Magazine Memories

Posted on January 20, 2024 by Granger Meador
January 2024

Magazines date back to the 1600s, with the use of the term itself being expanded to include printed periodicals in 1731 by Gentleman’s Magazine. That title reflected the earlier use of “magazine” for military stores and information…the publication was a “storehouse” of information. But magazines waned in the early 21st century, and by January 2024, even Sports Illustrated was on the ropes.

Every segment of the magazine business, including publishing, printing, distributing, and retailing, has been consolidated as the business imploded. After 2012, Newsweek was no longer printed, being available only digitally. From 2011 to 2021, the average American’s engagement with magazines halved from 24 minutes per day to 12. Over that period, broadcast media also declined: radio listening by 19% and television viewing by 24%, while the time spent consuming media on mobile devices increased by 460%.

Magazines are now a tiny slice of the average daily media consumption, at less than 2%

The implosion of the magazine business led me to recall the various magazines I subscribed to for over 50 years. As of 2024, I’m down to a single print subscription and one other quarterly magazine I pick up at a bookstore, although I also still dip into a few others in their online forms via Apple News+.

Growing up with magazines

National Geographic World

My father was an avid reader and collector of National Geographic, which covered geography, history, nature, science, and world culture. When National Geographic World , which was produced for children, debuted in 1975, my father gave me a subscription.

My father, who worked to fill out his own collection of the adult form of the magazine, started building a second collection of that which he intended to give to me. But I never found the adult magazine that interesting. As a teenager, I convinced him to sell off the spare set of issues and put that money toward completing his own collection.

He eventually had almost every issue from the early 1900s onward, but when he reached his 80s, he started downsizing and opted to sell that off. I bought him a set of compact discs that contained every old issue, but he consulted those sparingly.

National Geographic began in 1888 as a scholarly journal, and began to include photographs in 1905. It peaked in the late 1980s with 12 million subscribers in the USA and more abroad. As of 2022 it had 1.8 million subscribers, had laid off all of its staff writers in favor of relying on freelance writers, and it will end newsstand purchases in 2024.

As for my mother, she read Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and Southern Living, but I found those even more dull than Dad’s National Geographic and Smithsonian.

Reader’s Digest

I remember reading the excerpt in this issue of Michener’s book on Kent State

My father also subscribed to Reader’s Digest, which began in 1922 with DeWitt Wallace and his wife Lila Bell Wallace. DeWitt was recovering from shrapnel wounds received in World War I and had the idea of gathering a sampling of favorite articles from various monthly magazines, sometimes condensing and rewriting them, to form a digest. He was unsuccessful in selling the idea to publishers until he met and married feminist reformer Lila Acheson, who encouraged him to publish it himself.

For several decades it had 30 articles per issue to encourage readers to consume one per day, and the tables of contents were on the front cover. It was always grounded in conservative social and political values, and its domestic circulation peaked in 1984 at 17 million.

One of my father’s fellow Cities Service Gas Company employees had purchased a lifetime subscription to the magazine back in the Great Depression, and he had saved all of the issues for decades. When he decided to part with them, they came to me when I was in junior high, filling the bottom of one of my bedroom closets. I enjoyed reading the humor sections and found some of the book excerpts interesting. In particular, I recall reading their condensation of James A. Michener’s Kent State: Campus Under Fire from a decade earlier and how old-fashioned many issues seemed to my young self. I eventually disposed of the collection when I realized it had included some silverfish as an unwanted bonus.

Reader’s Digest also produced condensed books

In 1950, Reader’s Digest also began producing hardcover anthologies of abridged novels and nonfiction. For decades they issued four volumes each year, each containing abridged versions of three to six current best-selling novels and nonfiction books. They were quite popular, boasting 10 million copies sold in 1987, but used copies were little regarded. When we stayed at my paternal grandparents’ home, the headboard of the bed in the guest bedroom had bookshelves filled with old Reader’s Digest condensed books. Even though I was an avid reader, I steered clear of them. Condensing a magazine article was fine with me, as I had no qualms in stopping midway through one if my interest waned, but abridged books seemed sacrilegious. I remember how many paperbacks would reassure you on their copyright pages that “NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED”.

The Condensed Book series ended in 1997, but it was merely replaced with Reader’s Digest Select Editions that continue to be published. As for the magazine, its domestic circulation peaked in 1984 at 17 million. DeWitt and Lila died in 1981 and 1984, respectively, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and 2013, but still survives over a century after it began with a reported circulation of over 3 million with 49 foreign editions in 21 languages.

My Weekly Reader

The first periodical I had my own subscription to was My Weekly Reader, an educational magazine that I avidly consumed. Eleanor Johnson founded it in 1928. I read it during its circulation high point in the late 1960s and early 1970s when 13 million issues went out each week, with an edition for each elementary school grade, and Ms. Johnson was still editing each one. She edited it for over 50 years and passed away in 1987. The publication survived, sometimes as just Weekly Reader, until 2012 when it was consumed by the competing Scholastic News.

Highlights

I was also given a subscription to the Highlights children’s magazine for few years. Garry Cleveland Myers and his wife Caroline Clark Myers began producing it in 1946. My favorite regular features in those were Goofus and Gallant and the hidden pictures drawings.

Garry Myers wrote the Goofus and Gallant cartoons about social skills, with Goofus always behaving poorly and Gallant choosing a responsible, mature, and kind alternative. The characters were originally in the magazine Children’s Activities where the Myers worked for a dozen years before starting Highlights.

The Goofus and Gallant comic first appeared in Highlights in 1948. In my time reading it, the drawings were by Marion Hull Hammel.

Goofus & Gallant were originally drawn as elves, but they became human boys by the 1950s. Maurieta Wellman was the artist until 1952, and then Marion Hull Hammel took over and drew it through my era and on through 1984. After that it was drawn by Sidney Quinn, Kit Wray, Anni Matsick, and now Leslie Harrington. They have now appeared in over a billion issues of the magazine.

Did you know that Goofus and Gallant were originally depicted as elves?

The lads are popular enough to have been the subject of parody:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

In junior high, I had to sell some magazine subscriptions as a school-related fundraiser. I used my own allowance to purchase a subscription to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I was no doubt influenced by Robert Arthur, Jr.’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators book series, which I loved as more mature successors to the Hardy Boys mysteries I read in elementary school. They originally featured the famed movie director interacting with the boy investigators at the start and end of each book.

