A throwback from the marvelous World Wide Words: Where does "Wet one’s whistle" come from? https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-wet1.html

How to Improve Your Ability to Define Project Tasks (by me in 2013)
https://www.quickbase.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-ability-to-define-project-tasks

This shirt is a wardrobe "basic" at a good price, with a little sparkle and shine. https://amzn.to/3SGlKRM

Every September, AJI welcomes 10 early-career reporters to D.C. for a two-year fellowship. Fellows are paid $60,000 per year to take classes with some of the country’s best journalists and to write for NOTUS.
https://aji.org/application-2024-2026/

It began from the birth of Robert Stevenson in 1772 to the death of D Alan Stevenson in 1971, and included personal artefacts belonging to Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson. The author’s grandfather, Robert Stevenson, invented intermittent flashing lights, and his descendants designed most of Scotland’s lighthouses. https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2024/02/09/stevenson-engineering-archive-fetches-115000-at-auction/

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Cocoa futures prices have surged more than $1,000 or nearly 40% since the start of the year to hit an all-time high of $5,874 per metric ton. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/08/cocoa-prices-surge-to-all-time-highs-as-bad-weather-hurts-west-africa-crop-yield.html

JOB AD: VP, Marketing & Commercial (Dungeons & Dragons)
$228,080/yr - $398,760/yr
Renton, WA
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3810584610/

Really they should just ask my circle of friends. I bet one of you could do it.

In case you need a reminder that a rejection sometimes means, "Try again."
https://www.litrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/

I feel old

An Amazon review from 2010: A Well-Seasoned Kitchen: 4 stars

I still have this... hmm, perhaps it's time to take it off the shelf and use it again.
http://bit.ly/bYaYnd Pleasant cookbook, tweaking old favorite family recipes

In praise of RSS feeds https://www.pcloadletter.dev/blog/rss/

Many years ago, Carol Pinchefsky wrote "20th century tech phrases that lost all their meaning" for me, and when you read it you'll understand why she's among my favorite writers. Also you'll laugh.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112033946/https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/20th-century-tech-analogies-that-lost-all-their-meaning-1703.html

Bioluminescent houseplant hits US market for first time
Engineered petunia emits a continuous green glow thanks to genes from a light-up mushroom.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00383-3

"The present has the tools to bring the past to life in a big way. Whether it’s through colorizing photos or using AI to enhance hundred-year-old videos, technology has made these windows to the past much clearer and brighter." https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/11/no-sweat-tech-colorized-images-can-enrich-our-view-of-history/

This is a short history of the death mask, and what it can reveal about how our attitudes to death have changed over the centuries.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240209-the-lost-art-of-the-death-mask

Zain decided to make a time zone converter. It had seemed like an easy project, but he was horribly mistaken.
https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time-zones/

The station, WJLX, sent a landscaping crew to the site Friday morning for spring cleaning, only to find the 200-foot radio tower gone. https://news.yahoo.com/alabama-station-disbelief-200-foot-191925880.html

Microsoft is launching collaborations with several newsrooms to adopt generative AI, including Semafor, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, the Online News Association and others. https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/microsoft-pushing-generative-ai-in-newsrooms-partners-with-semafor-cuny-the-online-news-association-and-others/