Blog Blender

Father Pete leads the masses at Notre Dame

Thirty seconds into the video, the camera shows Father Pete — to call him anything else is to barely know him — striding into the Basilica. He’s as identifiable by his buzz cut and black-rimmed glasses as he is by his perpetual smile. Sunlight follows him through the doors.

That’s when the student section loses its collective mind, cheering as if running back Jeremiyah Love just went for another 98-yard touchdown.

Excellent story about a University of Notre Dame priest and the community he supports.

PJH Studios artwork, Portrait of a sun

PJH Studios

Movies, music, books, whiskey, and culture in a blog blender

  • Father Pete leads the masses at Notre Dame

    Thirty seconds into the video, the camera shows Father Pete — to call him anything else is to barely know him — striding into the Basilica. He’s as identifiable by his buzz cut and black-rimmed glasses as he is by his perpetual smile. Sunlight follows him through the doors. That’s when the student section loses…

  • Teens start banned book club

    After books were banned, what better way for teenagers to rebel than to start a banned book club? “It was really difficult for our first year,” Gooblar-Perovic added. “We couldn’t be like an official club with our school, because it would be, legally, iffy.” The group persisted. After the part of the law that affects…

  • The rise of chatfishing

    ChatGPT and its contemporaries are becoming dating tools, or at worse, crutches to mask social conversational deficiencies, aka chatfishing. Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left…

  • Mexico City’s zombie walk

    Every year, Mexico City hosts a zombie walk. Quite festive with a lot of different interpretations.

  • Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states

    Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states. Utopias — the white whale of the brewer’s lineup — is back for 2025 and it’s stronger than ever. Released every other year, the 2025 Utopias clocks in with a jaw-dropping 30% ABV, higher than most liqueurs and as much as…

  • Settlers of Catan movie

    Netflix purchased screen rights to Settlers of Catan. Hmmmm. Netflix has won the rights to the Asmodee board game and plans an array of projects — scripted and unscripted, live-action and animated. The streamer describes the TV and film projects as set in “a place where settlers must navigate bountiful and varied landscapes, shifting alliances…

  • Sea otters stealing surfboards

    A very real alliteration: sea otters stealing surfboards. On Wednesday, Isabella Orduna was catching some waves at Steamer Lane, a popular surf spot off Santa Cruz, Calif., when she felt a small nip on her foot. Startled, Ms. Orduna, a 21-year-old college student, rolled into the water. The moment she surfaced, she saw a “big,…

  • AI is gonna drink your milkshake

    Not only are AI data centers hungry for electricity, they are thirsty for water. So much that towns and cities are experiencing water shortages. Nearly 60 percent of the 1,244 largest data centers in the world were outside the United States as of the end of June, according to an analysis by Synergy Research Group,…

  • Tactical frivolity

    The current administration deemed protesters violent and menacing. You know what isn’t? A person in an inflatable chicken costume, a protest tactic called tactical frivolity. This humorous form of protest, known as tactical frivolity, shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants. In contravention of the Trump administration’s claims that…

  • Sleep is a spectrum

    We’ve known that sleep has cycles, but more research is showing that how we sleep is more nuanced and may exist as a spectrum. It’s still largely mysterious how the brain manages to move between these states safely and efficiently. But studies targeting transitions both into and out of sleep are starting to unravel the…