Month: March 2023 (Page 3 of 4)

The PopCulteer
March 10, 2023

It’s a day for internet radio notes about The AIR, so let’s dive right in.  The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Friday at 2 PM, Mel Larch celebrates a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a salute to Kool & The Gang, Disco stalwarts who were recently announced as headliners for July 2 at Charleston’s Sternwheel Regatta.

Straight out of Jersey City came this legendary band. Initially made up of brothers, Robert “Kool” Bell and Ronald Bell, with Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, Robert “Spike” Mickens, Charles Smith, George Brown, and Ricky West. They later added vocalist JT Taylor and worked with producer Eumir Deodato, and through that and many line-up changes they created an amazing catalog of R&B, Funk and Disco classics, and even had a few great ballads in the mix.

With the band coming to Charleston this summer, Mel thought it might be a good time to bring her listeners a solid hour of classic Kool & The Gang.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 070

Kool & The Gang

“Let’s Go Dancing”
“Tonight”
“Steppin’ Out”
“Hollywood Swinging”
“Get Down On It”
“Jungle Boogie”
“She’s Fresh”
“Ladies Night”
“Too Hot”
“Take It To The Top”
“In The Heart”
“Misled”
“Celebration”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday at  9 PM (kicking off a mini-marathon), Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM, and Tuesday at 1 PM  exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM we bring you an encore of an episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat from last July.  This was the show where Sydney Fileen celebrated six years of bringing you classic New Wave Music on The AIR by producing a new show that had every artist from her pilot episode, in the same exact order, only those artists were all represented by different songs. As I began writing this, I discovered that, for reasons unknown to me, this episode was missing from The AIR’s servers. So I’m re-uploading it and while I’m at it, I’ll just re-post the playlist here…

Big Electric Cat 093

M “Neutron”
Bow Wow Wow “Mile High Club”
The Humans “Pipeline”
The Fixx “Stand Or Fall”
Adam Ant “Dog Eat Dog”
Kim Wilde “2-6-5-8-0”
The Buggles “I Love You Miss Robot”
The Human League “The Lebanon”
Romeo Void “A Girl In Trouble”
Split Enz “Shark Attack”
Yazoo “Situation”
Pete Shelley “Telephone Operator”
The Waitresses “Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful”
Elvis Costello “Secondary Modern”
Ultravox “The Ascent”
Depeche Mode “Wrong”
XTC “Meccanic Dancing”
Martha and the Muffins “This Is The Ice Age”
Missing Persons “Hello I Love You”
Trio “Hearts Are Trump”
Wall of Voodoo “Two Minutes To Lunch”
The Go Gos “We Got The Beat”
Animotion “Let Him Go”
Gary Numan “I Nearly Married A Human”
Orchestral Manuevers In The Dark “The Punishment of Luxury”
The Beat “Rough Rider”
ABC “4 Ever 2 Gether”
Heaven 17 “Who’ll Stop The Rain”
Thompson Twins “No Peace For The Wicked”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon, Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Two classic episodes can also be heard every Sunday, starting at 10 AM.

Friday at 9 PM we present an encore of the episode of The Comedy Vault, in memory of Artie Barnes, who passed away last week. That will be followed by an hour of Dr. Demento, and then Neil’s Heavy Concept Album.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content, and all our regular features.

The Kanawha Valley Railroad Association holds their annual show this weekend at The Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center. This will be their second show at the Coliseum, but since last year’s show was greeted by seven inches of snow the night before, for many people this will be the first chance to see a model train show at this great space.

Officially, the 17th annual KVRA Model Train and Craft Show happens March 11 and 12, and it should be a great time for fans of model railroading, and for people and kids who just love miniatures.

Several displays with working train layouts will be on display and there will be dozens of vendors selling model railroading supplies, toys, clothing and related cool train stuff.

Show hours will be 10 AM to 6 PM on Saturday and 10 AM until 4 PM on Sunday. Admission each day will be $5, with children 12 and younger admitted free.

