RIP, Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, one of the greatest writers and advocates for rural America, died yesterday in Kentucky at age 92. A number of his books grace my bookshelves.

Sarah Ladd wrote an excellent obituary for the Kentucky Lantern, noting that Berry "leaves behind a sprawling legacy of advocacy, conservationism, literary pursuit and protest that inspired people from the hills of Kentucky to Hollywood and beyond."

On Substack, Mike Small wrote today: "We have lost one of our most important thinkers. ... On education, community, health, technology and economics, his writing poured out home truths and wisdom. He was an iconoclast who was rooted in tradition(s) but not bound by them. Berry wrote at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, twenty-four volumes of essays, and fifteen novels and short story collections — including the seminal The Unsettling of America (1977). ... His writing style had range, from poetry to polemic, often in short essays and aphorisms; it was deep, insightful, and wise but remained untainted by academia or jargon."

In a late-1970s essay, Berry wrote: "People who are willing to follow technology wherever it leads are necessarily willing to follow it away from home, off the earth, and outside the sphere of human definition, meaning, and responsibility." Those words seem particularly apt all these decades later, as we grapple with the spread and implications of generative artificial intelligence and technology that consumes our humanity.

Earlier, in "Think Little," a short 1970 essay on environmentalism and sustainability, Berry wrote this: "But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living."

Related post [from 2019]: Lost Corners: Review of Wendell Berry book from 12 years ago

Two-thirds of the way through the movie viewing year

We're two-thirds of the way through 2026, and I thought I'd share my work-in-progress ranking of favorite first watches of the year. It will be interesting to see how this list changes between now and the end of the year, in terms of both new additions and thinking more deeply about the films already on the list.

1. Harold and Maude (1971, director: Hal Ashby)

2. The Earrings of Madame de... (1953, Max Ophüls)

3. Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)

4. The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin)

5. UFOria (1985, John Binder)

6. Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler)

7. Times Square (1980, Allan Moyle)

8. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994, Stephan Elliott)

9. Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)

10. Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)

And here's the big catch. My favorite segment of the year, by far, is Federico Fellini's "Toby Dammit," (starring Terence Stamp, pictured above) from the 1968 anthology film Spirits of the Dead. However, the other two segments are not compelling enough to pull the film as a whole into the Top 10. (Sorry, Fonda siblings.)

Overall, I've had 34 first watches so far this year. And I will say that list includes Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and just leave it at that. The oldest movie I've seen is 1922's The Toll of the Sea, which is important historically but problematic on multiple levels. 

Here was 2025's final list. I ended up not ranking them last year, and that may be the case again this year! 

RIP Dolly Parton, incredible champion of children's literacy

Dolly Parton died today in Nashville at age 80. The legendary American musician, actress and philanthropist will be well-remembered for a great many things. I want to mostly focus on her incredible work regarding child literacy, something that typically gets placed below all of the other accolades in obituaries about her amazing life.

She founded the Imagination Library in 1995 to provide children with free books throughout early childhood. Through a series of expanding partnerships, it has delivered free books to tens of millions of children across the United States and in four other countries, and is currently sending out about 3 million books every month, including bilingual and Braille books.

According to its website, more than 332 million total books have been gifted through Dolly's initiative.

“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams,” Parton once said. “They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”

Her work to instill a love of reading in children from a very young age has planted tens of millions of such seeds, which will grow tall and strong for decades to come.

In an article published today by Good Housekeeping, Sarah Vincent notes: "The Imagination Library has been so impactful that we recognized it with the Good Housekeeping Seal in 2001. It marked the first and only time it had ever been awarded to a person, and we can’t think of a better icon to have that distinction."

Children age out of the Imagination Library program when they turn 5. They receive a letter from Parton that states, in part:

"This may be your last book from my Imagination Library but you have to promise me you will keep on reading. If you go to your local public library you will find a great number of books just for kids your age. Every book is a treasure and every time you open one up you will meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places. ... There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go. ... You do all of these things and you can be anyone you want to be. You are terrific."

“Of all the things I’ve done in my life, this is one of the most precious things,” Parton says in the 2020 documentary The Library That Dolly Built (which is narrated by actress and education advocate Danica McKellar). “If you’re lucky and fortunate enough to be in a position to help, you should help.”

A lot of people are helping today, in Dolly Parton's memory, by donating to or advocating for the Imagination Library. There are other ways to help children's literacy, of course. Place books for kids into Little Free Libraries, for example. I'm already planning to have a Dolly Parton-themed Halloween this year, handing out books to the trick-or-treaters when they stop by. Dollyween has a nice ring to it.

So long, Dolly. And thanks for all the books. 

Nifty packaging in today's mail

I received a package in the mail today and it came with some nifty bonuses. First, taped to the front of the envelope was an old banner for the Arizona Odd Fellow, dated March 15, 1924 — more than 102 years ago! The monthly newsletter cost $1 annually and was "devoted to the welfare of Odd Fellowship in all its branches." The two mottos across the top, bookending the eyeball and the three interlocking links, state "We Seek to Improve and Elevate the Character of Man" and "We Can Be Odd Fellows Only While We Act Like Honest Men."

Then, when I opened the package, it immediately appeared that I had been sent the wrong book. I was not seeking 1973's Pablo, Boy of Mexico / Eskimo Family / Yasin of Arabia (part of the My-Fun-to-Read Books series by The Southwestern Company). Though I'm sure that would be an interesting book to research.

