This week we go back to October, 2010 for Radio Free Charelston 112, “Toxic Soup Shirt.” On this show we had three bands making their RFC debuts–Crossroads, Doctor Curmudgeon and Happy Minor. We also had a movie trailer for the documentary, “Toxic Soup,” and one for “Jazz From Hell,” which never quite got finished.
This was an overlooked gem of a show, and we beat Charleston’s baseball team to the Canary in the Coalmine joke by a dozen years. And that epic sight gag was provided by Stefani Andrews, who was also behind the camera for our host segments.
About 51 weeks ago I published a post and video here celebrating Sir Troy’s Toy Kingdom in Canton, Ohio. It’s the largest brick-and-mortar toy store in the country now, and as such, it is very much a fun place to visit.
So a week or two ago, your humble PopCulteer and his beautiful and nicely-recovering wife made a trip North to shoot video at a couple of really cool places. One of them was a return visit to Sir Troy’s, this time intent only on making a short video “Christmas Card” for our readers.
And this is it here…
The music is courtesy of our friends, Clownhole (and we made a music video for this song also about a year ago), and the shaky video is by yours truly.
It’s basically just a bit of fun to drop in this spot and share some holiday cheer while we are away in Chicago celebrating Mel’s birthday.
I didn’t shoot any still photos at Sir Troy’s, except for this one, which I took to send to cheer up my friend, Pixie, in Liverpool…
…looks like we’ll have to make time to go back to Canton to shoot more photos and video in the spring.
By the way, in the intro to this I talk about making the first video “two years ago.” That was my bad. In my defense, 2024 has seemed very much like it took a year or three to get through.
That is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for all our regular features, with fresh content every day, and if you haven’t already, go check out The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide for loads of pop culture gift suggestions.
Since I took the whole month of November off from providing my readers with STUFF TO DO in Charleston, around West Virginia and just beyond our borders, this week we’ve got a bonus STUFF TO DO that will focus on the ridiculous amount of holiday-themed events, which all seem to be happening this weekend.
There’s way more than this going on, but these are the events whose organizers were kind enough to leave nice graphics with coherent information laying around for me to find…
For the entire month of November, STUFF TO DO went on hiatus so that your humble blogger could bring you The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide. With that excuse no longer valid, it seems I have run out of reasons to not write this post. Besides, there’s still tons of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and the rest of the Mountain State over the next few daysso you can just read below and find out all about it. To make up for my slacking off, you can even expect a holiday-themed bonus edition tomorrow.
Even with our newly-arctic weather, there are still outdoor events happening, so I will continue to implore you to not be a dick and vape or smoke around other humans who may not share your addictions. Lots of folks get really sick when exposed to that garbage and it would’ve been really nice to to to Light The Night without having to smell nasty tobacco and weed odors.
As I have been copying and pasting for some time now, this a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS. It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. And if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook or Twitter.
Live Music is on tap at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This week’s shows are not yet announced. Last week they didn’t put up FB event pages until the day of, so think of it as “blind box” musical entertainment.
As always, The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week to tell you about. Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein & Robin return with Hot Cub stylings for a good cause. Friday Tim Courts holds down the forts for Happy Hour. Check the graphics dump below for more upcoming events at The Empty Glass.
Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern with the ‘rona still lurking about all robust and reinvigorated and now with Fahrvergnügen™. Plus there are nasty seasonal ailents, Pumpkin Spice Farts, excited deplorables, flying reindeer droppings and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.
Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.
We travel through time this week as we reach back to the spring of 2015, while simultaneously looking forward one week on Radio Free Charleston!
Tuesday means a new RFC on The AIR. And this week Radio Free Charleston presents three hours of listenting enjoyment for you. To listen to The AIR, 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 found elsewhere on this page.
You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.
We open with an all-new first hour this week because your humble blogger and radio Svengali is leaving for a week in Chicago, and doesn’t want to deprive his listeners, so I recorded two episodes of the show back-to-back on December 2. Our second and third hours this week are a tribute to Tommy Medvick, the late drummer for The Swivels and Feast of Stephen, who passed away shortly before this show originally aired in April, 2015.
That first hour features new music from Bad Keys of the Mountain, Dinosaur Burps, The Spackles, Wendy James, The Polkamaniacs, SPACE FREQ, The Heavy Hitters and more. It’s over-loaded with local and indie musical wonderfulness.
The remainder of the show revives a tribute to Tommy that was originally an episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Three, on Voices of Appalachia radio, the predecessor to The AIR.