For more information about the model train and craft show, contact Joe Horter at 304-539-6721 or jhorter@gmail, Richard Boyd at 615-319-9654 or email kvrailroad@gmail.com or visit their Facebook Page or visit their website.

The plan is to, at some point, is for yours truly to make it to the Kanawha Valley Railroad Association HQ in Coonskin Park, and shoot some video of the layout up there. That has been the plan for several years now, but I’m really going to have to make it happen soon.

PopCult last attended the KVRA Model Train and Craft Show three years ago when it was in Jefferson. Here’s a quick video I made at the time…

You should know the drill by now.  There’s plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over The Mountain State this weekend, so let’s just soak in this partial list of suggestions.

Of special note is a show in Morgantown Wednesday night that will be our first graphic below.  Several artists that we play on Radio Free Charleston will be there.  Also, tomorrow I’ll be telling you about another cool event happening in Charleston this weekend, but today we’ll put the focus on music.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s The Parachute Brigade. Saturday Verdeant entertains the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit (as you’ll see below, this week it’s a really good cause).  Thursday evening The 11:11 take the stage at the Glass from 10 PM to midnight. Friday from 6 PM to whenever it’s a night-long benefit for everybody’s buddy, Herb Gardner.  You’ll see a few graphics for it below Throughout the night you’ll be treated to performances by Timmy Courts and Friends, Jason Jobe, Andrew Pauley, Dale Blankenship, James Townsend, Chet Lowther, Tom Kirk and Di. In addition, at 10 PM this will be Hair Supply’s only Charleston club appearance of 2023.

Next week they’ll have an open mic Monday night, and Songwriter Showcase on Tuesday. Other shows that have graphics are listed among the images below.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. In fact, it’s sort of surging again. Many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

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We bring you a free-format dive into our archives this week on The AIR  as we premiere three full hours of new Radio Free Charleston! You simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here and  listen to the cool embedded player elsewhere on this page.

Rather than revive some of our pre-2020 programming this week, we decided to just build a new three-hour show that you can hear at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. We dug into the archives and bring you local music from the last forty years, we mix it with old and new indie and major-label artists.

We open the show with a song by The Defectors.  Over the weekend Mel and I drove to Columbus for a memorial service for Greyson Estep, the son of one of my oldest and dearest friends, The Defectors’s guitarist John Estep. I had to see that my old buddy was going to be all right, and with that on my mind, I wanted to hear some of his music.

In the rest of our three-hour show we have new music from Jim Lange, The Anchoress, The Church, Rick Wakeman, Logical Fleadh and more. We also have classic local tracks from Feast of Stephen, Three Bodies, The Amazing Delores, Ann Magnuson, HARRAH, Jay Parade, Red Audio, Emmalea Deal and more. That’s mixed in with all sorts of other cool tracks from all over.

Because we can’t cram two links into the same word without it looking goofy, note that The Heydays are Douglas Imbrogno and Paul Calicoat.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (we have selective links in the playlist this week)…

RFC V5 122

The Defectors “Johnny”
Scrap Iron Pickers “Swamp Thing”
The Struts “Pretty Vicious (acoustic)”
The Church “Succulent”
The Amazing Delores “Coal”
Renaissance “Love Lies, Love Dies”
Jim Lange “Winter Blue”
The Anchoress “Climbing Up The Walls” (Radiohead)
M and Chuck Biel “Super Powers = Common Sense”
Ann Magnuson “Hey There Little Miss Pussy Pants”
Frank Zappa “Carol, You Fool”
Total Meltdown “Wake Me Up When September Ends”
Three Bodies “The Trax”
Rick Wakeman “The Dinner Party”

hour two
Wolfgang Parker “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”
Feast of Stephen “Needing Only Me”
Chris Cornell “Billie Jean”
HARRAH “Pay The Piper”
Science Of The Mind “Kaoss”
Bedowyn “Leave The Living For Dead”
Rain May Fall “Remember Everything”
The Heydays “Shady Grove”
The Wegmann Brothers “A Friend On The Highway”
Mojomatic “Crazy”
The MFB “Funkin’ Up The Neighborhood”
Eva Cassidy “Ain’t No Sunshine”
Depeche Mode “Ghosts Again (Radio Edit)”
Jay Parade “Hearts and Minds”

