PicoBlog

The news that Paul Reubens has passed away at 70, after a private six-year battle with cancer, is hitting me on an oddly personal level. I was working at Home Box Office as a researcher when the very first Pee-wee Herman special was aired in 1981, introducing the Pee-wee character – a kind of lightly ironized and slightly Dada Pinky Lee – to an audience beyond the L.A. live comedy circuit.

Intelligence comes in many forms, and in many guises we don’t understand. One of the most fascinating is fungi. Neither plant nor animal, fungi have more in common with us genetically than we do with plants. They make up the most populous kingdom on the planet, with an estimated 3.8 million species, 90% of which remain undiscovered. You can’t see most of it. It exists as mycelial networks underground that can spread for thousands of acres, exchanging nutrients, information and more to help whole ecosystems survive.

In her youth, when she was a star on the stage, Pauline Frederick was known as “The Girl with the Topaz Eyes,” and those piercing blue eyes of hers are her trademark in her surviving and readily available films. Tied to a stage mother who lived with her and scorned by a disapproving father, Frederick married five times and had a generally messy personal life that included an affair with a young Clark Gable when he was trying to break into movies in the 1920s.

Scenario: You’re diagnosed with Covid-19. You’ve been taking a statin to lower your cholesterol for years. But you’re told that the statin has a potential interaction with Paxlovid, the blockbuster Covid antiviral that decreases hospitalizations and death. Should you temporarily stop taking that statin and take Paxlovid for 5 days to decrease your chances of a bad outcome due to Covid? This question comes up a lot. First, if you take any statin other than lovastatin, simvastatin, atorvastatin or rosuvastatin, the answer is easy.

This topic has been sitting in my drafts for some time, and I felt there was no better time to publish it than in the wake of the copycat drama between pop phenom Doja Cat and metal band Chaver. On Wednesday, X (formerly Twitter) account Pop Crave, broke the news that both musicians who commissioned the visual artist Dusty Ray were not only releasing their upcoming albums on the same day, September 22, 2023, but with almost the same exact cover.

Hi, Ari here, writing you to cap a busy week—and turning to something that should be really important, with a dash of Bob Marley. My new piece is below, and you can always subscribe to my newsletter here: Share Do you ever get exhausted by it all? America went from Trump’s election to a pandemic to an inflation panic to this war. The war in Ukraine poses an uncertain, unknowable set of challenges to people directly impacted in the region, and many (lesser but important) impacts on people who are farther away.

Today, I am not going to write a blog at all really, but rather a comprehensive list of how you can say the word PEACE in all languages. This is something that we need to say more often, especially in times of war. English: Peace Spanish: Paz German: Frieden Russian: Mir Ukrainian: Myr  Polish: Pokoj Hebrew: Shalom Finnish: Rauhaa Norwegian: Fred Danish: Fred Arabic: Salam Turkish: Baris Chinese: Heping Vietnamese: Hoa Binh

Earlier this week, a very specific family Christmas card trend went viral: Mothers and daughters restrained with strings of holiday lights, mouths taped shut; fathers and sons free, smiling, holding signs that read, “Finally, peace on Earth!” Twitter user @mattxiv collected four of these photos (yes, multiple families did this!) under the caption, “Straight male humor is like ‘I regret getting married and I fucking hate my kids LOL right fellas?

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