Tommy was a great guy and one of the most powerful drummers I’d ever seen. Always upbeat and hilarious. He was a frequent guest on the original Radio Free Charleston broadcasts and he was not just a good friend, but a great friend. I am going to miss him terribly, and I’m hoping that this tribute can help his friends remember him, and let those who didn’t know him understand what a wonderful person he was.
Over the course of two hours you will hear music from The Swivels and The Feast of Stephen, two of the major musical projects Tommy worked with. You may also remember, if you are elderly enough, that The Swivels started out as The Swivel Rockers, then shortened their name late in 1989.He was also the lead figure in Tommy Spear and The Mints, but sadly I don’t have any of their music in my archives.
What we do have is pretty incredible. Tommy was an amazing musician and I hope that you can get an idea of how fantastic he was in this show. This show includes some rare demos that the Swivels recorded, which come to us courtesy of Tom’s bandmate in both the Swivels and Feast of Stephen, John Radcliff. We also have some excerpts of The Swivels, including Tommy, on one of the original RFC broadcast shows. We also have tracks from Feast of Stephen, which were supplied by the band’s producer, Dave McClanahan, as well as a few tracks from the Feast of Stephen reunion on RFC in 2007.
Links in the first hour of this playlist will take you to the artist’s page, so you can buy their music. Keep in mind that the first Friday of every month is “Bandcamp Friday,” so if you buy their music from Bandcamp on that day, they get to keep all the moolah.
“Forbidden Dance”
“Bank Robber”
“Scratch Out The Belly”
“Tired of Sinking”
“Superfund”
“No Vaccination”
“Battle With The Sun”
“Falling”
“Gas”
hour three
Feast of Stephen
“Coal Tattoo”
“Watch Me Plow”
“Urge To Care”
“Blinded Baby In A Cage”
“Revolution (World’s On Fire Tonight)”
“Mighty Gomec
“Season of the Wizard
“Escape The Man
“Sound 9
“Mystery Hole
Feast of Stephen 2007 Reunion
“Tired of Sinking”
“Bank Robber”
“Mystery Hole”
“No Vaccination”
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, Sunday at 8 PM and Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic 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.
After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.
At 3 PM we give you an encore of two classic episodes of The Swing Shift.
You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 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.
This week’s art is a bit of a sequel to last week’s. Like last week, it’s a small mixed media painting based on photos I took the week before last during a return trip from a secret mission that you will learn about in a few days.
On thick illustration board, this painting was created using acrylic paint, watercolor, Winsor Newton ink, white-out, razor blades and X-acto knives, a variety of brushes and straight edges. For this one I actually used an old-school GI Joe hand–the one with the pointy fingers, to get a solidly thick line. This idyllic winter scene is another based on a series of photos I took on the drive back home down I-79, after Mel took over driving.
This one was actually taken at a rest area before I turned over the wheel. I made the creative choice to omit some of the scenary, since I wasn’t in the mood to paint signs instructing people where to take their dogs to poop.
Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also 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.
PsychedelicShack 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.
At 8 PM you can hear an hour of the legendary and exquisite silliness of Spike Jones on last week’s new episode of TheComedy Vault.
Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we devote ten hours to five more episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. For the rest of this year we will be alternating between Prognosis and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, because we’re going to be pulling the early episodes of those shows from the server soon to make room for newer programs. After they’ve been offline for a year or so, we’ll bring them back into rotation but for now, you can hear them Monday evening into Tuesday morning, and then those episode will go on hiatus.
We lost Jules Huffman almost ten years ago at the age of 91. The retired WSAZ weatherman was better known to generations of kids as “Mr. Cartoon,” the host of a daily (later weekly) cartoon show on WSAZ that for most of its run aired at 4 PM, right after school.
The outstanding thing about Huffman was that he was a genuinely nice man. I met him a couple of times as an adult working in the television business, and he treated everyone, from a major TV executive to a lowly production assistant, with respect. I’ve heard dirt on almost every local broadcaster, and he’s one of the few people that had no dirt to tell. He was just the same nice guy that you saw on TV.
Now West Virginia Public Broadcasting has produced a wonderful documentary remembering Huffman, and since they’ve posted it to YouTube, I’m sharing it here for my readers who might have missed it or live outside the broadcast area.
This week we go back to September, 2010 for an episode of Radio Free Charleston that originated from The Empty Glass, the legendary music venue on Charleston East End.
The show this week featured music from Andy Park, Stephen Beckner and Stone Soup, plus some offbeat animation and a public service announcement for Covenant House that starred Ann Magnuson.
Most of this episode was shot at The Empty Glass on Thursday, September 16, during a benefit for Empty Glass Records, a project that allowed Charleston’s most celebrated bar to install recording equipment so that they can preserve the magic moments that still happen there on a regular basis.
