PicoBlog

The Royals threw a party on Saturday night. It was a helluva shindig. Then they played a baseball game. That wasn’t as much fun. Let’s start with the party…Lorenzo Cain means so much to this franchise, and by extension, this city. What’s gratifying is that the love and adoration is mutual. It’s not always that way between a player and a team and a city. The Jerry Seinfeld joke is that when you cheer for a team, you’re rooting for laundry.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. In 1995, Nihon Falcom decided it was time for them to develop a brand new Ys. The last one they had put together themselves was Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, all the way back in 1989 on the PC-8801 and PC-9801.

TheMotto No. 56 acknowledges Canada Day with the second of five interviews I’ve done with Aubrey Drake Graham. Live from the Rap Radar Mansion in spring of 2012, Drake was on his Club Paradise tour in Berlin, Germany and I rang him up for the cover of RESPECT. There’s no video of this conversation. But there’s audio, and once I got it transcribed, I asked my wife Danyel, like I usually do, to edit my work.

My calendar might say Monday March 4, but I’m pretty sure we’re barrelling toward Friday the 13th of Smarch, with all the lousy weather and bad luck that implies. No one knows exactly when Smarch, the 13th month of the year according to Springfield Elementary School’s misprinted calendars, falls, but I believe you can feel it in your heart. My heart tel… ncG1vNJzZmiklai5qrHKnqmnZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe8uorKyxXai6or7CoWSwnZGptaa%2B

Many years ago, when I lived and worked in Mexico City, I wrote a short article for “Outside” about bullfighting. The gist was this: I questioned whether the spectacle and ritual beauty of a bullfight was worth the cost. I also wondered whether the life of a fighting bull -- pampered and content until the cruel drama of its public death -- was actually worse than the life and death of a regular old cow stuck in a pen and either milked or killed by assembly line machines.

Share Trawling our bookshelves in search of an enjoyable novel that wasn’t too long or too light—Furst? Forster? Colette?—I came across a diminutive $1.50 Fawcett Crest paperback I’d never noticed: Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller, cover illo two women in long 19th-century dresses with the anachronistically bare-shouldered brunette kneeling at the other’s feet. So I asked my wife, who instantly recalled reading it back in our early days—copyrighted 1969 as A Place for Us, the retitled edition is dated 1973.

Mac, PC, Steam Steam Deck $9.99 intiny 3-6 hours Love Is All Around is a Chinese romance game using first-person live action video (aka FMV). You’re Gu Yi, a young man who comes to the big city to pay off his debts and meets six women who, for reasons that are never convincingly explained, fall head over heels for you. Every minute or so, multiple choice questions let you determine how the story unfolds.

There is no better reality dating show than Love Is Blind, where two dozen-ish single people sit in windowless Target-decorated rooms and Buzzfeed quiz their way into a quick marriage and inevitable divorce. The show’s participants can’t see one another until after they have gotten engaged, so all the turnoffs you’d notice on a first date don’t come until you’re already in the middle of planning a wedding. With its location-based casting, the show stumbles into some ethnographic research (meaning: of course the Dallas season was the craziest).

Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, "YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY," "YOU SHALL NOT MURDER," "YOU SHALL NOT STEAL," "YOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS," "YOU SHALL NOT COVET," and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, "YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF." Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.