Remember folks, eat smart. Food goes in your mouth, not your nose or ear.

The PopCulteer
July 4, 2025

It’s a holiday, and my readership will be low because so many of my readers check out PopCult while they’re at work.

Add to that the fact that your humble blogger has had a rough week due to some medical tests that did not go as expected,  plus this particularly holiday is not one I feel like celebrating for the next few years, and you can guess that I don’t really have much prepared for the column/post this week.

So we’re going to go a bit random.

First, today at The Regatta, the little-known band tasked with the job of going on after the awesome Velvet Brothers is KC and The Sunshine Band.  It just so happens that Mel Larch devoted an episode of her Disco Showcase, MIRRORBALL, to KC and we will be replaying that show for you this afternoon at 2 PM on The AIR. The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

In honor of the Disco-ification of the Regatta, starting at 9 PM tonight, the AIR will run twelve hours of MIRRORBALL, for your listening and dancing pleasure.

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A word of advice for folks getting medical tests done: Do not assume that the technician doing the test  has read your chart, particularly if you have  unusual allergies.

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The Gilded Age has returned for its third season on MAX (soon to revert back to HBO MAX). If you’re a fan of this spectacularly-acted period drama, it’s time to sign up for MAX for a couple of months again.

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I hate writing obituaries. One reason for that is that I really don’t like it when someone I admire passes away.

Also, when somebody I don’t admire dies, I don’t get too much satisfaction from abusing their corpse in print. Even if their demise gives me great pleasure, and possibly even a grin that you couldn’t remove from my face with a sandblaster, I hate the idea of intruding on the genuine grief of people who, for whatever reason, loved and admired the dead S.O.B.

My ego is not so great that I feel the need to parade around the dead body pointing and laughing in public.

So I keep quiet.  Unless the person is an undeniably huge figure in the local scene or pop culture, like Michael Jackson on Stan Lee, I prefer to simply let their passing go by without a mention in this blog. And even in those cases where I feel compelled to write about them I’ve tried to be respectful while setting the record straight about my reasons for not being a fan.

This post is not a response to any particular recent demise. It’s a general response to the question, “Why didn’t you write an obituary for …?”

There are three possible answers.  Either I don’t know enough about the person to write a decent obituary, or I had no idea who they were, or I know too much about the person to write about them without upsetting their friends and/or family. No amount of score-settling is worth being a prick to other people.

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I want to get this post online within the hour, so I’m going to just stick in random photos from our recent travels now. The plan is to drop a lot of photo essays next week.

Yesterday I gifted my lovely wife with a Disco Pineapple from Temu. We wanted to send a photo to our friend Pixie, and decided to stage a Plastic People Disco Pineapple Party for her.

While we were waiting to get on the train to Chicago about a month ago.

In Chicago, the mobile office was set up to do important work, while I used my old phone to monitor a security camera at home.

Across from our hotel, we found Chip City, a newish cookie chain. Just to piss off all the people who get mad that cookie chains exist.

The inside of the elevator at the hotel was covered with stickers. Yes, that’s a Buc-ee’s sticker you see before you.

We seen da Bean.

At the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum (photo essay coming next week) we were surprised to learn that there was a trolley service in the Clarksburg/Fairmont area.

My current Facebook cover photo. Since this was taken, another Corgi model and some plastic folks have been added.

And that is this slapdash edition of The PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day, even when I don’t really feel like it.