I have been meaning to post about this every October since I have been putting my mundane thoughts on the web some 15 Halloweens ago. As Halloween nears lots of listicles are coming out now with things to read, watch, wear. eat, and numerous other verbs. Most of them are being generated by Ai scraped out and plopped in your feed like so much pumpkin guts…or brains… When the pumpkin becomes a head the guts become brains…Anywho, this isn’t about pumpkin innards; it’s about a mysterious beast in Scotland (not that one) and a curse.
Continue reading A Long Way from DuckburgCategory Archives: Books
Crikey! Twenty Years Gone
My son has an uncanny ability to plan his exhibits around times that make them pertinent beyond the capricious interests of a child his age. Some of the other exhibits he’s curated have all landed in or around thematically appropriate semesters. (e.g. Smurfs’ 65th anniversary and the release of The Garfield Movie). This one is no exception.
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Ben and Me; Me and Ben
Today marks the 320th birthday of America’s favorite statesman, diplomat, scientist, and inventor. Having just missed posting Keaton on his birthday and Darwin on the annIversary of the Beagle sailing (and my new strategy of working across multiple days in drafts and not all at once) I am setting this one down. So here we go, on the correct day and in celebration of an American who has more books about him than he would have candles on his cake.
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Darwinning or Dar-Winning
Another installment of my son’s exhibits outside my office. Timely as ever we just finished this one up before the building closes for Christmas break. And as the HMS Beagle set sail with Darwin aboard on December 27, (1831), it’s worth sharing now.
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Watch it, Buster
We chanced across this gem of a book (The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore) a few weeks ago and after reading it–which I highly recommend–we went looking for the award winning short that was mentioned on the sticker.
We found it readily on youtube of all places, and I’ll link it below because it is indeed worth the 15 minutes. Go watch it first. Once you do, the rest of this will might make more sense.
Sesame Street
Just a few days before his next birthday and he chose to swap out Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with everyone’s friends from Sesame Street. To get to this street, you’ll need to find Bizzell Memorial Library and head to the third floor across from the PS call numbers. He chose this topic earlier in the year before it was announced that Sesame Street was losing funding, so it now has an added importance.
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Berenstain Bears
This is another of those larger exhibits my son helps out on. I want to do a much longer post about the Berenstain Bears and their evolution across the decades, but this one was a bit of a test for something I want to do every year as a kind of a summer reading program.
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Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Continuing on with the car theme, even if our Count Car is out of commission following some fuel pump failures and fouled plugs.
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Beetlejuice, Betelgeuse, BeatleJuice
All the planning in the world to drop a new post the week the sequel was released failed. I had 36 years to do this. I even had time to collect all the books. But, better late than never, so here goes my two Beetlejuice stories.
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A Dilly of a Birthday
A Whingdingdilly, anyway. I have been off the posts now for too long, with several that need to be written to conclude some chapters of life, but when I realized that today is the anniversary of my very first foray into blogging I ditched all of those self-reflective essays in favor of something more fun, and a far more important anniversary: today is Bill Peet’s birthday!
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