PicoBlog

Visit the Evidence Files Facebook and YouTube pages; Like, Follow, Subscribe or Share!Find more about me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Mastodon. Or visit my EALS Global Foundation’s webpage page here. In February of 2023, I wrote about the Yeti Airlines Flight 691 crash in Nepal, which occurred about a month prior to my post, utilizing publicly available information and the content of the preliminary incident report. Nepal’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission (hereafter, “AAIC”) recently released its final report in consort with the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN).

When I sold my first novel in 2000, I was very ignorant about the publishing world. But I guess I kind of assumed that my publisher was going to wrap me up in their big powerful arms and help me figure out how to maneuver my way through the process of becoming a published author. Silly me. Right about the time I finished the edits on my novel, I got a call from my agent, informing me that William Morrow, the publisher who bought my book, had just been acquired by Harpercollins.

Friends, The Washington Post calls Trump’s vision for a second term “authoritarian.” That vision includes mandatory stop-and-frisk. Deploying the military to fight street crime, break up gangs, and deport immigrants. Purging the federal workforce and charging leakers. “In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas. “Today, I add: I am your warrior.

[Impelled, not to mention impressed by Nancy Friedman’s study of beasel (here), I checked my 2019 book Sounds and Furies (orginal title Bitching - don’t ask) and disinterred what I had to offer vis-à-vis The Flapper in the context of her language. There is a whole chapter, and I have broken it down into three posts. A good deal, I acknowledge, but worth it, I hope, for what stands in my opinion as the first ever unarguably women-coined slang.

“Nik Sharma has long been one of my biggest cooking influences. His recipes are inspired by his heritage, with Indian and Californian influences, and flavour is always at the centre (thanks in part to his molecular biology background - his explanations on the science of flavour are fascinating).” ncG1vNJzZmimmaDAqa3Rpphnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZA%3D%3D

Good science might be conducted in a university lab. But great science often arrives from somewhere else. Newton discovering calculus and gravity at his childhood home, Darwin formulating his theory of evolution on the H.M.S. Beagle, Einstein working as a patent clerk while investigating relativity, Shockley’s invention of the modern transistor in a Chicago hotel room: many of the best scientists have achieved breakthroughs when on break from their day-to-day commitments or away from a university.

As promised, this week is mostly dedicated to SpongeBob, the best cartoon ever made.  RIP Steven Hillenburg.  I do have to clear the air about Dua Lipa being in FIFA though. I’ve ragged on Dua Lipa a bit on here, an artist I do overall adore with some annoying marketing tactics, but this is just so sick.  Most of the whole EA Sports collection saps the video games part of sports video games out and presents this faux-reality with highly specific player design and ratings, but this is actually incredibly inspired.

I’ve been working on an epistolary project—writing in the form of letters, a tradition that is thousands of years old—and it’s directly influenced by the Jack Keefe stories of Ring Lardner. In my project, a man from a small town in Arkansas writes letters to his pen-pal fiance in Ukraine, telling her about the traditions of his hometown’s festival. Ring Lardner’s books have a similar approach with the country rube Jack Keefe writing letters back home about life in the ranks of a major league ballclub and later from the trenches of World War I.

Readers, Today I’m sharing an essay by 70-year-old social scientist Bella DePaulo about people (like her) who prefer to be single most or all of their lives, and into old age. It’s also about our culture’s failure to recognize singlehood as a legitimate, acceptable—and hardly pitiable—way of living for those who choose it, and DePaulo’s work de-stigmatizing singlehood. Society privileges those who are partnered, and pressures us to couple up. But despite the messages we receive from a young age about the importance of landing a partner for happily-ever-after, long-term relationships aren’t for everyone; not every person aspires to be coupled.