The magazine had been launched in 1956 by HSD Publications. There was no formal connection with Hitchcock’s television shows of 1955-1965, although stories in the magazine were sometimes adapted into television episodes. Davis Publications owned the magazine in the era when I was reading it, with caricatures of Hitchcock appearing on the covers even after his death in April 1980. The magazine was sold to Dell Magazines in 1992 and Dell still publishes it along with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which dates back to 1941.

I enjoyed most of the short stories in the mystery magazine, but I had too many other reading interests to finish each issue. So they began piling up, with me feeling guilty about not reading more of them. After a few years, I finally chose to cancel my subscription.

Mad

I didn’t read Mad as a kid, although my father did pick up at a garage sale a couple of paperbacks of reprints of old features from Mad that I enjoyed. They seemed a bit old-fashioned, coming from earlier decades, but I liked their retro style, cynicism, and absurdity. Mad was launched in 1952 as a comic book and became a magazine in 1955. It peaked in popularity in 1973-1974 with a readership of over two million.

I remember laughing at this Al Jaffee article in one of the paperbacks my father got for me

Mad‘s “The Usual Gang of Idiots” was quite stable, with some creators contributing to the publication for 30-50 years. In 2007, I bought Absolutely Mad, a DVD with the first 460 issues of the magazine, so I have all of those available in my Google Drive. I did subscribe to Mad for a year or two in the 2010s, having enjoyed seeing contributor Dick DeBartolo, “Mad‘s Maddest Writer”, in technology podcasts. He had new material in every issue from 1966 to 2019, and the original magazine ended in 2018 at issue 550. There is now a rebooted version, consisting mostly of reprints, available as of this writing in comic book stores and by subscription.

Omni

I was a library aide in junior high, so I had ready access to the school’s magazines. I remember spotting Omni, which launched in 1978 and had articles on science, science fiction, and parapsychology. I knew science fiction author Ben Bova was associated with it, but I had no idea that it was funded by Bob Guccione of Penthouse fame. Omni was founded by Kathy Keeton, who had met Guccione in 1965. They were married in 1988 and were quite a pair.

I was initially excited that Omni had articles on science and science fiction. It was a slick production, with high-quality paper and graphics, but I was generally disappointed by its content, which I found to be of limited interest, particularly anything to do with parapsychology. Omni was gone by 1997, although a couple of issues were published in 2017 in a failed revival attempt.

Computer Magazines

It was home computers that truly got me into purchasing and reading magazines on a regular basis.

The Color Computer Magazine

I had the first and second iterations of Radio Shack’s Color Computer, and I subscribed to The Color Computer Magazine from its launch in March 1983 until its demise in October 1984.

Byte

My friend Sam subscribed to Byte magazine, which was founded in 1975 and lasted in print form until 1998. That is how I discovered Jerry Pournelle’s Computing at Chaos Manor column. Jerry described his experiences with computer hardware and software in a funny, frank, and sometimes irascible style. I enjoyed it enough to subscribe to Byte myself until it folded.

PC Magazine & PC Computing

Another magazine I subscribed to for many years was PC Magazine. It had wonderfully detailed and thorough reviews of computers and their peripherals, along with fun columns and articles by Jim Seymour.

I liked Seymour’s writing so much that I also subscribed to PC Computing in 1988 since he was the founding editor. Jim was a folksy and irreverent evangelist for empowering individuals through personal computers. He famously submitted a column to PC Magazine with profane language about a computer program he disliked. A copy editor asked the magazine’s editor-in-chief, “Can we say that in PC Magazine?” The reply was, “We can’t, but Jim can.”

I loved Jim Seymour’s work

PC Magazine grew to a considerable size at its peak, reaching 800 pages in December 1983. In 1984 it switched to two-issues-per-month, which lasted until 2008. Its circulation peaked at 1.2 million in the late 1990s. Circulation had dropped to about 600,000 by 2009 when the print version was discontinued. The magazine format was still available online until December 2022, but it now only survives as the pcmag.com website.

I am impressed that all of the print issues are archived at Google Books. Happily there are a number of magazines archived at Google Books and at the Internet Archive.

Computer Shopper

Computer Shopper was a thick tabloid magazine printed on cheap pulp

A magazine that I never subscribed to but picked up on a few occasions was the massive Computer Shopper. It was produced from 1979 to 2009 and was a tabloid, meaning it was larger than a typical magazine, and often had over 800 pages of pulp newsprint. It looked like a giant ad catalog, although it did have articles and editors.

Some used to joke that it was thick enough to stop bullets, but some of the Shopper’s editors and writers put that to the test at a Las Vegas gun range at one of the old Comdex trade shows. There was, as senior editor Dan Rosenbaum recalled, “general surprise when we discovered that even the thickest Shopper couldn’t stop even a .22 — but a .45 made a spectacular pile of newsprint confetti.”

Wired

A magazine that both intrigued and frustrated me was Wired. It often had interesting articles, but its garish day-glo design and tiny font sizes often made it needlessly difficult to read. It debuted in 1993 and won a design award in 2005, a sure sign that readability was not a priority.

I subscribed to Wired in print from 2005-2012, then digitally in 2018, and again in 2023 after hitting the paywall too many times. I still like the articles, but I’m grateful that their web versions are toned down, since some modern magazine layouts are truly obnoxious.

The layouts one sees these days appear to be attempts to trigger attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

News Magazines

I subscribed to Time for 30 years

As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I subscribed to to Time, which began in 1923 as the first weekly news magazine in the USA. It had a circulation of over 20 million at its peak, but had fallen to 4 million by 2006. Single-copy sales plummeted from over 116,000 in 2008 to about 58,000 in 2012. In 2020 it was reduced to one issue every two weeks, and as of 2023, it reportedly had 1.3 million print subscribers and 250,000 digital subscribers.

Over the 30 years I subscribed to the magazine, I especially enjoyed art criticism by Robert Hughes, film reviews by Richard Corliss, essays by Lance Morrow and Pico Iyer, a column by Joel Stein, and articles by Nancy Gibbs.

In his long retirement, my father subscribed to Newsweek, the weekly newsmagazine that ceased print publication in 2012. I would see it on his coffee table during holiday visits and peruse it, finding it thinner and fluffier than Time.

I continued to enjoy reading Time until the mid-2010s, when I noticed that fewer of its articles had information that was novel for me. I started skipping reading it; years of staff cuts had taken their toll on Time‘s coverage, and I had more timely access to text news on my iPad. The magazine grew steadily thinner, so when Meredith bought Time Inc. in 2018, announcing major staff cuts and its plan to sell off the magazine, I finally cancelled my subscription.

