women deserve a more satisfactory dating experience.

Dear Fam, Growing up, I lived and breathed Japanese culture, and when I was 12 years old, I told Ah Gong (my maternal grandpa) how much I loved anime, sushi, and ramen, and he scolded me rather furiously. Ah Gong lived through the Second Sino-Japanese War; the Japanese captured and tortured him. He barely survived their bombing raids of China. He didn’t understand why his favorite granddaughter was such a Japaneseophile.

My friends are degenerate pranksters, which means they spend a lot of time decanting drinkable alcohol into horrifying containers. Limoncello in a bottle of PineSol, crème de menthe in a handle of Scope. During one pandemic bike ride, a couple of ‘em thickened some vodka with agar and glorped it into an empty pump bottle of hand sanitizer. They offered a shot to every stranger we passed. The joke, in every case, is ultimately on them—they’re the ones who have to drink the Thick Vodka, the Cream of Mint.

If you look up the entry for octopus on Wikipedia, as I sometimes do on a particularly slow afternoon, you’ll find that it tells you that octopuses are “among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates.” They also have “a complex nervous system” and “excellent sight.” What Wikipedia will not tell you, but that I am here to stress, is that they are very tasty. They’re very tasty in a burger, at least, and particularly when eaten at Barba, a seafood restaurant that sits on a side street off Dubrovnik’s main drag Stradun.

When the comedian Katt Williams arrives to something called Club Shay Shay — the Shannon Sharpe-and-I guess-Draft Kings podcast — he’s there to correct the record. A revolving door of sentient grilling sandals have guested on the show previously (the black comedians Rickey Smiley, Cedric The Entertainer… ncG1vNJzZmigpaPBpr7HmqmroaNjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oopqspGLEqrjLopimq12YubaujKyfmrFdqLWixQ%3D%3D

If you paid attention to American Catholic trends in recent decades then you probably noticed some depressing numbers. Let’s start with material from a scary 2015 Pew Research Center report (it’s safe to say the statistics have not improved): Nearly one-third of American adults (31.7%) say they were raised Catholic. Among that group, fully 41% no longer identify with Catholicism. This means that 12.9% of American adults are former Catholics, while just 2% of U.

Crotona Park East, if you couldn't figure it out from the name, lies due east of Crotona Park in the Bronx. It's located between the neighborhoods of West Farms to its north, Morrissania to its east, and Longwood to its south. Crotona Park East ends at the Bronx River at the recently completed Starlight Park. Part of the Bronx River Greenway, a continuous series of parks and trails along the river, Starlight Park is built on land that was once part of William Astor's estate.

Where I live in the Bay Area (specifically, Oakland), the shift in seasons is more subtle than in the rest of the country. Our summers are often colder than our springs and falls; our winters splattered with afternoons suitable for t-shirts and shorts. If the days weren’t growing shorter and the nights getting longer, if the sun wasn’t rising at a peak 60 degree angle instead of 90, it might be hard to notice the passage of time.