PicoBlog

[Gmail is going to clip this email, so just click on the title and read the whole thing in a web browser. Or unclip it when you reach the bottom. Up to you!] One of the most boring, and oft-repeated, narratives of the last couple of years is that of the "pandemic breakout." You're probably familiar with it by now. Someone was stuck in lockdown in the spring of 2020, and they just started posting, and suddenly they were very famous.

There's one in every family - two in mine, actually... Zazu the Hornbill in The Lion King (1994) Like what you see? Learn more… It seems to be true that every family has that one person who just isn't with the program. In the Buddha's family, the traditional stories assign this role to Devadatta, his cousin through a paternal aunt. But more than a cousin, really, because Siddhartha Gautama--the man we've come to call "

A developer may face a lawsuit for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act while constructing a project still underway in southeast Durham, according to documents obtained by Bull City Public Investigators. In a “60-Day Notice of Intent to Sue” dated May 10, local environmental nonprofit Sound Rivers claimed that South Carolina-based developer Mungo Homes has committed multiple Clean Water Act violations by failing to control sediment runoff from a 216-acre development site at 1001 Olive Branch Road.

I’ve been slowly working my way through a rewatch of The Sopranos and remain in awe of the show. Despite debuting over 20 years ago, it still feels like a breath of fresh TV air. I think the reason is tone. The Sopranos is a show that feels full of life. Yes, it’s a mob drama with lots of violence and intrigue, but there’s also a huge amount of love, small talk, lightness, surreality, and humor.

It’s the 50th anniversary of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece about crime, family, America, the best pasta dishes to feed a small army of goons, and so much more. We’re taking the opportunity to talk about the saga as a whole. Two weeks ago, we kicked off our conversation with The Godfather, which ends with the death of Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and the ascension of his son Michael (Al Pacino), who acts decisively and violently in wiping out the heads of the other New York crime family, thus ending a threat to the Corleones.

My previous posts on Diana Ankudinova featured some of her performances when she was 14 and 15.  If you haven’t seen them, it’s worth checking them out.  You’ll see the emergence of a unique talent: https://zapatosjam.blogspot.com/2021/12/great-voices-9-shaman-diana-ankudinova.html https://zapatosjam.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-mysterious-case-of-diana-ankudinova.html This post contains only one clip.  It features Diana, now 18, performing “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, originally made famous by Elvis Presley, for an audience of professional singers.  This is one of those covers that is so different that it’s not really a cover.

It's rude to stare. We stare at people because there is something extraordinary about them. They don't fit within our usual frame of reference. It could be that they are visually striking or unsettling. Either way, the stare usually contains within it a power imbalance. The man stares at the woman, the adult at the child, the normie at the ‘freak’. Few of us will ever know what it is like to be constantly stared at, but we can get a sense of it with the photographs of Diane Arbus.

Ya’har maties!!! It’s me, a real life pirate, which can be proven by the fact that I have: Welcome back to another edition of: This week’s selection of diary comics are less thematic and more simple slice-of-life. I was very obsessed with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at this time. It almost overtook my entire personality in 2017— yet still paled in comparison to the Rocko pirate scene above.

On a Sunday morning 43 years ago today, Mount St. Helens blasted away its summit, laid waste to an immense expanse of forest and snuffed out the lives of 57 people. I’ve always wondered: Did those people have to die?  An interview I  conducted this week gave me some further insights into that question and a possible answer to one of  the enduring mysteries of that time. In the days and months that followed the eruption, the disaster was dubbed a worst-case scenario that no one could have foreseen and that, in some respects, unleashed more fury than the youthful volcano had ever vented before.