For several years in the 2010s, I subscribed to the print edition of The New Yorker, since I enjoyed its long-form articles. But eventually the number of articles that interested me declined, so I switched to a digital-only subscription, and I finally cancelled it once I subscribed to Apple News+ and could use it to access The New Yorker and a slew of other magazines on my iPad. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I found The Atlantic to be a great source of information, although, like NPR, The New Yorker, and other sources I enjoy, it skews left politically. When I desire facts over analysis, I prefer Reuters and AP.

Speaking of news bias, a valuable chart that plots news sources on axes of news value and reliability and political bias is the Interactive Media Bias Chart.

Professional Periodicals

I had dial-up modem access to a CompuServe account beginning in high school in the early 1980s. As an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma in the 1980s, I repeatedly enrolled in an Engineering Computing course, even after I enrolled in the College of Education, so that I could also enjoy dial-up modem access to Usenet newsgroups.

I then moved to Bartlesville and taught physics at the high school from 1989 to 2017. The World Wide Web wasn’t public when I began my teaching career, so printed periodicals were vital links to the wider world of my profession.

So I was a long-time member of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society, which yielded subscriptions to The Physics Teacher and Physics Today. I got a handful of good ideas from the former which I implemented over the years.

I was also a longtime member of the National Science Teachers Association, so I received NSTA Reports. Throughout my teaching career, I was a member of the local chapter of the Oklahoma Education Association. Thus I received its local newsletter along with the state-level OEA Focus periodical and NEA Today. In the 1990s, when I was doing graduate work in curriculum and instruction, I was also a member of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and received its Educational Leadership periodical.

I left all that behind when I transitioned to district administration in 2017, and while I receive complimentary copies of the aptly named District Administration, I usually toss those in the trash since I have found little in them to assist my roles in communications and technology.

Entertainment

A magazine that I have purchased for many years at Barnes & Noble bookstores is Filmfax, which bills itself as “The Magazine of Unusual Film & Television”. It covers old Universal Studios monster movies, 1950s film noir, interviews with actors and directors, and other nostalgic coverage of the entertainment of yesteryear. It was published every other month for some time and later published quarterly. It always includes several pages of ads about its own back issues; that and the lack of an online presence told me that it was a small operation.

The internet informs me that Michael Stein created it in 1986 and was publishing it while a professor at the Medill School of Journalism, later devoting all of his time to publishing Filmfax and another magazine titled Outré. A 2004 article reported that Michael Stein was 59 with a staff of two working out of a small loft in Skokie, Illinois, and most of the magazine’s stories were by freelance journalists.

The only print magazine I now have a subscription for is bmonthly, a local magazine managed by Keith and Christy McPhail. One can pick up free copies of it at various local businesses, but I would sometimes miss an issue, so I subscribed. I appreciate the local history articles in it by Debbie Neece, Mike Wilt, Sarah Leslie Gagan, Kay Little, et al. along with other features. I could simply read the online version, but with its emphasis on photography, I enjoy thumbing through its printed glossy pages.

A local magazine I enjoy

The Future

While I prefer audiobooks and e-books over traditional paper books, paper is still more than twice as popular as those other formats.

That supports the idea that while print magazines have faded, there is a long tail for them, especially ones emphasizing photography and esoteric topics, that might stretch out through the rest of my lifetime. Algorithms dominate digital media distribution, and artificial intelligence is impacting content creation, but magazines are especially well suited to human curation focused on smaller communities and niche interests. Only time will tell.

Posted in history, nostalgia, random | 1 Comment

Parental Guidance Suggested

Posted on January 13, 2024 by Granger Meador
January 2024

Libraries have been at the forefront of recent culture wars. Much of the political posturing and consequent legislation appear to be performative, since many titles are readily available online through Books Unbanned and other initiatives. Personally, I’m all for parents regulating what their own children experience, but I am skeptical about those who wish to impose their will upon other parents and students. I am necessarily a censor myself: in my technology role in a public school district, I must help enforce the Children’s Internet Protection Act.

One of my 1980 Christmas presents

Censorship and book banning are nothing new, of course, and there have long been accompanying concerns when they stray beyond protecting children. Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 as a cautionary tale about conformity, technology, and government censorship. When I was assigned to read it in junior high, I didn’t find it as compelling as his fantastic short stories, which were so good that I asked for a collection of them for Christmas. I do recall liking how in the book the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles, who memorized books to preserve them, was named Granger. I remember pondering which book I would choose to memorize in such a situation.

My adopted home of Bartlesville has its own history of library censorship gone awry. In 1950, librarian Ruth Brown was fired on trumped-up charges of supplying “subversive” materials. She was actually fired because of her support for racial desegregation and civil rights. Many decades later, the Bartlesville Women’s Network commissioned a bronze bust of Brown for the library lobby, along with an exterior wall mural.

My own youthful encounters with censorship and ratings involved comics, music, and movies, rather than books. All of them involved efforts by the respective industries to self-regulate and thus avoid legislative censorship and suppression.

Comics

The comics I purchased in the 1970s all featured an odd seal on their cover, saying they were approved by the Comics Code Authority. That was a self-regulation scheme among publishers in the United States. It was instituted in 1954 after an episode of moral panic centered around Senate hearings and the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.

The comics code was revised in 1971, and I’ve previously shared how the grittier Bronze Age Batman stories did not appeal to me when I was a child. The Code’s power weakened in the 1980s and 1990s, with the influential Watchmen series released by DC in 1986 without a CCA Seal of Approval, and the Code was finally abandoned in the early 21st century.

More sophisticated ways for media companies to self-regulate involved ratings and warnings rather than content codes. Ratings could allow for greater artistic expression while providing guidance to parents looking to censor what their children experienced.

Music

Music ratings didn’t become a thing until after I graduated from high school. Tipper Gore founded the Parents Music Resource Center, pushing for a ratings system and for lyrics to be printed on the backs of albums. Senate hearings followed, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) responded by introducing a standard Parental Advisory label for recordings with “explicit content”. Walmart famously refused to stock any music carrying that label.

As for what constitutes “explicit content”, there are no standards, just general guidelines. The RIAA suggests the advisory be used for material with “strong language or depictions of violence, sex, or substance abuse to such an extent to merit parental notification” while its British equivalent also suggests that “racist, homophobic, misogynistic or other discriminatory language or behavior” merits a warning.