hour three
Lee Press-on “Powerhouse”
Matt Mullins and The Bringdowns “This Mountain”
O.W.L. “Midnight Carnival”
Emmalea Deal “Queen”
The Science Fair Explosion “Demon Burger”
Red Audio “Plasticland”
Gary Numan “The Joy Circuit”
Andy Prieboy “All For Your Love”
Logical Fleadh “Lark In The Morning/Gold Ring/The Slammer”
Frenchy And The Punk “Blood”
Laibach “Neptune, Oxytocin”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM, Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

Then at 1 PM we have MIRRORBALL, followed at 2 PM by Curtain Call. At 3 PM two great recent episodes of The Swing Shift arrive.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM, Friday at 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

The title pretty much says it all this week. Above you see a drawing of pin-up queen Bettie Page done using White-Out on black construction paper.  It was a bit of an exercise in the freehand application of negative space. Much of it was done using the little applicator brush, but I got the finer lines by using a dental brush pick.  Those were mostly the background squigglies.

This is based on one of her classic photos, but I was using a tiny reproduction I found on the web, so I regret that I can’t properly attribute it.

To be honest, I started out just trying to empty the bottle of White-Out so I could toss it, then as I progressed I lked what was happening enough to put some effort into it. Despite my shaky hands, this may be the closest I’ve gotten to capturing Ms. Page’s face in a physical drawing or painting.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM you can hear part two of David Mitchell’s history of British comedy on an encore episode of Comedy Vault. Part three will debut Wednesday night.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, comprised of classic episodes from the first year of Sydney Fileen’s dedicated New Wave Music program, which recently passed its 100th episode.

I like cheese. Lately I’ve been on a grilled-cheese sandwich kick, using Velveeta and Kroger Carbmaster bread in my neat-o little sandwich press. Above you’ll see a playlist of three videos about cheese and/or Velveeta. The last video has an extra-cheesy factor as the poor announcer mispronounces practically every multi-syllable word. You could make it a drinking game if you wanted to.

Heck, you could even do shots from a can of spray-cheese.

Cheese is the star of our video showcase this week.

I like cheese, even when it’s just processed cheese food.

Maybe I shouldn’t blog when I’m hungry.

From February 2007, This is an edited version of Radio Free Charleston’s 14th video episode, “Spider-man Shirt.” We still cannot find the original version of this show. If we did, we would restore the “Pentagram Flowerbox” cartoon, but we still wouldn’t present the show in an unedited form. I’ll tell you more about that in a moment.

As it is, this show includes a terrific vintage music video for Go Van Gogh’s “Shut Up, I Love You,” the most-requested song on the radio incarnation of RFC and Joe Justice’s hilarious short film, “Marvel Jackass,” which is even funnier now, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t exist when this show was first done.

There’s also a LAX cartoon by Frank Panucci, which took the place of Pentagram Flowerbox. “Pentagram Flowebox,” the story of Satan living in a trailer park, debuted in our third episode, and was included in many installments of our show until episode 20. This series was created by a former Charleston-area musician, and was brought to me by RFC Big Shot Brian Young. The former Charleston-area musician shall remain nameless by his own request. He prefers to be known as “Third Mind Incarnation.”

Our differences were a classic case of bad communication. Neither of us made enough effort to contact each other, and therefore, when we each grew increasingly unhappy with the way the series was progressing on RFC, we had no way to foresee or resolve the issues. I wanted shorter, punchier pieces for the show. The series’ creator wanted to do longer, less traditionally-structured pieces. I thought I had his blessing to edit his material to fit our format, but it turns out that he was not at all happy. Rather than deal with it privately he chose to inform me of his unhappiness with a series of nasty comments that went up unmoderated in the Gazz version of PopCult. Harsh words were exchanged, and we dropped Pentagram Flowerbox from Radio Free Charleston. Better to part ways than to kill each other.

