The PopCulteer
March 21, 2025

Okay, so the migrating from one PC to another that I told you about yesterday is not going as quickly as I had planned.

The original idea was to have the desk cleared off, the new PC booted up, and the KVM installed so I could load it up with the appropriate software while still using the old reliable computer to update the blog.

The trouble was that clearing off the desk is taking longer than expected. Ten hours of steady work, and I can now see the surface of the desk (which badly needs dusting), but I still have long way to go before I can reposition everything and relocate the power cables so that I can put everything where it’s supposed to go.

I’m also going to relocate a couple of nice shadowboxed GI Joe sets that look like they’re about plunge off the wall any second now.

Still, I have to produce a PopCulteer column today, so how about we run down the top ten things I found while cleaning off the desk? Be warned that these things are dusty, and more dust was whipped up while cleaning, and since I just grabbed my camera and shot with a macro setting real quick and forgot to dust them off, they look even dustier than they are.

Top Ten Desk Treasures

10  Coming in at number ten, it’s a miniature Suffering Bastard Tiki Mug that I don’t remember buying.

I’m pretty sure he came from Trader Vic’s, but I don’t remember buying one when I went on a Tiki Mug buying spree a few years ago.

Maybe he just decided to show up and suffer independently.

This little guy is about four inches tall, which means he still holds more alcohol than I’ve ever had to drink in my life.

9  Number nine was a “Welcome To Charter Broadband” pamphlet with a CD ROM that I got twenty years ago when I made the late leap from dial-up. After waiting nearly five months to get hooked up by Verizon, only to finally be told that their service didn’t quite reach my address, I called Charter and was hooked up in two hours.

Since then, Verizon sold out to Frontier, while Charter sold out to Suddenlink, which got bought by a German company who changed the name to Optimum. My internet is still flowing through the same wires that brought me Capitol Cablevision in 1972.

8  Number eight was Volume III of the Warner Brothers Records Sampler Series “Just Say Yes.”  This will likely turn up as the third hour of Radio Free Charleston in a week or three.

Back during the original broadcast incarnation of RFC, this was one of my go-to samplers that allowed me to play the alternative hits of the day without lugging around a briefcase of thirty or forty CDs.

I mean, I still did lug around a briefcase full of CDs, but most of them were samplers like this one.

7  Number seven was a container of multi-colored rubber bands.  The fact that these have atrophied to the point that they crumble when you stretch them tells me they’ve been there more than a decade.

6  Number six was one of my high school sketchbooks.

5  Number five was a halfway-decent drawing of a very muscular Pete Townshend in that sketchbook.

4  Number four was my E Bow. I’d wondered where that had gotten off to.

3  Number three was a Chinese knockoff toy Volkswagon painted like The George Barris Batmobile, that must have been an eBay purchase because the box was crushed as though it had been sent in an envelope. Apparently this is based on a gag from one of those LEGO superhero movies. For some reason, the fact that it’s based on a LEGO movie, instead of just being a goofy knockoff, makes it less fun to me.

2  Number two is a tiny orange fishnet bag with little plastic toys and a couple of thumbdrives that I got at the International Toy Fair in New York just over ten years ago.

1  And finally, number one is Luigi!  Luigi is a kitchen timer, and was the co-star and timekeeper on Word Association With Lee and Rudy, the half-hour talk show I used to do on The AIR with Lee Harrah. We keep threatening to revive it, and now that I found Luigi, that’s a tiny bit more likely.

And this hastily-scrawled list is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content, even when things aren’t going too smoothly.