PicoBlog

It’s August and maybe you are at the sea. If you are, you are at the site of one of my great culinary epiphanies: A better way to make a margarita. I can already hear you thinking:  What? José! What is wrong with a margarita? Well, the fact is, I don’t like a salt rim. Sometimes I get too much salt. Sometimes not enough. So on this episode of my podcast, Longer Tables, I will explain to you how I came up with a fix that gives you just the right amount of that salty flavor.

This was originally posted on my Twitter account as a thread which you can read and share here. It is time to tell a very difficult story. A story that happened exactly 101 years ago today. This is the story behind an image that has been called the world's first photograph of a murder caught on film. I wish it was not relevant today. But it is. So here is a story:

I rarely covet. Handbags, shoes, jewelry—these things leave me cold. I used to castigate myself for my lack of interest, assuming I had no feminine instincts. Or taste. But that’s not it—or if it is, that’s only half the reason. It turns out what I want is just … different. This authentic 19th century vampire-hunting kit that just sold for $20,000 at auction, for instance. The minute I laid eyes on it, the spirit of covetousness rose within me.

Welcome to Sports Stories, an illustrated newsletter at the intersection of sports and history. If you’re not already a subscriber, please consider joining up here — we have both free and paid options.  A few months before Super Bowl XXXVIII, a man in Liverpool named Mark Roberts wrote to the National Football League. It was 2003, and NFL Europe was still in full swing. Then, as now, the league had its eyes on global domination.

Joslyn Park is a 2 1/2 acre city recreation park between Kensington and Strand at 7th Street. It occupies the former Walter T. McGinley estate, which was purchased by the City of Santa Monica in 1958 with funds donated by Marcellus L. Joslyn. Both men were very successful in business and yet rather shy of the limelight. The park is located at the top of a ridge with eastern vistas over Los Angeles (the original name for 7th Street was Mountain View Ave).

Happy Thursday! This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is all about Pippi Longstocking — as interpreted by Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki and Yoichi Kotabe. That’s quite a lineup. In the ‘80s, Takahata and Miyazaki built Studio Ghibli into a creative powerhouse, and Yoichi Kotabe joined Nintendo — defining the designs for Mario, Bowser and more. The trio’s work got known around the world. Before the fame, though, there was the Pippi series.

Dating in general is an experience, but dating in your 50’s is frightening - and I’m not talking about getting out of your bubble and meeting new people. I’m talking about the quality of people that are available (it’s a cesspool) and individuals not knowing the difference between companionship vs a relationship and which one they can emotionally handle. After the death of my father in 2015, I stop dating. Why?

Judea Pearl’s and Dana Mackenzie’s The Book of Why is a theoretical and practical book about epistemology, intertwined with history of science (particularly, the history of thinking about causality and causal inference and the application of these ideas in science). The explicit focus of the book is practical epistemology (that is, how researchers should pose questions, conduct research, and publish their results) and the theoretical part, the philosophy of science, is not the explicit focus, but I think it’s worth as much attention as the practical part.

When the modern mind attempts to grapple with animistic concepts like “the sun is alive,” the first impulse is to dismiss them as a superstitious fancy. Thankfully, many of us recognize the culturally imperialistic tone of that dismissal. We may also be in touch with our own fundamental indigenous knowledge, however deeply buried it may be under layers of scientific education, that the sun is indeed alive. We want somehow to accept that without denying what science has taught us: that the sun is a burning ball of gas, a nuclear furnace, and couldn’t possibly be alive.