I’ve mentioned in previous years that August is a minefield of anniversaries for me.

A couple of weeks ago, it was my birthday. This past Monday was my tenth wedding anniversary. We are rapidly coming up on the 35th anniversary of Radio Free Charleston.

And on this day nineteen years ago, the first two posts appeared in PopCult.

The first was a silly little bit of wordplay about buying an eBow on eBay.  The second was a short plea for tips on where to find good Won Ton (or crab rangoon, to some folks) in Charleston. Notable in this post is a reference to Krabby Patties, which marks the first allusion to SpongeBob Squarepants in this blog.

These were just test posts, really. I wasn’t sure exactly what this blog was supposed to be (sometimes I still wonder about that), but they do mark the humble beginnings of a blog that is closing in on seven thousand posts and has lasted many years past the typical lifespan of a blog.

Also, I didn’t even realize it at the time, but August 28 is the birthday of Jack Kirby, the man who co-created Captain America, and created the bedrock of the modern Marvel Comics universe. it was 12 days and 21 posts before I got around to mentioning Jack Kirby in PopCult. I’ve mentioned him over a hundred times more since then.

One post before that, on the same day, was the first Beatles reference in PopCult. My first art post was on August 31, six posts in, and the first toy-related post was the next post, published on the next day.  Other posts in the first month of this blog mentioned such now-familiar topics as professional wrestling;  music;  comic books;  GI Joe, Captain Action and action figures in general; and the late, now-demolished, Charleston Playhouse.

Gazette Photo by Chip Ellis

That actually isn’t too bad when you consider that, until 2013, I didn’t post fresh content every day.  For those of you new to PopCult, this blog started out as part of The Gazz, an online version of the entertainment section of The Charleston Gazette. It bounced around the various web versions of the Gazette and Gazette-Mail until I exited stage right from that sinking ship four years ago, dragging all my previous posts along with me (save for most of the images from the first year or so, which had been lost during one of the many Gazette-content portings).  And I always have to pause and thank Douglas Imbrogno for hiring me to write this blog in the first place, and giving it the name it has now.

In a post where I sort of introduced myself I wrote…

So, that’s about it. I may tee off on comic books, toys, movies, animation, health care, food, television, or anything else that strikes my fancy. I’ll also share some of the artwork, photography, and music that I’ve been working on these last few years. Maybe along the way I can reconnect with some of my old Radio Free Charleston co-conspirators.

I’d say I’ve lived up to that, and a bit more.

We now have our sister internet radio station, The AIR, as well as our regular weekly features: Monday Morning Art, STUFF TO DO, The PopCulteer, The RFC Flashback, and Sunday Evening Video.  I also run Kickstarter Alerts and review toys, comics, theatre, books, movies and TV shows, plus I babble about having Myasthenia Gravis a lot.  And every November I kill myself cranking out The PopCult Gift Guide.

I don’t want anyone to mistake this bit of self-reflection as a sign that I have any intention of stopping soon.  PopCult will be around as long as I am.  The truth is, I’m writing this early on the morning of August 28 because I just got back from an anniversary trip with my lovely wife, Mel Larch, yesterday. I was too tired to write last night and hadn’t prepared this post before I left. so I’m winging it.

About that trip, it was a bit of a spur of the moment thing.  We drove to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, so Mel and I could meet Rodger Bumpass, the voice of Squidward on SpongeBob Squarepants and someone who’s career I’ve followed since his days at The National Lampoon, and then we just meandered our way through Maryland, the Eastern Panhandle and Virginia before coming home.

I didn’t realize that we weren’t supposed to take pictures, which is why the nice handler lady is glaring

You won’t be reading much about that convention. I might post a few photos, but after we were there for a while I realized how much fun I was having not taking pictures. I put the camera away. So we met Rodger and I met Michael Golden and Renee Witterstatter as civilians, and not as a blogger or reporter.

And I liked it.

And that comes to the one bit of news in this otherwise unremarkable post.  At the end of September, Mel and I are going to JoeLanta, the newly-revived GI Joe convention in Atlanta, Georgia.

And I’m not shooting any video. I might take a few photos, but I want to experience, for the first time in the fifteen years that I’ve been going to toy conventions, what it’s like to be on the floor of a convention without a camera. It looks like 80% of the announced guests for JoeLanta are “content creators” with their own YouTube channels, so any videos from me won’t be missed, and I might get to see the show in a whole new light.  I’m not retiring from shooting video and photos at conventions, but I’m going to try to enjoy them on a different level, and in the case of a show where there are dozens of other folks shooting video, I’ll take a pass.

Apologies to anyone who finds this to be underwhelming as far as marking my anniversary, but 19 years isn’t exactly a milestone.  Next year I need to put some effort into this.

Okay…one more convention pic…