The PopCulteer
December 23, 2022

Regular readers of PopCult may have noticed that I’ve been slacking off this week. Christmas and the Arctic Vortex seem to be racing to see who can get here first, and to be honest, I wasn’t quite ready for either.

So I’m going to knock out a quick PopCulteer and be on my way. I did promise you fresh content every day (even if some of it isn’t as fresh as it ought to be). So we will have our regular features all weekend long. Today it’s short notes and a few leftover photos.

We also have holiday programming all weekend on our internet radio station, The AIR. This will include several replays of our new, three-hour AIR Christmas Special that just premiered Tuesday.

Next week I plan to bring you a newish video episode of Radio Free Charleston. I’m not sure what day it will debut, or what’s exactly going to be in it, but since I haven’t shot video of any bands recently I think it’s safe to assume it’ll be vintage video from the RFC vaults.

I also wanted to mention that PopCult has officially left The Charleston Gazette-Mail.  I actually took the blog independent over two years ago, but I had continued to post my content at the old location to take advantage of the Google searches and Wikipedia entries that still wind up there, and also to point those new readers to this new version of the blog.

However I’ve noticed a disturbing trend over the past couple of years, even before I left their friendly confines, and to be honest, while I once considered it an honor to be associated with The Charleston Gazette,  for some time now their endorsements and op-ed editorials have been puzzling, if not embarrassing.  From printing carefully prepared think tank propaganda pieces as op-eds to welcoming one of the great villains of our time on a video show so they could soft-peddle his crimes and let him spout nonsense unchallenged, it’s been increasingly difficult to defend whatever the hell it is that’s going on there.

I mean, my fear when the paper was up for auction was that they’d be bought by the soulless and far-right-wing Ogden Newspaper chain. I was thrilled when The Huntington Herald-Dispatch swooped in at the last minute. However, over the last four or five years, it seems that the only difference is that Ogden would have destroyed the paper overnight, while HD Media has let it suffer a slow death of creeping corruption and political gamesmanship.

The last straw for me was when they fired four of the best reporters they had, because they dared to criticize the man who seems to be single-handedly ruining the paper. If you want to read the whole story, Kyle Vass, at Dragline, has an excellent account of what happened HERE.

So last week I stopped updating PopCult at The Gazette-Mail, and just put up one final post pointing readers here. My readership levels here at the new location have already matched what I was doing as part of the GM.  While the old blog still gets a couple or three dozen hits a day, it’s just not worth the extra effort to duplicate my efforts to keep a blog updated at a site that, to be frank, has become a bit of an embarrassment.

So that’s what happened there.

I hope you all have a very happy holiday season, and to fill up the rest of this post, here’s a few random photos…

Another look at the Pioneer Zephyr, at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

A classic Golden Age Christmas cover from the original Captain Marvel. Don’t call him “Shazam,” dammit.

More cool plastic at Rotofugi.

Recently uncovered in the Panucci family photo archives: The first-ever photo, from May 1989, of your PopCulteer wearing a fedora.

Finally, we go back to MSI for one of the millions of decorated trees they had on display. Actually, there are two of them in this picture. One is being bashful.