PicoBlog

Blaze Jordan has long been a name that baseball fans have heard. Now, a 21-year-old corner infield prospect for the Boston Red Sox, Jordan has come a long way from the viral videos on YouTube of him hitting monstrous home runs as a 13-year-old. “I forget about it a lot of the time until somebody brings it up to me because it was so long ago and everything,” Jordan said. “I feel like I'm just kind of in the moment now, but yeah it's cool when somebody brings it up.

“When Berto comes here, please don’t speak to me that way, “ I say to my son, Raffi, after a particularly rough conversation where he told me to “shut the fuck up” repeatedly.  “He will think you have been raised in a barn.”  This is the conversation I am having with my eleven-year-old who came to us from foster care at age four, with his sister Desi, who was then 7 months.

[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com.] Yesterday, protestors blocked roadways in California, Illinois, New York, and Oregon, snarling traffic for hours and impeding travelers attempting to catch their outgoing flights at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Their stated cause is a righteous one: demanding an immediate ceasefire to the horrific violence that has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza.

Company: KnowYourMeds (soon to be renamed Creda Health) is an AI powered digital health platform that addresses a critical care gap by enabling “continuum of care” relationships between patients and their providers. Over 100 million Americans suffer from one or more chronic conditions and need help with managing their diseases in between visits to their doctors. For a variety of reasons, patients don’t have 24/7 access to their providers and often end up making decisions that are injurious to their health.

For whatever reason, there seems to be more DC Comics movies this year than in the past few years. Maybe some of it is due to delays from COVID and other things, but it’s a good thing that someone decided to release Blue Beetle in movie theaters rather than the rumored plans of just putting it on the HBO Max streamer (which I don’t fully believe after seeing it), because the resulting movie is one that is so much fun to watch with other people.

When the news is too heavy and dark — which is too often — it can feel like we have to justify why we write about names. I’ve got to admit, when I tell people in real life what I do, it sometimes comes out a bit fluffy. But Abby at Appellation Mountain puts it better than I could: Names matter. At a moment when the world is filled with horror and pain and worry, the act of naming – of learning others’ names and acknowledging those names – is a way of acknowledging each others’ humanity.

If you’re a fan of fruit pies, you’re going to love my blueberry crumble. You’re getting the best parts of a classic pie: the ooey gooey jammy center and the sweet crunchy crumbly topping, with ten times less effort. I added a tart and sweet raspberry pink sauce, which will get soaked up by that delicious crumble goodness. Top it off with vanilla ice cream and you’ve got yourself a tasty, comforting dessert you can eat while lounging on the couch, watching your favorite show, or at a dinner with friends and family.

For much of this year, starting in January, I exchanged emails with Bob Rafelson about an interview for our shared alma mater’s alumni magazine; the legendary film director was cantankerous, generous, hilarious, but we never seemed to get around to the actual interview. Rafelson, 89, had long absented himself from the film industry and lived on a mountaintop in Aspen, CO, with his wife and two teenage sons; he was hardly a recluse, but he was resistant to sentiment and, aside from a 2019 Esquirefeature and some garrulous panel appearances available on YouTube, he kept a low profile.

The ’80s in 40 revisits the decade of the 1980s choosing four movies a year, one from each quarter. This entry covers the fourth quarter of 1981.* Years before I finally watched Body Heat, I encountered it as an object of study. My freshman year of college, I joined a short-lived extracurricular club devoted to pop culture,headed by a chain-smoking, leather-wearing English professor with dim hopes for the future. Though I could never quite share (and often couldn’t understand), his self-declared “post-structuralist” views, , his enthusiasm for literature and what lay below the surface of the text make him probably as responsible as anyone for pointing me toward pursuing criticism as a profession, even if at one point I thought it would be a career devoted to English literature and result in me having campus office hours and a stack of papers to grade.