PicoBlog

During his SNL monologue on Saturday, Nate Bargatze joked about his reading habits. He has a point. I read books almost exclusively on my Kindle (which, miraculously, syncs with Libby), and it’s astonishing how little an ebook does given what it could do. Ebooks are just…words. Every screen is words. Even when the book is Britney Spears’s memoir, which … ncG1vNJzZmimn6mytLLRqKSaq52Wua280Z6qrGajqq%2B0wMCcomebn6J8sXvSp6NmmqKewa%2Bx2Kxkpp2dpLazecCnm2ark6e8rbjIp54%3D

Happy Groundhog Day! I’m Geoff Plitt, and welcome to What You Need to Know, the brief, weekly newsletter where I share the best comedy videos I’ve seen all week. It will always be free, and you’re welcome to become a friend by following me on Twitter, Threads, Instagram, or TikTok, where I share my own jokes every day. And now, the videos you came for: This SNL sketch from last weekend made me laugh:

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. —Mae West Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to Woke we go. Yes, this is gonna be one of those essays, and before you ask—no. I haven’t seen it. No one has. I freely admit that I’m preemptively piling on with the other bitches and getting all “Miss Crabtree” about the forthcoming live action Disney regurgitation of Snow White. Why? Because it’s fun.

I’m not very good at identifying plants, and I won’t pretend I am. But thanks to Diane Porter’s recent post in her wonderful newsletter My Gaia, I think the plant in the photo above is snow trillium. They now carpet the landscape at Cedar Bluffs, especially below the lookout I so often take photos from. They are small and hard to see in the above photo, but it you look closely, they are the little white dots.

1× 0:00 -1:40:14 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Snow White is a story rich in symbolism and rife with retellings. This latest one by Jonathan Pageau was written with the intent of illuminating the symbols of the old story for a modern audience. Let’s see how he accomplished that. In case anyone doubted my fairy tale symbolism obsession, I managed to create a review longer than the book itself.

Last week, Trump started promoting “God Made Trump” an ad using an AI generated voiceover of Paul Harvey. As we’ve seen more and more MAGA evangelicals abandon all their stated principles and beliefs in an act of sweeping idolatry. Some ads take days or weeks of creative process, iteration, and revision. This was not one of them. This ad was rattled off into Notes on my iPhone and our brilliant production team took the concept and ran with it, cutting the spot in mere hours.

Issue 55 Subscribers 1,977. Firstly, a huge thank you to Latitude for sponsoring another issue of the Europe in Space newsletter. Latitude is developing Zephyr, a 17-metre tall launch vehicle capable of deploying 100 kg payloads to SSO at an altitude of 700 kilometres. To my 56 new subscribers, enjoy your first issue and, as always, if you have any commen… ncG1vNJzZmidpae8sbHAp6qpmZOas621xqGrZ6ull8C1rcKkZZynnWS9cL%2FOZqOoppdirqa7y66qZpmemXq1tMCnoqxllqS%2Fbq3LpQ%3D%3D

Yes, I know the social media saying. “This isn’t an airport. You don’t need to announce your departure.” And yet, I’m announcing my departure — from Twitter. And since a lot of you got to know me and my work there, I thought I’d make a short post explaining why. When Elon took over Twitter, and immediately started making it worse, I told myself that I should stay for at least a little while because (1) Twitter was still the best place to get breaking news and a terrific place to discuss current events and (2) I still had a large platform and maybe I could still do a little good by offering historical perspective there.

While I was away, the heads (and wallets) of Substack eventually came out clear and sound with their position about the neo-Nazis issue: Definitely not a nice birthday/Christmas present for me. I am obviously disappointed, and I’m currently packing my stuff (requesting all my archives as I type) to leave: I’ll be moving puntarelle, and also Barocco e i suoi fratelli, and praeterpropter, either to Wordpress or to some other platform, I still have to sort everything out.