PicoBlog

The Towne Center Plaza was home to a fatal fire in Gatlinburg that claimed the life of one person last year, and the new building for the businesses that were lost will soon return. There were four businesses that either suspended operations or moved to a temporary location: Pucker’s Sports Grill, China Bazaar, Cafe 420, and Gifts of Gatlinburg. The owner of Pucker’s, Chad Kennedy, was interviewed for the story on WVLT news in Knoxville, and he confirmed the business is returning to a bigger and better place next door to the large building being constructed.

Back in 2004 a research article came out called “The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad,” in which researchers explored an idea called the region region-beta paradox. Human brains have a lot of nifty tricks that can be brilliant for our survival in some instances and chaos inducing in others. First of all, humans are able to guess about consequences, which is termed affective forecasting.  That is, we can look at a situation we have never been in before and make a guess about how it would play out.

I just finished binging the Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul. I just got to say, "Wow!" This show is television history. What a masterpiece by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. What is embarrassing to me is that I originally gave up on the show after just viewing 4-5 episodes when it first came out. My expectation had been something akin to Breaking Bad, but Better Call Saul is an entirely different kind of show.

With Tottenham Hotspur's rich history tradition in the FA Cup, it would be all too easy to overlook just what an astonishing achievement it was when Martha Thomas' dramatic extra-time strike sent the women's team to Wembley. Spurs lifted the men's FA Cup for the first time way back in 1901 as a non-league club and remain the only such outfit to do so in the history of the grand old competition.

My first band was called Dynamite Lover. My dad did not like that name. “Jeez Holl,” he’d say. “You really gotta call it that? Maybe think of some other alternatives?” I was so offended. “Why wouldn’t I call it that? I love to blow shit up! (I’d never actually blown anything up.) Explosions are rad! Dynamite is a great word…” I scoffed in defense, while he just sort of shrugged his shoulders, rolled his eyes, and let it go.

Happy National Taco Day, fellow Retrologists! I’m marking the occasion by sharing photos of some Taco Bells I’ve visited over the years, each shedding light on a particular moment in the chain’s history. By the time I visited the first location of Taco Bell, in Downey, California, the chain had long ago left the building at 7112 Firestone Blvd., and Tacos Raul had stepped in. But the Bell bones were still evident in this photo from 2012.

Hiya. After a couple months of feeling like every burner on my mind stove was having to fire away at full blast, I decided to take some time the last couple weeks to recharge my brain batteries. In other words, I went to Disney World. And even though it was only for a couple nights, I still left feeling exhausted, like you do when you go hard at all four parks.

As if surviving the forced closures and adapting to limited service models due to the pandemic wasn’t enough for many of our beloved bars, on the night of December 19, 2022 the award-winning, trailblazing Atlanta bar Ticonderoga Club suffered a water pipe rupture that destroyed their kitchen, upstairs space, and their front dining area, wreaking havoc on their plumbing and electric systems, forcing them to close for four months. But now there’s reason to raise a glass of Hootchy Cider Punch as earlier this month they reopened their doors with the motto, “The Club Is Dead.

RETVRN rhetoric is everywhere. It’s at the height of its power, the same way woke stuff was in 2019. If you at all follow right wing world on Twitter or elsewhere, you are familiar with a certain kind of pining: Let’s go back to a rural way of life. Let’s reassert traditional gender roles. Let’s erase the Sexual Revolution. Let’s RETVRN. Beneath this idea is another one: an image (some would say a mirage) of Real America.