Ben(d Sinister)

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

what else what else. do you guys think st augustine was hung

I do remember something from the season 1 blu ray set of B7 to the effect that the model unit sometimes didn't read what the director requested and just sent what they thought would be wanted, which if I've recalled accurately, wouldn't help.

"The government don't interfere in police decisions like this, except when they want to."

In which role? Although the answer is still 'not that im aware of'

Glory, glory hallelujah!

Facebook post from Kaleb Horton, September 18, 2017: Toys R Us is probably going out of business this year. I'm fascinated by the collapse of retail, because what it really signifies is the collapse of the 20th century. The reason I pushed to profile guys like Harry Dean Stanton, Merle Haggard and Chuck Berry, was that writing about them is a way of writing about the 20th century, and how different it was from where we are now. How shockingly different, in retrospect. The migration out of the south, the descent of the Dust Bowl, which was a Biblical plague; the millions of people who were killed during World War Two. Monoculture, and the idea that a great episode of a television show would be seen by *half of all people.* The arrival of flight, and the end of horses. Homes without electricity. Coming of age without computers, without television. Listening to the radio for entertainment. The 20th century was a long time ago and it's a ghost now. It's a ghost you see in the places you wouldn't expect. It's seen in towns that were bypassed by the freeways, the dusty little towns out west that still have old diners and motels and payphones. It's seen in the places that we left, places where mines shut down, places where tourist attractions died off. It's seen in Bakersfield with Buck Owens' Crystal Palace and it's seen in Roswell, which stubbornly maintains the relics of the '90s UFO boom. Things like that won't be around forever. Someday owners will die and towns will burn and they won't be rebuilt. And it's difficult to suss out what those things are, because they're on roads, physical and metaphorical, that we no longer travel.

The ghost sightings happen in stupid places, unexpected places, and uncool places. A few months ago, I went with Marie to the Toys R Us on Victory Blvd. in Burbank, which still looks exactly like it did in Back to the Future in 1985 somehow. It's not nostalgia that you see there, it's just a customer base and economic model that's aging and won't be around a lot longer, and it's *boring.* There's no reason for anyone to ever go to Lancer's, the little diner by that Toys R Us. Because it's not good. People go there out of tradition, and old habits. 80 and 90 year olds go there. We were lining up for a Nintendo, which is still a hard thing to keep stocked in stores. Toys R Us was actually the best place to obtain one, because it's no longer a place children beg their parents to take them to. When we went in, wham, there it was. The ghost of 1996. I was 8 years old, for a fraction of a second. The feeling wasn't nostalgia, it was a kind of temporal dislocation. A confusion. But it wasn't an immaculate 1996, it was a fading 1996. It was lonelier than I remember it. It's time for Toys R Us to go out of business. It was time ten years ago, fifteen. There are reasons to be nostalgic about the 20th century. We weren't plugged into so many wires, so many screens. We were a little bit closer to the process of manufacturing and agriculture than we are now. We made more things by hand, and our goals as people were uniquely audacious and driven by mad, desperate power that was temporary and had to end.

But the 20th century was hopelessly cruel and soaked in blood. The 20th century gave us flight, but it also gave us bombs that can end the world and Richard Nixon and his evil sidekick Kissinger and it gave us new mutations of slavery and race and class subjugation and it gave us useless, disgusting monuments to Confederate slavers and traitors and cowards. It gave us President Trump, who wouldn't exist today without New York City's collective cocaine addiction in the 1980s. I want to find the ghosts, not because I miss the past -- the good old days can't return because they're imaginary and what you really miss is youth and if you're lucky a warm feeling of safety -- but because I don't even know what things we'll lose, or when we'll lose them, or how long we have to document them. I know ghosts when I see them. Toys R Us for the mundane side and the Salton Sea for the widescreen wasteland side. But I have absolutely no idea how many there are. I figure people go first, then places. Those are the things we have a limited time to physically document and historically examine and preserve on film. The ideas will go away much slower, and some of them may be eternal, like cold wars. But those are a lot less fun because you don't get to drive to them.

And now I'm just spelunking around and here's this Facebook post by Kaleb Horton from September 2017. It was three months after MTV dumped its freelancers. I'm sure it would have been a piece there; instead he posted this on FB just to have it written out: Toys 'R' Us as societal microcosm.

More surviving episodes i mean; i don't wish it were longer. Im not that crazy.

Niche dr who opinion here but I wish we had more of The Daleks' Master Plan.

Amazingly, this is a description of a mid-90s bbc sitcom that got 3 series.

I seem to recall (im not watching it again any time soon) that the female protagonist just drops out of the story halfway through too. Its absolute bobbins.

The two Collected Poems published in his lifetime also saw edits and rewrites to some of the work that was included, iirc, so he was a tinkerer.

It was edited by his son so it may have been a non-legally-binding decision the younger MacCaig wished to respect. Still, they should have called it Selected Poems or something of that sort.

Norman MacCaig was so disdainful of his first two books that even the posthumous collected poems which finds room for 100 previously unpublished pieces omits them entirely. They're not that bad either.

Aaaarrgghhh!

You shouldn't just post that first one without some kind of a warning.

@drmaudbailey.bsky.social
Been on a day out, saw this, thought of you x

My 'phone give me alerts every time it finds a Peugeot 504 for sale. I didn't ask it to do that, I am not looking to buy one abd don't remember ever googling it, but here we are.

It is very funny to me that Bezos paid an actual billion dollars for the right to ruin James Bond.

I can only speak for myself, but I often found I could get a secondhand hardback for less than the price of one of these, and that would have a sewn binding and be properly typeset.

I don't think the canteen is in the first season, although I can't remember when it first pops up.

Unsure if the caption on screen there is the caller's name or an urgent instruction.

Carl Giles was a fascinating man. A few months after this he was with the Coldstream Guards when they liberated Bergen-Belsen.

The German camp commander got excited and kept banging on about how much of a fan of Giles war cartoons he was. Kept asking for a signed drawing. /1

Boys only want one thing and it's a Meadows Frisky.

And to think many accuse them of not actively doing anything!

Now thinking I might go all in on Arrthur Askey impressions instead.

Thinking of going all in on 'The Blood of Christ' as my Thing.

My pleasure! I'm just glad it was real and not a fever dream I had or something.