The effectiveness of the “Tipper stickers” has been questioned, with some suspecting kids might simply seek out music with the adornment. But “Explicit” labels persist, and the major streaming services have optional settings to block such content.

Explicit songs I like

I generally prefer to avoid explicit lyrics, but I do like some songs that would push some people’s buttons, such as Lola by The Kinks from 1970 and Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side from 1972, which both reference transgender people. The latter is famously also quite direct about prostitution and oral sex among characters at Andy Warhol’s New York studio.

I generally shy away from songs with curse words in their lyrics, but I must admit that Cee Lo Green’s cleaned-up Forget You from 2010 lacks the punch of the original song, and I understand why John Grant invoked the curse in his Gmf.

Movies

As for motion pictures, their first attempt at self-regulation was the Motion Picture Production Code applied to most films from 1934 to 1968. It arose after various Hollywood scandals led to almost a hundred film censorship bills across 37 states in 1921. Around the time of my birth, Jack Valenti successfully pushed for the old code to be replaced by a ratings system.

The original movie ratings system

The original movie ratings were G, M, R, and X. M was later renamed GP and then PG, which finally stuck, and the added PG-13 rating didn’t come along until 1984 when I went to college. X eventually became NC-17. My parents took me to G-rated movies when I was young, and I was perturbed when I saw my first PG films, being unused to rude and profane movie characters.

I associated R ratings with violence, profanity, and sex/nudity. The first R-rated movie I recall seeing was when some high school friends rented the 1981 slasher film My Bloody Valentine. I’d already seen Hitchcock’s Psycho on late night television, so I thought I was prepared, but my girlfriend and I found the slasher film sickening, even with nine minutes of its violence and gore cut to avoid an X rating.

When I turned 17, one of the first R-rated motion pictures I saw in a cinema was Silkwood, which lured me in not for its rating but because it was a factual story about a whistle-blower in Oklahoma. The next year I saw another R-rated film in a cinema, Amadeus, which was far less factual but is still one of my favorite films. After that, I saw far more movies on videotape than at a cinema, and what a movie was rated was less prominent for me.

There aren’t very many shots of Mathilda May in Lifeforce that I can share in my blog

A memorable cinematic experience in my introduction to R-rated films was seeing Lifeforce in 1985. The nudity in that science fiction/horror film was titillating, but I was put off by how some of the film’s plot stole heavily from a better and older film, which had no sex or nudity: Quatermass and the Pit. The most unusual thing about that showing of Lifeforce was how that was the only time I saw a sneak preview. When my best friend and I purchased our tickets, we were asked if we would agree to see another film first for free and fill out comment cards about it. As college guys not dealing with a curfew, we agreed. But I remember almost nothing about the preview we watched, except that I rated it very poorly. Lifeforce was too distracting, and if asked I would have given it a poor rating as well.

As for even-more-mature X or NC-17 movies, I don’t recall ever seeing one in a cinema. A friend and I rented 1971’s A Clockwork Orange in college, and I have shown Wendy 1969’s Midnight Cowboy and Bad Education from 2004. Years ago, I also watched 1995’s Showgirls for laughs. While none of those movies are appropriate for children, the first three are among the best films I have seen…and yeah, Showgirls is one of the worst. Ratings aren’t perfect, but I certainly prefer their use to production codes or bans that would block the creation and distribution of mature works for adults.

Back to Books

Banned books that were assigned to me in public school

Book censorship is far more fraught for me than slapping an explicit label on a song or a rating on a movie. It is interesting how many books that have been banned from various libraries over time were assigned reading when I was a public school student, including Huckleberry Finn, Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Comstock laws passed in the years after the Civil War criminalized the use of the postal service to send obscenity, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, and personal letters with any sexual content or information. Those laws were inspired by the widespread availability of pornography during the Civil War. An updated form of them is still on the books, although the legal definition of obscenity has changed over the years.

The courts originally held that all material tending “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” was obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit. That began to change in the USA in 1933, when James Joyce’s Ulysses was found to not be obscene. The courts decided that offensive language in a literary work was not obscene if it did not promote lust.

In 1957 a new test for obscenity was formulated: whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the material appeals to a prurient interest in sex, and whether the material was utterly without redeeming social value. In 1973 that second condition was modified so that materials with “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” were not to be considered obscene.

He knew it when he saw it

What any of that means is pretty darn vague, and effectively allowed many localities to crack down on adult theaters and bookstores, as well as nude dancing. It also explains why Bartlesville and many other venues have recently had disputations over whether or not particular performances in public forums were obscene. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his own test for obscenity. He replied, “I know it when I see it.”

That famous non-definition shows the difficulties inherent in censorship. People differ on what they find shameful or morbid. Some seek out steamy sex scenes in pulp romances or slash fiction, while others regard such material as obscene. Pornography of all sorts is readily available online, even as religious fundamentalists condemn it. And we are all too familiar with the rampant hypocrisy of many who vociferously promote what they claim to be “family values”.

My own preference is that adults self-regulate. If something offends you, then avoid it while heeding the advice first written down in 1622 in The Ancient Law Merchant: Leuen ende laeten leuen…live and let live.

Posted in books, movie, music, nostalgia, politics, random | 1 Comment

Comic Influence

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Granger Meador

Comic books have had a significant influence on my life, even though I only owned a few dozen in my childhood and have only read a few as an adult. They have influenced what I saw on television and in cinemas throughout my lifetime, and the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 2010s surprised me by its dominance of the box office for many years, although its stars are now dimming.

Exploring Comics

I shared a few months ago the stark contrast of the campy Batman television show of the 1960s with the dark tales of his 1970s comic books. That left me a bit leery of comics. I had never taken to the first comics I encountered, ones that my dentist stockpiled: Casper the Friendly Ghost and Archie. Casper was too childish, and Archie was focused on teen antics that I couldn’t identify with. I loved the Josie and the Pussycats television show from 1970-1972, but I don’t think I even knew it was based on a comic book.

My parents would take me on extended vacations to their vacation cabin on Table Rock Lake in the Ozarks. When I was young, there was just a black-and-white television there that my father had won at a hunting dog event, and even with a giant outdoor aerial, it could only pick up a couple of stations. So when it rained, shutting us in from the great outdoors, I needed additional entertainment.

I was a quick reader, so I exhausted the books we brought. On a rainy grocery shopping trip to the Ramey’s in Cassville, I spotted some three-packs of comic books on a rack and asked for one. That introduced me to more DC comics, featuring satellite-era Justice League of America, Superman, Green Lantern, and the like. I enjoyed the main stories along with the side adventures of minor characters like Atom and Plastic Man.

