PicoBlog

What I’m reading: a really beautiful book called Close to Home, by Michael Magee. It’s about a young man growing up in West Belfast, and it tackles some fairly big issues in an articulate, poignant way. Read it! (Also bonus: this Vittles piece about the Press Up restaurant group in Dublin) What I’m listening to: like, it seems, the rest of the world - a lot of Fred again. I think I’m pining for music festivals

Bob Keller is one of the finest warriors this country has ever produced. He started in the Rangers, but that wasn’t enough for him, so he joined Special Forces and earned the coveted Green Beret. A few years later, Bob passed a grueling selection and joined the Army’s most elite special operations unit — yep, those guys — where he became a team leader. He’s been on more than a thousand missions and in hundreds of gunfights.

Sometimes when you’re wandering the continent, you find yourself needing a haircut. Thankfully, the witcher has many a handful of options to cut Geralt’s hair and style his beard. I’ve broken down my definitive ranking of barbers in The Witcher 3. Note: This list does not yet include the 4 barbers in the Blood & Wine expansion (yet). Novigrad barber (The Bits) Guy is shaking and decidedly under the influence, which would be fine if he didn't also fuck up your hair sometimes.

Reminder: Uni Watch’s time on Substack is coming to a close in late May. After that, I’ll be taking a break for at least a month, and then my Substack will return at some point this summer with a new name and a new subject focus. To learn more about all of this, including what it will mean for those of you with paid subscriptions, look here. — Paul The NFL uni-verse has just gone through an extraordinarily busy period.

While our Friday video calls are generally reserved for paid subscribers, I’ve received many requests to make last week’s discussion with Rashid Khalidi publicly available. Given the significance of Professor Khalidi’s comments, I’ve decided to do so. I hope you find them as insightful as I did. This Friday’s guests will be two of America’s most perceptive commentators on Israel-Palestine, and foreign policy more generally: Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah and Terrell Starr, author of the Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack.

It’s time to make things a little sweeter!  After five weeks, we’ve rounded off the ‘Cooking with Vegetables’ series and as of this week, we’ll be starting a series on classic French desserts and pastries. Don’t expect complicated techniques or long recipes here. We’ll be making delectable sweet treats with simple ingredients. And the best part? As an added bonus, not only will we dig into a hearty slice of food history with each recipe, but I’ll also be discussing a food painting.

I am not usually drawn to tales of woe, but since starting this Substack I’ve liked to pay close attention to what everyone else is watching, and therefore have been keeping one foot in Netflix’s Top Ten, hoping for another One Day or The Gentlemen. I think you’ll agree, with Baby Reindeer, the waiting is over. The plot line of a stalker didn’t fill me with joy and optimism, however, there were five things about this series that set itself apart and reeled me in:

When I think of the depiction of monsters in film, I think of the name Ray Harryhausen. In this age of CGI and burgeoning AI, the legacy of Harryhausen’s work is fast receding in living memory and for the modern popcorn muncher, it’s probably fair to say that stop-motion, latex-covered automaton creatures, no longer pass muster. But this, perhaps, says more about how our imagination is being blunted rather than sharpened.

“You know, you don’t always have to wear the hat,” Elmore Leonard once said to Timothy Olyphant, per an interview that the Justified star did with The A.V. Club. “Maybe the wind picked up one day and blew it away.” Through multiple interviews it becomes clear that while Leonard didn’t have many objections to the soon-returning series rooted in his short story, “Fire in the Hole,” he seemed not to be a fan of Olyphant’s version of Raylan incessantly wearing the hat.