PicoBlog

Donald Trump greets Phil Mickelson on the driving range during Day One of the LIV Golf Invitational—Bedminster at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster on July 29, 2022. (Photo by Charles Laberge/LIV Golf via Getty Images) I’ve been fascinated by the tensions caused by the emergence of the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour, a tournament currently being hosted at Bedminster, one of Donald Trump’s courses. This is partly because Trump’s long-standing feud with the PGA (who broke with him over January 6) is in my reporting wheelhouse, but also simply because I love playing the game of golf.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s unit for scouring the internet and hoovering up databroker profiles, Randy Nixon, is frustrated by both the “simplicity” of Bloomberg’s recent coverage of his agency’s capabilities and by Hollywood’s focus on spies. During a panel hosted this afternoon by the spycraft social network and newsletter The Cipher Brief, Nixon lamented that “People forget about [Open Source Intelligence] more often than not, because HUMINT [Human Intelligence] gets all the Hollywood attention.

I think the one thing that stands out to me is that generally with luxury goods, I always thought that part of the appeal was that the stores curate a certain experience - you go to the store, you get free wine and snacks, you get fawned over by an attentive salesperson. You have, for lack of better work, a *mystique* about the experience that's a step up above getting things off the rack at Macy's.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I freelanced a bit for a website called Deadspin. Many things were different back then. For example, instead of the upstanding, seven-years-sober, 401K-having grown up who’s composing this today, I was a bottoming-out alcoholic and freelance writer (or, ahem, “editorial consultant,” depending on who was asking), who wrote and filed many an assignment from the same dingy dive bar on the corner of Valencia and 26th Street, in San Francisco.

In 2022, we happily left SnackWell’s brand cookies behind. The product was discontinued last year. Good riddance. For those of you fortunate enough not to have encountered these dubious treats, SnackWell’s was a brand of cookies that emerged during the 1990s heroin chic low-fat diet era. Every Clinton era kid tasted the signature Devil’s Food cookie cakes at least once. Our moms bought them en masse along with Susan Powter diet books and Richard Simmons exercise tapes.

When measuring HRV, we end up with a number. This number is what we normally call an HRV feature. An HRV feature is a mathematical way to translate a series of beat-to-beat (or peak-to-peak, when using optical measurements) intervals collected in a certain amount of time (ideally, 1 to 5 minutes) into a single number that represents your HRV. Different apps or software might provide different HRV features, making them not directly comparable.

It’s finally here—my compilation of heart words and accompanying instructional slide show! If you haven’t heard of heart words or don’t fully understand how or why to teach them, check out this article. Heart words are high frequency words that are irregular. Irregular words have graphemes that are not “behaving” or making the right sound. Commonly known heart words are the, of, said, could, and again. Words are also considered irregular—and thus heart words—if they have spelling patterns that the students do not yet know.

During the Second World War, the decision was made to locate Britain's principal civil airport at Heathrow. Heath Row had been previously a small hamlet along a minor country lane called Heathrow Road in the ancient parish of Harmondsworth, Middlesex. Heathrow's original buildings were demolished in 1944 for the construction of the airport Here, we're going to take a tour of the old Heathrow hamlet at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 - I’ll be illustrating this post using an old 1939 map and the photos you'll see here largely date from that time.

Directed by Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie France & United States, 2014 What is this film really about? I suppose the title is about as good an answer as you will get. It’s the key question that ReidsonFilm grappled with when watching Heaven Knows What. Is it possible to make a film about drug addiction without romanticizing the ‘junkie lifestyle’? Make no mistake, this 2014 film by Josh and Benny Safdie does its best to show you the destructive potential of heroin dependence, and the acrid emptiness of a life on the margins.