My favorite Superman comic was from September 1972. Oddly, the cover of Volume 1 #256 wasn’t about the better story in it, which was The Dagger that Ripped the Sky! I was fascinated by its depiction of a jet that had a human personality and created a puzzle for Superman to solve.

From my favorite Superman story

It was a strong story from Cary Bates, and greatly augmented by the artistry of Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson.

I was so impressed that from then on whenever we would go on a vacation in Missouri I would get my mother to buy me a Comicpac at the Ramey’s. But I didn’t get comic books back home in Oklahoma City; they were strictly a vacation luxury. I did get something of a fix via the animated Saturday morning show Super Friends, which began in 1973.

A fun music video based on remix of the theme from Super Friends

My best friend, the late Gene Freeman, had some issues of Superboy starring the Legion of Super-Heroes from the summer of 1975. Those interested me since they were set in the 30th and 31st centuries and featured the recognizable Superboy but teamed him with a panoply of characters I had never heard of, such as Karate Kid, Timberwolf, Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, and Duo Damsel. The artwork in Volume 1 #209 was far more sensual than I was used to.

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes featured plenty of young superheroes showing off their figures

I was intrigued, and eagerly read #210 and #211, and remember being scandalized that Star Trek‘s U.S.S. Enterprise was depicted as being in a junkyard. Sure, put the Jupiter 2 from the crummy Lost in Space there, but the Enterprise? How rude.

A nerdy digression: Trekkies like me will note that they based their depiction on the 33″ model of the Enterprise, not the 11-footer, the giveaway being the flat bottom of the saucer section since the smaller original model was made of solid wood and was turned on a lathe. As I compose this post, the 33″ model appears to have finally turned up after being AWOL for decades. How’s that for making a post about comic books even more nerdy?

Gene also had a few Marvel comics, such as Iron Man and the Fantastic Four. I was surprised at how their superheroes had conflicting and flawed characters. While those comics were interesting, I found that I favored idealism over realism. So I kept asking for DC, not Marvel, comics.

I didn’t keep any of my comic books as I grew up, but I have been and will continue to be exposed to plenty of media based on such books.

1970s TV & Movie Superheroes

The superhero television shows I watched were almost entirely characters from DC. By junior high I had not read any comic books for a few years, but I still liked watching syndicated reruns of Adam West’s Bright Knight and Burt Ward’s enthusiastic Robin. A neighbor tomboy and I had fun creating our own take-offs on the 1960s Batman show, recording Batgirl and Robin narrations on a cassette recorder in my back yard, laughing and giggling our way through our own comedic take on the Dynamic Duo.

I would also sometimes catch reruns of Adventures of Superman from 1952-1958 starring George Reeves. It was dopey and low-budget, with lots of gangsters, and clearly targeted at kids. I preferred the first season of the Wonder Woman television show with Lynda Carter in 1975-1979, which was campy and fun, although the later seasons lost some of the magic.

I watched the Shazam! and The Secrets of Isis shows on Saturday mornings from 1974-1977, and in junior high saw Christopher Reeves and Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman in the theater. I was impressed enough with it that I made sure to see the sequels as they premiered in theaters in later years, but their quality steadily dropped to where #IV was an embarrassment.

I didn’t see many Marvel characters on television, having never caught The Amazing Spider-Man in 1977-1979 or the 1967-1970 animated version. But I was a huge fan of The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff The Bionic Woman, and Kenneth Johnson, who was the showrunner of the latter, went on to make The Incredible Hulk with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. (I also got to see Lou at a Tulsa convention, and he was a real sweetheart.)

I only ever read maybe one issue of the Hulk comic books and found it grotesque. But I liked the television version, which made use of the trope of the innocent hunted man from the 1960s television show The Fugitive. Showrunner Johnson actually disliked comics, so he was happy to make drastic changes for the television version of the big green guy. Stam Fine did a great job looking back at that show:

Stam Fine’s look back at The Incredible Hulk television show

Interesting One-Offs

Some other superhero movies I enjoyed in my 20s included The Shadow with Alec Baldwin and John Lone in 1994 and The Phantom with Billy Zane in 1996. I also enjoyed Men in Black, which unlike the other two, did have sequels, although they left no lasting impression on me.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

And that brings me to the big daddy of all franchises: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It launched in 2008 with Iron Man and as of late 2023 included 33 films. I have seen 12, or a bit more than 1/3 of the releases.

The Mark 1 suit from 2008’s Iron Man

While I found most of those movies entertaining, they were ephemeral for me. The only one that I might currently consider rewatching would be the original Iron Man, whereas I have rewatched the 1978 Superman a few times over the years, I would happily revisit Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, and I have seen the 2009 Watchmen more than once.

My affection for those superhero films is presumably deepened by having read Superman comics in my youth and enjoying the Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins. My memory of Marvel comics is limited to a vintage issue or two of Iron Man and the Fantastic Four, so I have no comic book references for most of the Marvel characters I have seen on screen such as the Avengers, Spider-Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Hulk, the Carol Danvers version of Captain Marvel, and the X-Men.

Color Issues

I won’t be reading any vintage Marvel comics online, since the reprints are so garish. Below are images from colorist Jose Villarrubia, who wrote, “Kirby’s robust art could stand more vibrant coloring than most. However, it looked so much better the way it was colored originally. Here is one of the many splash pages in the classic Thor #160. On the left is a scan of my personal copy; in the center is how I would restore it, and on the right is the way it looks in Marvel reprints.”

A vintage Marvel comic, a restoration, and the garish reprints Marvel produces

If you skim a few online vintage issues of Tales of Suspense or Iron Man, and compare those to the reproductions of DC comics I shared earlier in this post, you’ll see what I mean. Reportedly when Marvel reprints were prepared in the early 2010s, the colorists were instructed to ignore how the pages looked and use a fixed number of swatch colors in Photoshop. Perhaps they were trying to show what the comics would have looked like on high-quality glossy paper, but the reality is they were printed on cheap pulp, which muted the colors. Here is a detailed article on pre-digital comic book coloring.

