Anna

We were in a small Southern town, and the Baptists were easily offended! The other thing I recall is that a classmate ran the projector, so when it ended they tried to run the filmstrip back to the racy images under the pretense of "rewinding" it, but the teacher got wise and turned off the lamp.

Pretty sure my high school screened Ben (about a rat, with theme song by Michael Jackson). They charged us 25 or 50 cents, and if you didn’t want to go or didn’t have the money (it was a small Southern town with its share of rural poverty), you got sent to the library. I happily went to the library.

For no particular reason, my high school screened Enter the Dragon, and because it was in a small Southern town, the Baptists got upset about the brief nudity.

We watched the filmstrip version of that in my 9th grade English class and the teacher put her hand in front of the projector so we couldn’t see that image!

Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy at the Fillmore, SF 2/17/2026

Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy at the Independent, SF 2/16/2026

It looks like I'll be seeing you two nights in a row now!

What it was like to be a bush at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance The bushes on the field during the halftime show became a meme after the internet found out they were actually human performers.

www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/...

THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH A HISTORY MAJOR

A grid of mass market paperback books: The Grass Harp, The Member of the Wedding, Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, Main Street, Scoundrel Time, Another Country, Invisible Man, Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance, Rebecca, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Great Gatsby, Butterfield 8, The Blackboard Jungle, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Naked Came the Stranger, The Group, If I Die in a Combat Zone, A Separate Peace, The Maltese Falcon, Up the Junction, The Boys in the Band, The Fugitive Kind The Graduate.

I bought some of these used as a kid back in the 70s and 80s. Others belonged to my parents, and I don't know how I wound up with a few of them.

GM: Charisma check.

Mamdani: [rolls natural 20]

GM: that’s a d6 how did you

Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

As a librarian, I have to say ... FUCK!

The cast of SCTV

SCTV is on Internet Archive if you'd like to enjoy the early work of Catherine O'Hara and her fellow sketch comedy gods.

S1: archive.org/details/sctv...
S2: archive.org/details/sctv...
S3: archive.org/details/19-m...
S4-5: archive.org/details/66-s...
S6 + Cinemax: archive.org/details/sctv... #TVSky

YouTube video by ShoutFactoryMusic Fountains Of Wayne - Valley Winter Song (Live In Chicago)

"Valley Winter Song" by Fountains of Wayne (from the album Welcome Interstate Managers), more poignant since the death of Adam Schlesinger from Covid in 2020.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdjB...

YouTube video by remhq R.E.M. - Welcome To The Occupation (Live in Chicago / 1995 Monster Tour)

Welcome to the Occupation
🎸
Document, 1987
Live in Chicago, 1995

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxCz...

Libraries can't afford e-books. D.C. lawmakers have a plan. The demand and price for e-books is up — and it’s busting the D.C. Public Library budget.

No surprise to librarians, but perhaps surprising to users, demands/prices for ebooks /audiobooks are killing public library budgets. David Szalay's book, Flesh,” costs DCPL:
$28.99 hardcopy
$59.99 ebook
$69.99 audiobook
DCPL owns hardcopy; rents & must repurchase ebook & audio book every 2 yrs.

i think this MLK day the thing to focus on is the strategic focus and tactical brilliance of the civil rights movement and the way it was laser focused on a set of achievable goals

Opinion | One Year of Trump. The Time to Act Is Now, While We Still Can.

"Ask anyone who has lived in a country that became an autocracy, and they will tell you some version of a story about walls closing in on them, about space getting smaller and smaller. The space they are talking about is freedom." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/o...

I loved using the blow dryer thingy and watching the plastic wrap shrink. I worked for a music CD distributor that had one. One day a friend who was starting out as a lawyer came to visit me at my workplace and I showed it to him. He said, "no one at my firm ever asks me to shrink wrap anything."

THE song of 2026 (so far). by @axolotmusica on insta & tiktok.

OBITUARIES by Alexandra Grimm'17 EVELYN SKLAVER SHUMAN '40 died Sep- tember 24 in Chestnut Hil, Mass, at age 106. While an undergraduate she volunteered as a prenatal counselor at Boston Lying-In Hospital; as the war had rendered basic medical supplies scarce in the maternity ward, she advised that expectant mothers use newspapers to manage postpartum bleeding. Later in the war she spent four years working as a contact tracer of sexual ly transmitted diseases, particularly syphilis, in Boston. She lived for many years in Marblehead, where she participated in book clubs, regularly played bridge, and often took in a symphony performance on a Friday afternoon. She lived through 19 presidencies and was proud never to have voted for a Republican. She leaves three children, James, Robert, and Heidi Jay; her hus- band, Harold, predeceased her.

Avoiding my geopolitical anxiety by reading the Harvard Magazine obits, and damn this issue starts off with a banger

St. Elsewhere (1982–88) medical drama -185 eps : Joshua Brand, John Falsey, John Masius, Mark Tinker : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive St. Elsewhere (1982–88) FILMED IN NEWTON MA -185 eps_The lives and work of the staff of St. Eligius Hospital, an old and disrespected Boston teaching...

archive.org/details/st.-...

A plastic bread bag featuring illustrations of The Supremes and text reading: The Supremes Special Edition White Bread

We saw one of The Supremes’ White Bread bags, which I hadn’t known about before!!

“A plastic bread bag for The Supremes ‘Special Formula’ White Bread that was marketed in 1966 by Schafer Bakers in Lansing, MI, in partnership w Hitsville Merchandising in Detroit.”

A Bay Area Librarian Is Using Vintage Vinyl to Show Tweens Where Music Comes From Gina Cargas reached out to the community about collecting records for her middle school students. The response was overwhelming.

www.coyotemedia.org/a-bay-area-l...

And a museum exhibition: www.sfomuseum.org/exhibitions/...

New Haven's Sally's Apizza plans to become "the Chipotle of pizza" Sally's Apizza on Wooster Street in New Haven, Connecticut, is an iconic institution among pizza lovers. The small restaurant crammed with photos and memorabilia on the walls and a coal-fired…

I wrote on @boingboing.net about Sally’s Apizza, a tiny, legendary family pizza shop in Connecticut that was bought by an investment conglomerate that plans to make it “the Chipotle of pizza.”
boingboing.net/2025/12/22/n...

Betty Reid Soskin, nation's oldest park ranger, has died. She was 104 Betty Reid Soskin, one of the nation's most iconic park rangers, died peacefully at her home in Richmond on Sun., Dec. 21, 2025. She was 104.

Betty Reid Soskin, one of the nation's most iconic park rangers, died peacefully at her home in Richmond on Sun., Dec. 21, 2025. She was 104.

I don’t really have any family holiday traditions, but given that I’ve now seen Low Cut Connie at the Stone Pony in December 3 times with my oldest childhood friend, I think this counts as a tradition.

Texas royalty Joe Ely has passed away today.