PicoBlog

I’ve read all the articles you’ve written about Reverse Polarity Bootleg Grounds but was unable to post a comment, since they are more than a year old! My question, which I don’t believe was answered in the articles, is this: Are surge protector companies, like Progressive, working to fix this problem in their products so they do detect this condition? Appreciate your comments! Thanks! —Jeff I’m happy to provide a few updates.

My favorite scene in My Cousin Vinny involves a play on words. Joe Pesci, a criminal defense lawyer with an infamously New Jersey accent, grills a witness on the stand, finally reaching the conclusion—that perhaps the witness was, in fact, mistaken. He asks whether it’s possible that the two yoots the witness saw weren’t the clients in question. Here’s the scene: Fred Gwynne of Herman Munster fame plays the judge, and he is as deadpan as it gets.

I’m currently in India for a good friend’s wedding, so this week’s newsletter is shorter than usual. There are just some thoughts on nationwide sporting spectacles before the usual headline roundup. The big macro news is that state support for a list of private developers has been announced. In the past five days, share prices in private developers like Longfor (+18.5%), Sunac (+25.8%), and Country Garden (+29.9%) jumped. It was the Cricket World Cup final on Sunday.

Red Bull was conceived in 1987 as an energy drink company. And now, we cannot even imagine a party or an extreme sports event without its raging bulls.  Well, the billion-dollar question really is - "How can an energy drink brand selling at around Rs. 125/can make such windfall gains, that it makes it possible for them to own and sponsor so many extreme sports? That too, without even owning a single manufacturing plant?

Welcome back to Lucid! This week I am doing a membership drive to mark the third anniversary of the founding of Lucid. I know that so many of you find the essays I write and the Q&As I host helpful and clarifying. Let’s grow Lucid so others can be helped as well. Share Lucid If each of you shares Lucid with someone else, and those who can afford less than $3/month (the price with the discount) become paying subscribers, we can multiply our reach.

Fiverr is among the most popular freelancing platforms on the web. Ranked as one of the top 400 websites in the world by Alexa, it allows businesses of varying sizes to find talented freelance workers who perform a wide variety of digital services. These services are also called gigs and start at the price of $5 (hence the name). With its commitment to changing how the world works, the freelancing marketplace has grown in importance, year over year, and even more so since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In October 2023, I wrote about the nature of practice for writers and what we can learn from footballers and musicians. That post developed in to Grist, a program to help authors develop the basic skills they need to become great at their craft. In the post, I outlined six things I think writers should practice regularly:  Observation Feeling both physical sensations and emotions Listening Intentional reading and watching

Grunge is everywhere again. Look around. Teens wear Nirvana t-shirts. Rappers make references to Kurt Cobain. And roughly every other time I tell a Brooklyn musician that I write grunge music, the response is, “me too.” But what is grunge, anyway? When I first began the Return of the Grunge project in 2018, here’s how I defined the new music I was writing: Return of the Grunge consists of 11 original songs inspired by 90s alternative rock — those distorted guitars, loud drums, catchy melodies, angsty singers, and weird lyrics that first made me pick up a guitar.

Dear Parents, You may not be aware of significant and important details of your children’s locker room experiences.  Male coaches at Glendale Unified School District have expressed concerns because they do not want to see biological females undress in front of them. In response to their concerns, Assistant Superintendent of Glendale Unified School District, Kelly King, has re-educated the male coaches that they are bigoted if they do not allow biological females to undress among the biological males.