Comic Tropes

So, given their impact on other media, I’m interested in comics, even though I am not a regular consumer. As I shared recently, I quite enjoy Chris Piers’ looks at ComicTropes. I especially enjoy it when he looks back at weird comics from its Golden Age:

With comic book and Star Wars movie franchises faltering, it will be interesting to see if something more mature can thrive. But, as H.L. Mencken cautioned, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

Posted in movie, nostalgia, random | Leave a comment

Return to Bromide Hill

Posted on December 28, 2023 by Granger Meador

December 20-22, 2023 | Photo Album

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Sulphur Springs Reservation was established in the Chickasaw Nation of Indian Territory in 1902, and it became Platt National Park in 1906. Its national park status was dependent on a deal made with the Chickasaws and Choctaws, who had seen what had happened to the similar hydrotherapy area of Hot Springs in Arkansas. Private entrepreneurs were allowed to build and operate bathhouses there, and the tribes feared they would lose access to the waters of Sulphur Springs unless it was protected.

The city of Sulphur developed directly north of the park, which in the 1930s boasted eighteen sulphur, six freshwater, four iron, and three bromide springs.

The popularity of hydrotherapy waned as more effective treatments were developed for psychological and physical ailments. But Platt remained a popular camping spot, thanks to improvements made by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.

Robber’s Roost is a lookout 140 feet above Sulphur on Bromide Hill, and the park’s principal mineral springs once issued from its base. Before I was born, my father and mother visited it with my maternal grandmother and three of my mother’s siblings.

Platt was always a target for removal from the National Parks system, with Secretaries of the Interior recommending in 1913, 1925, and 1933 that it be given to Oklahoma and made into a state park. In 1976 Oklahoma finally lost its only National Park when Platt was combined with the Arbuckle Recreation Area and renamed the Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

In the 1970s, my parents would tow their Yellowstone trailer to what we still called Platt to camp in the Rock Creek area just west of Bromide Hill, a campground which had been developed from 1950 to 1967.

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Granger at Robber’s Roost above Sulphur in 1977

Recently I came across a 1977 photograph of myself on Robber’s Roost atop the hill, and that prompted me to suggest to Wendy that we return to Sulphur for a brief visit at the start of our 2023 Winter Break. I had introduced Wendy to Sulphur a decade earlier, and we had returned during Spring Break in 2019.

We set out from Bartlesville on the first day of Winter Break, enjoying lunch at Kilkenny’s in Tulsa before heading down the Turner Turnpike/Interstate 44, exiting at Stroud.

Sulphur 2023 Trip Map
Our travel route

Seminole

For our trip to Sulphur in 2019, after passing through Prague we enjoyed diverting westward to Shawnee to tour its art museum and railroad depot. This time we simply drove due south through Seminole, home of First Peoples who were forcibly relocated from Florida in the first half of the nineteenth century.

There were originally 24 towns in the Seminole Nation established in Indian Territory in 1856. In 1892 the Seminole government was dissolved and the nation’s territory divided among three thousand enrolled tribe members. Rampant fraud led to only about 20% of the Seminole lands remaining in Seminole hands by the 1920s, when Seminole county became for a brief time the greatest oil field in the world, producing 2.6% of the world’s oil.

In 1926, Seminole boomed from 854 to over 25,000. The town became a morass of mud.

Motoring through Seminole during the oil boom

Railroad traffic grew so much that on March 18, 1927 the Seminole yards handled over 24,000 freight cars.

Seminole during the oil boom a century ago

A few Seminoles became wealthy, but most of the riches went to whites. The boom was over by the mid-1930s, and the population stabilized at about 11,000 from 1930 to 1960, but then collapsed to less than 8,000 by 1970 and was 7,146 in 2020, when 20% of its population was below the poverty line. Today, over 13,000 of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma’s 18,800 enrolled citizens live in Oklahoma. Thirty years ago, the Jasmine Moran Children’s Museum was established; it is the town of Seminole’s biggest attraction.

Bowlegs

Five miles south of Seminole is Bowlegs, another oil boom town. But when they built highway 377, it bypassed Bowlegs, and there isn’t even a sign on 377 telling you to turn east for about a quarter-mile on highway 59 to reach the notorious former boomtown.

The Indian Territory Illuminating Oil company (ITIO) brought in the first well there in 1926, and the town grew to about 15,000. ITIO was formed in 1901 and was run by H.V. Foster and Theodore Barnsdall, oil barons familiar to folks where we live in northeast Oklahoma. ITIO was a leader in the oil fields of the Osage reservation, Seminole, and Oklahoma City, and was absorbed into Cities Service by 1940.

The town’s name may have come from Billy Bowlegs, a leader in the Seminole wars when the tribe was still in Florida, and that name might be a corruption of Bolek, an earlier Seminole chief. Billy’s tribal name was Holata Micco, meaning Alligator Chief.

The boomtown of Bowlegs had a bad reputation, with one dance hall nicknamed “the Bucket of Blood” due to its many brawls.

The Sinclair Gasoline Plant at Bowlegs was once the largest in the world

Bowlegs declined rapidly after the boom, with only 105 residents in 1946. Today about 350 people live there, with 24% of the residents living below the poverty line.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of highway 377 from Stroud through Prague to Seminole. It was mostly a four-lane divided highway with little traffic and a good road surface. It was just a two-lane south from Seminole to the Canadian River, expanding again to a divided four-lane for the short drive from there to Ada. We then took the ridiculous two-lane Chickasaw Turnpike from Ada to Sulphur.

Legislators forced Governor Bellmon to build it in the late 1980s. He knew it would be a big money-loser, so he had it built with only two lanes. It was in poor condition by 2002, an albatross that neither the turnpike authority nor the department of transportation wanted. The turnpike’s pavement was finally rehabilitated in 2006. In 2011, the last four miles of it near Sulphur was transferred to the department of transportation, reducing the weird little toll road to 13.3 miles. It collected $896,000 in tolls in 2020, which was about 0.3% of the tolls collected statewide. The Chickasaw earned a bit more than $67,000 per mile that year, while the original 86.5-mile Turner Turnpike from Oklahoma City to Tulsa earned about $850,000 per mile. Back in 1954, voters approved cross-pledging turnpike revenues, so the sensible turnpikes support the rest.

Sulphur

For our previous stays in Sulphur, I booked the Hollywood Suite at The Artesian hotel. This time, I used VRBO to rent a vacation home a few miles outside of town to the west of the Lake of the Arbuckles. So before going to the cabin, we stopped to buy breakfast and lunch groceries at Sooner Foods.

Sooner Foods in Sulphur, a family-owned grocery

I noticed a portrait hanging on the wall by the checkouts, which told me we were dealing with a family-owned business. The portrait was of James Rae Howe, who established the store in 1954. He owned and operated stores in Sulphur, Davis, and Tishomingo, and he rebuilt the Sulphur store after it was destroyed forty years ago in a fire caused by a lightning strike.

