PicoBlog

Wait, what’s a “chess movie”? It’s a movie in which the story centers mostly around the game of chess. So you really watched every movie with chess in it? Nah, there’s just too many. I had to pick out the most popular and interesting ones. This post should be titled “Every Seemingly Fascinating and/or Relevant Work of Visual Media I Managed to Get Hold of That Sort of Mostly Centers Around Chess, Ranked”, but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue now, does it.

Michael Musto is a longtime columnist, author and commentator, best known for the "La Dolce Musto" entertainment/nightlife column in the Village Voice and many TV and documentary appearances.Like a really good book, life has given me way more chapters than I ever expected. Alas, I couldn’t have predicted that as an Italian-American kid growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1960s. It was a time of hippie-dippie love and peace — which I read about and saw constantly on TV — though those warm and rosy feelings were apparently reserved only for the young; older people were considered business suited, untrustworthy, corrupt, and pretty much doomed.

Maybe, like me, you first heard about Future Society via TikTok. I was inundated with ads by them. Honestly it kind of made me less interested, it felt gimmicky and cheap (clearly I have not been paid to write this post). But after listening to this interview with the founder of Future Society on the Perfume Room I developed a new appreciation and interest in what they were doing. All of their fragrances are inspired by extinct flowers.

There are 700 major islands in the Caribbean, ranging in size from Cuba, the largest, down to St. Martin, which is split into two countries, one French and other Dutch. Geographically speaking, there are actually 7000 islands in the Caribbean, with only around 40 inhabited. Some islands are really only a small tip of land sticking up out of the sea, others are international destinations. Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispanola, which is divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the Bahama Islands, Trinidad, Barbados and the American and British Virgin Islands may be best known, but there are so many more making up the region called the Caribbean.

Can’t catch her now In honor of Black Friday’s RSD-only release Guts: The Secret Tracks, which has remained impressively hard to find on Soulseek in 320k (😬) — and what’s bound to be a sweep in the coming weeks of year-end 2023 lists that cover pop at all — here’s a definitive ranking of every Olivia Rodrigo song that doesn’t predate her singing the word “fuck.” I’m sure some of the High School Musical material bangs but I don’t have enough paid subscribers to justify more than 29 grafs on this (give or take some one-liners), especially during year-end season whereupon I will die.

Today: On May 1, a 14-year-old student with a rifle was killed by police trying to enter Mount Horeb Middle during morning classes in Mount Horeb, WI (small town of 7,754 about 25 miles from Madison). Just like the shooting at Perry High in Perry, IA in January, 8 of the 10 highest casualty school shootings took place in a “never happens here” small community. Some Good News: In April, The Economist: Inside a Month of America’s School Shootings won first prize at the International Media Association Awards.

February was another busy month for school safety with shootings, averted attacks, and swatting at schools across the country. On February 8, a 14-year-old male student in Cincinnati, Ohio was arrested for plotting a school shooting at Mariemont High. The student was planning the attack with an adult who was arrested in Colorado Springs. They plotted to both kill students and kidnap others to rape. Hours before the student was arrested on campus, a police office interviewed him and then sent him to school.

This week on Hung Up: A Tortured Poets Department head meeting. I also talked ‘Tortured Poets’ on the amazing podcast Pop Pantheon. And I was onstage in Chicago for an event with Joanna Godard and Big Salad!“Kylie Jenner is rumored to be pregnant, expecting a baby with Timothée Chalamet,” read a tweet on Tuesday from the viral news Twitter account “Pop Tingz.” I gasped mid-bite, in the middle of an otherwise totally normal lunch with a friend in a Brooklyn backyard.

In my earlier post about Alexander Pope, I didn’t mention how important he has been in my life. I first read his poetry in the State Library of New South Wales, and found in his lines a dazzling splendour and clarity to match that of the nearby Sydney Harbour. His couplets have a reputation for being cold and stiff, but to me they sparkled like marble in the sun. On that afternoon in the library, I knew I would be reading Pope for a long time.