It took the entire month of November, but we have finally arrived at The Master List of every single thing I recommended in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide. I decided to change up what I’d told you I was going to do in the intro post, and run the Master List on Black Friday instead of making you wait a week. It seemed like I really lightened my workload, but there are still fifty-five items here.
As in previous years, I made some changes to The Gift Guide. This year I did two posts a day, only on weekdays, with some containing multiple items. All of them have some kind of pop culture angle, and I hope all of them help to inspire somebody’s gift giving. This year our readership has exceeded any previous year’s PopCult Gift Guide, even with fewer entries. For that, I thank you folks for sharing the links and spreading the word.
This is the first year in my memory where I didn’t once have to wake up early and crank out that day’s Gift Guide entries. Even though my writing schedule was interrupted by some family health issues, a magazine deadline and two out-of-town road trips, I managed to get this whole thing written ahead of time. In fact, I’m compiling this Master List post before Thanksgiving. It’s just a few hours before Thanksgiving, but that counts.
Because of the nature of how I did the gift guide this year, some of the links will take you to the post that includes the items listed, but you may have to scroll down a bit to find the exact item you’re looking for. Due to popular demand, this year I will incorporate the Turkey Day gag gifts into the regular list.
And with that we wrap up The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide and also give you this week’s PopCulteer. It is truly a relief to have this behind me. However, there is no rest for the haven’t-yet-seen-Wicked, as next week, part of our return to semi-normalcy will see us continue to provide fresh content every day along with a few very special holiday video treats.
We interrupt The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide posts right before the final one, just so I can tell you about this afternoon’s new music specialty shows on The AIR.
Even in the midst of the Gift Guide, we do have some radio shows to tell you about Friday on The AIR. This afternoon we serve up a new episode of MIRRORBALL and a brand-new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat! 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.
MIRRORBALL
Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch brings you classic Disco with a little bit of an international flair. There are some huge chart hits here, as well as some club classics, but don’t be shocked if you find a track or two from another country. It’s all part of the big Disco melting pot.
Check out this very danceable playlist…
MIRRORBALL 108
The Dooley’s “Think I’m Gonna Fall In Love With You”
Regalado “Pinoy Funk”
Ashford & Simpson with Chaka Khan “Stuff Like That”
Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band “I’ll Play the Fool”
Patsy Gallant “From New York to L.A.”
Van McCoy “The Shuffle”
Emotions “I Should Be Dancing”
Hot Chocolate “So You Win Again”
Three Degrees “The Runner”
Moments “Jack In The Box”
Belle Epoque “Black Is Black”
David Soul “Silver Lady”
Odyssey “Use It Up and Wear It Out”
Amanda Lear “I Don’t Like Disco”
You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a mini-marathon that includes the latest episode Saturday nights at 9 PM
Sydney’s Big Electric Cat Visits A Big Country
Also on The AIR at 3 PM (EDT), Sydney Fileen graces us with a brand-new special mixtape-style new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. This time Sydney looks North to the Scottish highlands as she brings you music by Big Country.
Once the pride of Scotland, Big Country was formed when Stuart Adamson, formerly the guitarist for the band, Skids, left that band and teamed up with guitarist Bruce Watson to form a new band. Once they recruited Tony Butler and Mark Brezicki–who were session musicians known as “Rhythm for Hire,” the band was complete, and they became mainstays of the New Wave scene for the remainder of the eighties.
Sydney has assembled two hours in which you will hear the best of Big Country from 1983 to the end of the decade. It’s a great way to relive those incredible bagpipe-sounding guitars.
Check out the playlist…
BEC 122
Big Country
“In A Big Country”
“Harvest Home”
“Inwards”
“Chance”
“1,000 Stars”
“The Storm”
“Lost Patrol”
“Close Action”
“Fields of Fire”
“Pooroh Man”
“Wonderland”
“All Fall Together”
“Angle Park”
“East of Eden”
“Steeltown”
“Tall Ships Go”
“Just A Shadow”
“The Seer” with Kate Bush
“The Teacher”
“Look Away (12″ mix)”
“One Great Thing”
“Hold The Heart”
“Peace In Our Time”
“”King of Emotion”
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.
Check PopCult later today for The Master List of The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide.
The PopCulteer
This is the first year in my memory where I didn’t once have to wake up early and crank out that day’s Gift Guide entries. Even though my writing schedule was interrupted by some family health issues, a magazine deadline and two out-of-town road trips, I managed to get this whole thing written ahead of time. In fact, I’m compiling this Master List post before Thanksgiving. It’s just a few hours before Thanksgiving, but that counts.
The 2024 HESS Fire Truck
Wicked Monopoly
Overlook Hotel Swag
Tiki Mugs
Also on 
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