And so we reach the end of an other Halloween Countdown that Sorta Wasn’t. Behind the scenes, I managed to cram my October with all sorts of ghoulish delights, from 1970s made-for-TV devil movies to the original PS1 Silent Hill game to a long-overdue reread of Stephen King’s Night Shift. It was great fun, but […]

Might as well, I suppose. Recommended listening: The nice thing about clearing the archives is being able to double-dip musical selections with zero shame.

My plans to come roaring back after the Halloween Countdown didn’t pan out, but the time wasn’t entirely wasted. The world is awash in ill-conceived takes forged from bullshit and claims of unearned authority. Instead of joining that yowling chorus, I’ve decided it’s better to speak only when I have something to say. (On this […]

…and we’re back, just in time for the closing stretch. The Kid is doing fine, though things took a bit longer than expected. The same goes for getting back into my regular routine after eleven days of holding down the home front by myself while the ladies were at the hospital. At least my car […]

My plan for daily Countdown posts went into the shitter on Friday when we had to deal with the real-life nightmare of the Kid getting admitted to the hospital, where she and Maura have been since. It’s no COVID-related, but related to a preexisting condition. She’s doing okay though what happens next is still being […]

I’m not what form the Halloween Countdown will take this year. A deadly plague is sweeping a world already pushed to the brink of hysteria. Meanwhile, your humble narrator has spent the last six months walled up in his ancient New England manse, surrounded by dusty artifacts of bygone ages. His body still suffers the […]

A few years back this site was hit by a vandalism hack which injected spam links into every published post up until that point. While I managed to clean out the malicious scripts, my inelegant brute force solution did not undo the damage to the site’s archives. That left a decade’s worth of posts — […]

I started this feature without having a coherent plan,just a nostalgia-tinted swirl of memories unearthed after flipping through some periodicals from the year in question. Now that the project is done, I’m still not sure what I was trying to accomplish, much less whether or not I succeeded in doing so. 1983 was the year […]

When I embarked on my deep dive of Google Books’ digital archive of Billboard, I picked 1975 as my starting date. That year offered the best intersection between my childhood nostalgia and my historical interests — enough faint memories to avoid abstraction while offering a solid vantage point for observing the ascendancy of disco, the […]