PicoBlog

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about curiosity, attention, wonder and strange things under the Arctic. First, a fun update to this story I did a while back on the ‘Stargate’ portals between Lithuania and Poland: It Really Is Different If We're Really There· December 29, 2023 You may have heard that New York and Dublin recently got their own portal connection - and here’s gonzo reporter

After their plane’s engine failed, over remote terrain in far northern California early this month, a young family of three descended under the plane’s parachute to a safe landing. (Photo by Kristina Carrara, via Shelter Cove Fire Department.)In just the past two weeks, pilots and their passengers have escaped unharmed after three separate incidents across the country that could have had much more tragic outcomes. They were in greater Seattle, on the remote northern coastline of California (shown above), and in southern Georgia.

Monday, June 5, 2023 Good afternoon! Greetings from an airplane! Ah, it’s like old times (November-January, at least) except this isn’t for a book tour stop but something fun I’ll show you this fall. It’s still hard to leave home, though, the kids, the husband, and further down the list but maybe not as far as it should be, the sheer delight of NYC farmer’s markets in June, brimming with strawberries.

Good evening… actually, almost: good morning, everybody! It’s really ‘no fun‘ to monitor developments in Ukraine of the last few days. Sure, the government and different authorities are trying to keep the spirits high; the PSU’s Su-24-units are really pounding the Russians on the occupied Crimea hard, and the Russians have lost an Su-35 over the Sevastopol area today (reportedly, the pilot ejected safely, and it was ‘own goal’). However, in grand total, the situation remains unpleasant and no immediate improvement is in sight for weeks longer.

Sometime in the late 1990s, my church started singing “Shout to the Lord.” I remember it vividly because there was this one woman who would raise her hands when we got to the big key change. (You know the one…) I had theretofore not seen many people throw their hands up at our church, but it seemed authentic and powerful and like something you would wan… ncG1vNJzZmijkamyrcXNm5yarKljwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89ooK2rXam2rrGMraZmq6SkvW6%2FyKeeoqaXYrWquMuspqef

A federal case manager who allegedly had a sexual relationship with a prisoner at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego is having her location tracked as a condition of her pretrial release, per the orders of a judge. She also has to abide by a curfew. That federal employee, San Diego resident Shantal He… ncG1vNJzZmikpaCyqa3RqKOdZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe8itqmatnpi8r7%2FToquurJmku6K4jK2mZqWfo7a1u9FmmA%3D%3D

Not five minutes after I finished writing a story about the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s 2022 proposal to encourage people to keep small bass for the table, my friend Tim Lee called to see if I wanted to go fishing. To be honest, I didn’t really have the time, but his timing couldn’t have been better. State fisheries biologists say people need to keep and eat more bass, and the new rule would limit them to keeping six bass, only one of which could be over 16 inches.

Scroll to the bottom of this post for a printer-friendly PDF of the recipe only. Have you ever simmered a big pot of bolognese on the stove for hours, taken a taste, and thought I kind of just want to eat this as is? No pasta, just a bowl and a spoon and maybe a sprinkle of cheese. You steal another taste, then another, but eventually add the pasta because you’ve already cooked it and it is pasta night, after all.

The beauty industry is sick. See: consumption as a beauty ideal in the 1840s, malnourishment as a beauty ideal in the 1990s, and the “dark bimbo” or “succubus chic” look today — cheeks pinched courtesy of fat-sucking surgery, bones protruding courtesy of Ozempic injections, expression embalmed courtesy of neurotoxin-infused needles. “It may seem like the trend … is the same ‘heroin chic’ from the ’90s, but it’s actually something much more covertly sinister,” Laura Pitcher writes in a new article for Nylon.