Since “Third Mind” was so unhappy with our editing of his work, I didn’t feel right leaving it in the show when we put them up in the MySpace archives. I felt that it was better to respect his artistic vision. In some shows on MySpace Pentagram Flowerbox was replaced by “The Mascot,” classic 1930s puppet animation by Wladislaw Starewicz.

Since that time, however, the Third Mind Incarnation has shuffled off this plane of existence, and on the way out, asked us to restore his cartoon to the show. When the demise of MySpace made it necessary to re-upload all the old shows to YouTube, we figured we’d restore them while we were at it. As much as possible, the episodes of RFC that you see are as they were originally. Except for this one. This is the butchered episode of RFC, and is responsible for two-thirds of the garbage drama I’ve had to deal with producing the video show.

You see, there is one other big gaping hole in the show in this episode. One entire song has been excised. The song is “I Hate Your God,” and the fact that I had to remove a video that Melanie and I worked so hard on is quite a bummer. However, serious questions over the authorship of the song came to light and have never been sorted out.

I’m going to dance around some of the details here in the interest of fairness and also because I don’t really want to relive drama from over fifteen years ago. I have this forum, the other party does not. I’d be surprised if he’s even still alive, to be honest.

Melanie Larch and I directed the video for “I Hate Your God” for a Huntington band that turned out to be just one guy. The video was considered a creative high point in the first year of the show, and we hit it off right away with the musician. So much so, that over a year later, he spent a month as my houseguest.

By the end of that month, our friendship had soured. I gave him a ride back to his mom’s apartment in Huntington, and essentially wrote off ever seeing any reimbursement from him for over a thousand dollars worth of stolen and broken items.

A couple of weeks later I received a very disturbing email. It was from a former bandmate of my now ex-friend, claiming that he’d actually written “I Hate Your God.” I forwarded the email to the person in question, and got no response. A follow-up also went unanswered. Then he posted a message on his MySpace page saying that he would “…be in the news soon. None of it’s true, but I don’t care. It’ll make me famous.”

My personal experience with this person was all I needed to know that the charge of plagarism was more than credible. The fact that he never managed to write another entire song by himself sort of clinched it for me. Rather than “make him famous,” I pulled the video off of YouTube and had all still images from it removed from MySpace. Fifteen years later there isn’t a trace of it left on the internet. I have considered re-using the video, but replacing the music with a banjo tune.

When this drama hit the fan, I chopped out all references to the group and eliminated the video. That’s why the host segments here seem so choppy.

The PopCulteer
March 3, 2023

We have quite a few cool things (and one bit of unpleasantness) to tell you about tis week, so let’s dive in…

Super Joe Unlimited In The Comics

Regular PopCult readers should remember Power Comics from their very entertaining The Masters comic books that I wrote about in this blog, and they should also be well aware of Super Joe Unlimited, the revived action figure line that that I’ve been writing about for the last couple of months.

And folks who read PopCult very carefully might have already figured out where I’m going, since I spilled the beans back in January, not realizing that they weren’t ready to announce anything yet, but now, this is official: Power Comics will be releasing a Super Joe Unlimited Comic Book, sometime this summer, and the cover, which you can see at the head of this post, will be available for sale at ToyLanta later this month.

How about I just post the press release here?

Today, Power Comics, Inc. proudly announces it’s partnership with Super Joe Unlimited to produce for the first time, an official comic book series dedicated to Super Joe!

Super Joe Unlimited recently relaunched the 1977 Super Joe 9” action figure line selling out it’s initial production run of figures and accessories. Piggybacking on that tremendous success Power Comics will release the comic book series entitled Super Joe Unlimited this Summer.

“We are very excited at the opportunity to bring Super Joe to the wonderful world of comics,” stated Jason Schiermeyer, CEO of Super Joe Unlimited.

Austin Hough, publisher of Power Comics, Inc. added, “There is very little back story surrounding Super Joe, so it’s like we have this ‘blank canvas’ to really create something new and special. And, we all know how much artists love a blank canvas.”

