Creature Double Feature is one of the lowest hanging fruits on the Gen X Bostonian nostalgia tree, familiar to any child of the Seventies who lived within WLVI’s broadcast range and had access to a TV set on Saturday afternoons. Bring it up in a gathering of local forty-somethings and you’ll get a chorus of […]

I’ve recently been scanning eBay’s listings for reasonably priced copies of old Sears Wish Books. While there’s a excellent online depository of these holiday catalogs, it has a few unfortunate gaps which happen to align with areas of particular interest for me. Besides, when it comes to this type of artifact, there’s no substitute for […]

My GRAVE-est apologies for GHOST-ing on yesterday’s post, but I was being tormented by a lost set of car keys and supposedly-but-not-actually faxed important paperwork and other real life terrors more fiendish than any salivating hellbeast. In any case, here’s a cursed artifact from a 1984 Billboard insert covering the rental-driven horror flick boom… While […]

Me (internally): “Things have been too hectic to update the site more than once or twice a week. Should I even bother attempting the Halloween Countdown this year?” The Kid (via text): “hey pop check out the new doll me and mom got” (By the way, the person who crafted the doll must have filled […]

After switching my focus from 12-inch longplayers to 7-inch singles, I began assembling a shortlist of preferred vendors for my 45 RPM fix. It wasn’t an intentional process, but something that developed as I noticed some of the same seller names popping up on my purchases page. All shared a few certain qualities. They had […]

As far as masculine role models went, the lads of the early Reagan Era could’ve done worse than Indiana Jones. Rough, rugged, and capable of dealing out (or rolling with) a stiff slug to the jaw, the intrepid archaeologist was also a man of letters whose laconic demeanor masked a sharp wit. Indiana Jones was […]

My sixth grade yearbook is a stack of mimeographed sheets stapled between two pieces of colored construction paper. My entry for the front cover illustration — a row of inelegantly rendered arcade cabinets with “GAME OVER” scrawled above them — didn’t get the top prize but did make it onto the final page. The document […]

It was the week that put the work in “working vacation — eight days to finish getting the house in order before the Kid’s first overnight stay with us. It was also the first truly sweltering stretch of the season, coming right on the heels of having four of my teeth extracted. By the time […]

By my entirely subjective standards, there are few albums as “essential” as Belly’s Star. The fancy-pants 180-gram double-LP reissue of the band’s 1993 debut was one of my first “new” vinyl acquisitions, which was covered (among other tangential ramblings) in a previous post. It has also been spun a grand total of four or five […]

I really wanted to write a detailed analysis about how the Cool World soundtrack manifested from a space-time fold which curved above and below the temporal brane of the Grunge Era, past and future coexisting as pits on photonically agitated polycarbonate… …but I can’t stop wincing about the separate listings for the Thompson Twins and […]