Some time back WP convulsed and died. This wouldn’t have been bad if the backup services I was paying for had saved everything. My page was thrown back to maintenance mode when I moved over to an external hosting system in 2017. I was absolutely sick over losing all that completely irrelevant stuff. And internet Archive which has been diligently crawling my site had failed to catch anything for the entire year of 2020.
Mummy Dearest
My son recently turned two. He also recently became incredibly interested in all things mummy. This could be from the six-feet-tall Tut sarcophagus bookshelf we have or it could be from one of the shows that we’ve watched. Anyone who has children will tell you that if the like something you get to partake of it over and over again. Luckily, there are a few outlets for mummy content across the shows we’ve been watching. It’s an interesting list if for nothing else than to think about how solidly Egyptology and Mummies’ Curses are engrained into our popular culture. Continue reading Mummy Dearest
Go West Young Viewer
After putting together and talking about the post on made for TV movies, I was talking to my grandfather (Papaw) about them. I call him every Sunday and have for nearly the entire time I haven’t been living in the same town. We lived on a dirt road in Texas and my grandparents’ house was at the end, we were about halfway down, hayfields, gardens, horses, cows, bees, emus at one time, all in between. He couldn’t remember watching The Spring, though he did say that was twenty years ago and he was starting to get old. He turned 89 this past May 4th.
We then started talking about the westerns that came on television during the same span of time. Many of those we watched together, too. Through the conversation he listed a few he could remember and I added to them and had to take to the computer to find the title of one neither of us could remember but knew several key plot points–more on that one later. As I was making the list with him, there were a couple that were also part of an evening’s entertainment at my other grandparents’ house across town, which may be what these posts have actually been about.
My Voyages with Doctor Dolittle
Do they give awards for trailer editing? This one was done really well, it revealed nothing, didn’t give all the best parts, and even kept some things unknown. At least the first one did, I didn’t see the official second trailer until I was putting together media for this post.
Shead and the Bishop
Back when I first started unraveling the travels and works of Ralph Brownell Shead I came across this article in the Indianapolis Start dated January 8, 1935 (Elvis Presley’s Birthday).
Shead and the Chickasaw Rancher
So much has been rolling along since the beginning of the year it all deserves it’s own retelling, and will likely get one after I forget what all the things were. But, this one bears a share as soon as possible so it can be added to the Shead story at large that has somehow ended up my major secondary project in life, and a very rewarding one.
Hat’s All Folks
This may be the most important post that I ever write. Also the most rigorously academic, and in 10 years probably the most read. We have recently gotten the Boomerang streaming app so that we have all of the stuff I already own conveniently playable from the Apple TV. Currently my son’s favoritest thing to watch is Magilla Gorilla so to stretch it out we’ve been watching a lot more of the Hanna Barbera productions that I remember watching growing up. They aren’t all on the app itself, so I’ve had to dig things out. As we’ve been going through I noticed how many of the characters’ personas are summed up in their clothes. Well, really hats. Many times their uniform is just a hat and a tie. We all know this, but I thought it was a great idea to consolidate them here, try and figure out what kind of hat it is, and, since the library recalled ALL of my checked out books and has yet to reshelve them so I can check them out again, a good way to keep up a word count weekend while not dissertating. And these are just from the Hanna-Barbera Universe
Under the Tenfluence: Books
I finally tracked down my last missing Prehistoric Zoobooks, but have not had the time to put them in a proper post, it is still on the list though. I am working more on my dissertation at the moment and with a new routine at home due to the arrival of my son at the end of June things are a bit up in the air with anything that isn’t deadline/need-based driven. To that end though here is something that I am retrofitting for a full post that was done in a series on Facebook. It was one of those “10_____ that influenced (or some other verb) me” chain tags that go around from time to time. I usually ignore them, but this one came an a time of reflection on my own habits and what I was writing about early American readership so I decided to take something flippant and approach it in a way I could use it for a blog post. In fact, for people starting out blogging or online journaling these types of lists may provide a nice ease into the pool.
Zoobooks
I was talking to a friend about paleoart a couple weeks ago. We were talking about how the first thing you absorb about something is generally what establishes your head canon and makes it hard to change. I realized that a good portion of mine came from two-page spreads in Zoobooks like this one:
Summer at the Museum
I was originally just going to throw some fun screen grabs from these early time machine Phineas and Ferb episodes up on the Paleo Porch facebook page and be done. While going through the episodes for the shots though I noticed there was more to say and show about the museum than just the “back-in-time-with-dinosaurs” trope.