Issue 1 features comic book legend Bob Hall (right) recreating his iconic cover of Marvel Comics’ G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #4 from 1982 using the Super Joe action figures and play sets from the original 1977 toy line.

Power Comics is making this cover available as an 11”x17” print, autographed by Hall, and available exclusively for the upcoming Toylanta con March 24th-26th.

If you can’t make it to ToyLanta, you can still get in on the Super Joe Unlimited action.

Posters can be purchased for $25 each via PayPal at powercomicsinc1@gmail.com and picked up at the My Vintage Toys and Trains booth at Toylanta March 25th and 26th. When ordering, please include the number of posters you are requesting in the Notes section.

If you cannot attend Toylanta, you can still purchase an autographed poster, or posters. Simply add $12.50 to cover shipping (up to 10 posters), and please make sure to include your mailing address. The autographed poster(s) will ship flat following the conclusion of Toylanta.

Follow Power Comics, Inc. on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for more announcements concerning release dates, availability, story lines, AND the announcement of the rest of the creative team behind Super Joe Unlimited!

POWER UP!!!

That’s very cool news, and I have to say that I’m glad they’ll be selling the poster through the mail, because this year, ironically enough, I will be skipping ToyLanta in favor of attending JoeLanta in August.

About That Irony

Last year, when the folks who run ToyLanta decided (at the suggestion of many GI Joe collectors) to return to their roots and spin off JoeLanta as a separate show, it came together too quickly for yours truly to attend. We had other plans for that time.

By way of quick explanation, originally, over twenty years ago in fact, the show was called “JoeLanta,” and it was devoted to the 12″ GI Joe. around 2016, as the show grew and came to incorporate more toys and even another Atlanta toy show, they changed the name to ToyLanta.

While the change was quite successful and helped raise more money for the Cody Lane Foundation, fans of the original show were missing the “good old days” and wanted a show just for them again. So now there are two great toy shows, both for the benefit of the Cody Lane Foundation, and your PopCulteer, sadly, had to make a choice. Last year, when I had to miss the first new JoeLanta, I decided that in 2023, I would skip ToyLanta and attend JoeLanta.

Another reason for this is that, since 2013, in those years when the pandemic allowed us to travel, we always went to my choice, JoeLanta/ToyLanta. This year I wanted Mel to pick someplace she really wanted to go for our March travel destination. We had never been able to go to the Humana Festival (which has yet to start back again), but I figured Mel would want to make some kind of theatre trip.

Several weeks ago, I discovered that Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob Squarepants, would be appearing in Lexington, Kentucky. He would be there the same weekend as ToyLanta, but since we’d already decided to skip ToyLanta, our weekend would be free. Here’s the irony, Tom Kenny is a guest at The Lexington Comic and Toy Convention.

Mel is one of our world’s most enthusiastic SpongeBob fans, so we’re skipping one toy show to attend another.

There is one other point that’s more coincidental than ironic, but Bob Hall, who drew that awesome cover for the Super Joe Unlimited comic will also be in Lexington (along with Jim Starlin, Mike Grell, Sam Raimi, a few dozen former Power Rangers and more). I’ll tell you all about that show and ToyLanta in the coming weeks, and I’ll have plenty of photos from Lexington at the end of the month.

News On Another Comic Con

Another show that I won’t be attending, but is still very cool, is ITHACON, in Ithaca, New York. The show happens at the Emerson Suites on Ithaca College Campus on April 22 and 23.

ITHACON is the nation’s second longest running comic convention (after San Diego), and this will be its 46th iteration. This event highlights comics, cosplay, gaming, anime, manga, and pop culture. It could make for a fun weekend road trip for the die-hard comics fans among you.

The convention is presented by the Comic Book Club of Ithaca. Membership tickets for adults cost $20.00 for both days of the convention, while tickets for Sunday access cost $10.00. Youth memberships for ages seven through seventeen are priced at $5.00, and adults are eligible to bring up to two kids under six for free admission. As a bonus, anyone who purchases tickets by April 16th will receive a special “swag bag” upon check in.