James Rae Howe passed away in 2011, and his son Kemper is now President of the chain. I am pleased to note that Sooner Foods has employed many deaf students at the Sulphur store over the years; Sulphur is the home to the Oklahoma School for the Deaf, and Kemper Howe is a member of the Oklahoma School for the Deaf Foundation.

At our rental home, we were thrilled to find a large Christmas tree in the living room.

Rental house Christmas Tree
Christmas tree at the rental house

Wendy promptly spotted a cat without a tail meowing at us on the deck.

Sugar Plum 1
Sugar Plum on the deck

That evening she bought a food-and-water dish and some cat food at the Dollar General for our new feline friend, which she named “Sugar Plum”.

Sugar Plum 2
Sugar Plum enjoying some food and water

We dined in town for two evenings, at opposing ends of the opulence scale. As we drove through town on our way to the rental, Wendy spotted a Carl’s Jr. and mentioned how she missed eating at them. I had avoided the chain for decades, having been repulsed by its ads of hamburgers dripping sauce on clothing in the 1990s. (I haven’t watched television in years, but reportedly the chain shifted to sexually suggestive ads from 2005 to 2017. I can only imagine.)

So we dined at Sulphur’s Carl’s Jr. franchise. Wendy enjoyed a Famous Star cheeseburger, while I had some chicken tenders.

Two extremes in dining in Sulphur

The following night we enjoyed a meal at Springs at The Artesian that cost three or four times as much. I enjoyed a chicken fried steak with country gravy, mashed potatoes, and green beans, while Wendy had a spicy chicken sandwich, and I made sure that we ordered the honey glazed carrots she has always loved there.

Bromide Hill

The primary activity of our trip was a one-mile hike on Bromide Hill. The weather was a thin overcast in the 60s without too much wind, so it was great for hiking.

Bromide Hill Trail Track 2023

We drove up and parked at Robber’s Roost. Junipers around the entry steps had mature seed cones, which look like berries.

Juniper Berries on the tree
Juniper berries are actually seed cones

Many of the cones/berries had fallen onto the steps at Robber’s Roost.

Juniper Berries on the steps
Juniper berries on the steps at Robber’s Roost

There, high above Sulphur, I posed for a shot we could later compare to the one taken of me there 46 years earlier.

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Granger at Robber’s Roost in 1977 and 2023

Wendy then posed for a shot we could later compare to her first visit to the overlook ten years earlier.

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Wendy at Robber’s Roost in 2013 and 2023

Bromide Hill is formed of conglomerate rock of the Vanoss Formation. That material forms the surface of much of the recreation area, with only limited areas having underlying shale and sandstone layers of the Simpson Group.

The first name of the area was “Council Rock,” and the “Robber’s Roost” moniker arose after its use as a hideout for outlaws. Springs along the banks of Rock Creek had a salty taste from bromide in the water, and people took the waters in hopes of curing stomach trouble, nervousness, and rheumatism.

By 1908, over 100,000 people visited the area annually, with many visitors camping in the area for three days or longer, taking the waters. Cliffside Trail was established along the face of Bromide Hill, and in 1912, 4,466 feet of cement walks and stairways were built on the Rock Creek side of Bromide Hill. The walks had iron banister posts and a chain, but the chain soon rusted and flaked onto hikers’ hands. Portions of Cliffside Trail washed away in a flood in 1916.

New Bromide Hill trail in 1932

The postcard shows Bromide Hill sometime after 1916, as it includes an iron bridge that was built over the creek after the 1916 flood. It would be dismantled in 1943 and yielded 25 tons of scrap metal for the war effort.

In 1931, a 200-foot retaining wall was constructed at the base of the hill to prevent erosion from Rock Creek and to provide a hiking trail.

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp 808 was authorized for the park in April 1933. 169 young men were set up in tents by the end of May, with another 25 “local experienced men” who were stonemasons, carpenters, plumbers, and tradesmen to teach and supervise the crews.

The park service’s landscape architects judged the park’s trail system to be “antiquated and totally inadequate” and specified trails be constructed 4.5 feet wide with “careful attention to drainage and appearance and gradient”.

The trail up the hillside was completely rebuilt, replacing “flimsy flights of concrete steps” with a long, stone-walled ramp. An 80-foot retaining wall was installed under Robber’s Roost, and the CCC built an extension to the top of the hill in 1935.

In 1937, the Rock Creek Causeway was built below the west end of Bromide Hill. To this day it provides access to the Robber’s Roost parking area up top as well as to the Rock Creek Campground.

By 1941, visitors were less interested in the mineral waters issuing from the hillside spring. In 1943 the park superintendent reported that the trails suffered from erosion, with the trail to the top of Bromide Hill being the most-used and in bad shape. Drainage repairs were made, and the Bromide Trail along the base was rebuilt in 1952.

Bromide Hill in 2002

The flow of Bromide Springs dried up after 1966, with the last trickle from Bromide Springs for two months in 1973. Stone swales with drainage culverts are located along the cliff side of the trail; some of those were constructed in 1990.

After posing at Robber’s Roost, we took the trail down the north side of Bromide Hill. The stone retaining walls always impress me, along with the rock gutters on the cliff side of the trail.

Bromide Hill Trail
Bromide Hill Trail with stone retaining walls and gutters

I clearly recall being intimidated hiking up the long ramping switchback as a child. Thus I led us down the hillside, not up it, to then join the Bromide Trail alongside Rock Creek.

After a 15-minute walk down to the creek, we ventured out onto a pedestrian causeway near the Bromide Pavilion.

Rock Creek
View southeast along Rock Creek

We could see the Rock Creek causeway for vehicles to the northwest.

Rock Creek Causeway
The 1937 Rock Creek Causeway is beyond the fallen tree

I shot some video of the water flowing in the creek.

Then we walked down to the automobile causeway, where I took a shot of Rock Creek flowing onward to the northwest.

Rock Creek west of the causeway
Rock Creek viewed from the automobile causeway

The steep western end of Bromide Hill was to our left as we turned south.

West end of Bromide Hill
The western end of Bromide Hill

The familiar sign for the turnoff to the Rock Creek Campground was there.

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The turnoff to Rock Creek Campground

We stayed on the road to the left to gradually wind our way around and up the back side of Bromide Hill. There is no walkway along the road, but it was easy to shift onto the grass shoulder whenever a car approached. That made for a gentle return to the minivan up top.

My tracker informed us that the entire one-mile walk took us 45 minutes, with stops. It was just beginning to mist as we returned to the minivan, reminding us of how rainy it was a decade earlier when I first brought Wendy to the park.

Homeward

Our visit to Sulphur was just a brief getaway. Instead of returning home through Ada, Seminole, and Prague to join the Turner Turnpike at Stroud, we took busy Interstate 35 from Davis north to Norman.

I-35 is quite overloaded south of Norman. Texas is preparing to spend $2.5 billion to widen I-35 to six lanes, with it expanding to eight from Denton to the Oklahoma border within the next 15 years. But Oklahoma only has $492 million in its eight-year plan for widening and improving 35 miles of I-35, whereas there are $3 billion in needs along that 126-mile corridor. In the future, I will consider taking old slow highway 77 to avoid the hectic I-35.

I bought Wendy some shoes at the Brown’s Shoe Fit in Norman, and we had lunch at the old El Chico in Sooner Mall. I ate there regularly throughout college from 1984-1988, when it was Sooner Fashion Mall. The mall was quite busy, which was interesting to see given how our local mall has been moribund for years and over my lifetime I’ve seen the closures of Shepherd Mall and Crossroads in the OKC metro and the Southroads, Eastland, Kensington, and Promenade malls in Tulsa.

We then struggled along I-35 through the metro and then shot along the Turner Turnpike to Tulsa. I’m glad that the Turner will eventually be entirely widened to six lanes to reduce truck jams, but that will take years to accomplish.

We enjoyed our brief excursion to Sulphur, but we will likely hunker down for the rest of the break. Wendy has picked out a 1935 Frank Capra film, a Bette Davis comedy from 1942, and a 1949 Joseph Mankiewicz movie for us to watch. I’ve retaliated with a 1941 Howard Hawks film, an Ealing comedy from 1955, and a Billy Wilder movie from 1961. A couple of them aren’t available to stream on Amazon Prime, YouTube Premium, or iTunes, so I ordered those on optical disc. I am skeptical that we’ll get to them all before we return to work, but we should have fun trying.

Photo Album

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2023 Reads & Watches

Posted on December 26, 2023 by Granger Meador

At the end of 2022, I composed a Book Report on what I read that year, which expanded into an overview of my reading habits. A year later, I’ve decided to broaden the scope of the retrospective to include other media.

Books

I read about 32 books in 2023, the fewest since 2018, but still about double my rate of a decade ago when I was often away on day hikes. The continued slide since the pandemic lockdown high in 2020 is no surprise, given my steady diet of YouTube videos, including many long-form ones.

I continue to enjoy books in both written and audio form. It appears that about half of my fellow Americans don’t read books at all, and WordsRated found that the average number of books read per year increases with age. Their finding was that the average number of books read by Gen-Xers like me was six, and place me among the 17% from that generation who read 11 or more books in a year.

Anecdotally, one of my acquaintances had read 75 books by mid-November this year, while one of my former students read 150 new books this year and re-read about 20 more. So while I read more than the norm, I know folks who easily outpace me.

My favorite book in 2023 was The Man Who Died Twice, the sequel to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. I listened to the first book in July, fascinated by the characters populating it and its take on modern life across the pond. Most of the characters live in a luxury retirement village in southeast England and the initial contrivance is that four of the retirees gather to investigate crime cases. The pensioners include a female nurse, a male psychiatrist, a male union activist, and a retired female spy. A young policewoman and older male detective get drawn into their activities, along with a brutally competent Polish immigrant and various side characters.

The initial book, which Osman wrote in 2020, was so delectable that I deliberately delayed devouring the next in the series. I often save what will likely be a great read/listen for later while I explore other works. That way, when my reading becomes frustrating or I suffer from ennui, I can readily return to something by a proven author.

Thus I parcel out the comedic works of P.G. Wodehouse, the mysteries of Edith Mary Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters), and now the Thursday Murder Club books of Richard Osman. I read or listened to eight books, including science fiction, romances, historical novels, another mystery, and two nonfiction works, before taking up the second in the Thursday Murder Club series in October. It was great fun to reconnect with his memorable characters, and I repeatedly paused the audiobook to cackle with glee and ponder where the tale might be going.

Another favorite in a different genre was Attachments, an office romance by Rainbow Rowell. That one was so good that upon finishing it I immediately purchased Landline for my Kindle, saving it for later. I see that is a Christmas love story, so I might wait for some hot and humid summer weather and use it as an escape.

I also greatly enjoyed Ted Chiang’s thought-provoking tales in Exhalation: Stories. As for classics, I took on A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and Reverend Frederick Amadeus Malleson’s translation of Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre.

I enjoyed Peter Manseau’s unusual Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter: A Novel sufficiently to later read his The Maiden of All Our Desires: A Novel, which was even better. Manseau is a novelist, historian, and museum curator, being the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History.

I greatly enjoyed listening to two more splendid nonfiction works by Simon Winchester: Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World and Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. I can never get enough of listening to my favorite living polymath.

I’m currently listening to Ann Napolitano’s Dear Edward and reading Peyton Place by Grace Metalious on my Kindle. The former is much more modern than many of the books I read, and I like not knowing what will happen next with its deeply traumatized title character.

As for Peyton Place, it was notorious in the 1950s as a tale of secrets, sex, and hypocrisy in a small New England town. The opening draws you right in: “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. ” I am only 1/4 of the way through it, but I am enjoying its portraits of women struggling with their sexual and social identities that conflict with their town’s social and moral principles. Grace herself led a short and troubled life, and it certainly appears that she heeded the advice to write what you know.

I continue to track my reading at LibraryThing and at GoodReads.

Videos

My main distraction from reading is watching videos on YouTube. I have subscribed to 164 channels, and in 2023, I supported 10 via Patreon. I decided to link my favorite channels for you and to include a representative video or playlist from each in case you want to explore some of them.

Videos on Video

Cars

Books and More

Home Projects

Travel

Old & New Tech

Art

Music

Other Favorites

Other favorite channels this year have been Defunctland for its amazing long-form looks at things Disney, Phil Edwards, formerly of Vox, for his eclectic interests, science with Steve Mould and Veritasium, geology with Myron Cook, and anything that interests Peter Dibble.

And those were just the most interesting 1/4 of my subscribed channels. So while I don’t watch television, I most certainly do watch…a lot! When I was young, our family only had a black-and-white tube television with four broadcast channels, so I feel truly blessed to have so much high-quality focused content readily available on my iPad, and more books than I can handle via Kindle, Audible, and yes, wood fibers.

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