“ITHACON is a celebration of creativity and entrepreneurism. It’s a small show that always punches above its weight class,” says Ed Catto, of Ithaca College’s School of Business.

Ed, as you may know from past PopCult posts, is an old friend, and one of the high-mucky-mucks at Captain Action Enterprises.

You can follow ITHACON on Facebook to see what guests they’ll be bringing in this year. The timing is off for Mel and I to attend this year, but in the future, who knows?

The Poe-Man’s Kickstarter

Robert Jimenez has a new Kickstarter campaign for a cool new trading card set, and it was fully funded in its first hour so you know you’re going to get it if you kick in. This trading card set is devoted to none other than Edgar Allen Poe. I know a lot of PopCult readers are big Poe fans, so perk up your ears.

POE: Ghastly Vignettes is the 6th Zerostreet Trading Card Set. This 36 card set features artwork by Robert Jiménez inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

The set features a “cover” card plus 25 vignettes inspired from passages of Poe’s work which are quoted on the back. There is also a 10 card subset of printed sketches. These 10 illustrations will also be available as reward add-ons, but may be sold out by the time you read this.

Featured Poe stories include The Gold-Bug, The Murders At The Rue Morgue, Hop-Frog and more.

Each Kickstarter set will include the 36 card set in a tuck box, one Raven sticker, one Lenticular card and one metal card. Extra cards can be added on as well.

It’s forty bucks plus shipping for the full set and bonus cards. I’ve already jumped in on this one. There were add-ons that would allow you to buy the original art, but I believe that’s all been spoken for already. You can still get other Zerostreet card sets and other cool stuff.

There’s about two and a half weeks left in the campaign. You can find it HERE. Check out the video here…

The Elephant In The Comics

I was going to write an essay on the Scott Adams/Dilbert meltdown, but after thinking about it, why waste my time and yours talking about a barely-talented cartoonist who did a comic strip that was mildly amusing for the first year or so before he started repeating himself?

In recent years, Adams has become increasingly toxic and vocal online, and to me that’s when Dilbert went from being a mildly amusing, poorly drawn comic strip that used to be sort of funny to being the work of a crappy human being who was beneath my notice. I figured that one day he’d self-destruct publicly, and that day came last week. He spewed racist garbage so toxic that his syndicate pulled the plug on his comic strip and book contract, his other book publisher dropped him and his agent quit. More than half the newspapers that carried his strip had already jumped ship.

Anybody who’s seen his online presence couldn’t have been surprised. He’s been one of the most awful people on the internet for more than a decade. I know I lost any interest in the strip.

With the benefit of hindsight, I see even the early strips differently.

Dilbert is the extreme narcissist. He’s always right, and everybody who overrules him at work is a moron who doesn’t deserve their position. How dare a woman even work at all? His bosses…why, they went to college! Damn those idiots! And he’s such an impotent twerp that he doesn’t dare say what he thinks. He goes home and imagines his dog saying all the things he believes. He is the ultimate incel with a superiority complex.

For years Adams has been blaming “cancel culture” for the fact that no Hollywood studio wants to make a live-action Dilbert movie. The real reason is, they already did.

It was called Falling Down.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features and fresh content every day.

Yesterday we told you all about Celtic Calling in Charleston, but there’s plenty of other STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over The Mountain State this weekend, so let’s just soak in this partial list of suggestions.

The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit.  Thursday evening our old friend Kenny Booth (above) hosts a shred session from 10 PM to midnight and you find out more about it HERE. Friday from 5 PM to 8 PM Timmy “Courts and Friends hold down the fort at the Glass.  Sunday it’s the famous post-Mountain Stage Jam, hosted by The Carpenter Ants, at 10 PM. Next week they’ll have an open mic Monday night, and Songwriter Showcase on Tuesday. Other shows that have graphics are listed among the images below.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. In fact, it’s sort of surging again. Many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.

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