Turns out that gutted pink book's covers were just being used to protect the actual book I was hoping for: Meet the Werewolf by Georgess McHargue. That book is part of a post for another day. So stay tuned. In the meantime, I'll make good use of of those pink covers to protect something I send out in the mails. I wonder how long we might be able to keep it circulating that way?

Poe-fect summer snapshot

This is probably the best photo I'll take in 2026. 

Cats Spice, left, and Smoky, right, are looking out the kitchen window at Poe the fledgling raven, who is sitting on the outside table to stay cool in the blazing heat and/or get my attention so I'll bring him/her some Temptations cat treats. Sitting in the sink and looking directly at me, annoyed, is Monkey, who wants me to turn the faucet on to a drip, so that he can get some water. (Photo taken on July 14.)

Poe may be moving on and has only been a seen a couple times in the past week. Perhaps he/she has found some other ravens to live with.

T.E. Dikty, regarding science and science fiction 70 years ago

One of the reasons I've held onto The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956, which I purchased from Jim Lewin at the York Emporium, for so long is because it features an excellent and compelling introductory essay by T.E. Dikty, whose lived from 1920 to 1991 and whose full name was Thaddeus Maxim Eugene "Ted" Dikty.

It seems to me that in this time of treacherous antiscience, rejection of historical truths and a warming world ever-teetering on the brink of greater violence, some of these passages by Dikty are worth amplifying:

• "This was the year when the United States announced it would shortly launch an Earth satellite, when hundreds of lives were saved by the polio vaccine, and when a general announced that hundreds of millions — friend and foe —  would be lost in the event of another war because of radioactive fallout."
• "In Germany, a major science-fiction crisis impended when the government was about to ban Utopia and Utopia Grossband on the grounds they contained 'atomic war' stories. Due in large part to a plea by well-known American science-fiction fan and agent Forrest J Ackerman, the German censor board reversed its stand and allowed the magazines to continue."
• "Parents throughout the nation would have no difficulty at all in pointing out the most signficant science development during the year. That was the vaccination — after some delays — of children and expectant mothers with the Salk polio vaccine. Although not 100% effective, there was no doubt that the vaccine substantially reduced the number of cases."
• "Atomic power for peaceful uses was being investigated more eagerly each year, with the realization that by the year 2000 the world will be using eight times as much energy as it does now and fossil fuels will be incapable of supplying this demand." 
• "Electronic brains were in the news again. This time they were going to replace the weatherman in forecasting the weather."  
• "A guided missile was developed which is guided to its target by the heat given off by said target (and in what science-fiction story did we first read about this?)."
• "With every passing day Tomorrow was a little closer, and science-fiction writers had to be spry and inventive to stay ahead of onrushing technology. The world of the future was no longer just around the corner —  it was racing pell mell up the block."

The post with 18,000+ pageviews

A "popular" new Papergreat post will get maybe 20 pageviews in its first 24 hours. This blog isn't exactly a buzzing hub of internet activity. So it was to my great surprise last month when I discovered that the quick and silly post Ingredients list found in the parking lot of a Circle K in Florence had thousands of pageviews during its first day. It has now accumulated about 18,400 pageviews.

All of this is because the post was chosen for aggregation by an AI-powered "news" site called Newsbreak, which gathers others' reporting on community news and puts it together in one stream for local readers. 

I imagine that the "found in the parking lot of a Circle K in Florence" portion of the post title is what caught the "eye" of the AI. Because a human being with journalism training would never have selected such a post to aggregate as "breaking news." So let that part be yet another lesson regarding the deep limitations of AI. 

At least Newsbreak states up front: "It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency: Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation."

I'm not sure how many people read that note, though. Newsbreak's readers questioned why it was aggregating an incredibly nonessential post from Papergreat. Some of their comments:

• Why is this news worthy?
• how is this news
• lmao why is this in the news?
• lmfao I cannot believe this made the news!
• Well this source is getting blocked
• why in the f**k is this a news article
• Why is this even a post.
• slow day huh
• why is this news and why did someone actually take the time
• This is news worthy because of what??? I’ll wait for a reasonable answer

Clearly, some of them still don't understand this is what you're going to get when you remove humans from the equation and let a bunch of code try to figure out what's "newsworthy." It just so dumb that we're trying to have AI reinvent a wheel that wasn't broken.

Thomas Baekdal asked in 2024, "Why do news aggregator apps keep failing?" and found that the initial answer is quite simple: 

"We already have all the news aggregators we need. ... Every single national and local newspaper is a news aggregator. It's a publication where the journalists look at millions of different things that have happened in the world over the past 24 hours, and then they have picked out (aggregated) the news stories that they feel you need to see. ... So, newspapers are news aggregators. Which also means that all the news aggregators are just aggregating other news aggregators... and that just doesn't make much sense, neither in terms of audience or business model. ... For some strange reason, many tech entrepreneurs never realized this."

* * *

For what it's worth, all of the interest generated did get some folks to comment on the blog post (not the Newsbreak post) with ideas regarding what all the ingredients were for.

Guesses ranged from "some sort of sweet and spicy marinara sauce using honey" to pork roast with hot honey drizzle to pizza to pork barbecue. It's not clear whether they might have asked an AI chatbot to generate those guesses...

Guerre

Whenever I fall into a rut of not posting, whether it's due to busyness, stress, depression, despair at world events or some combination of the above, I typically look through postcards to find something that can spark me to break the streak. In this instance, I already knew which postcard I wanted, but I had to go through the entire shoebox to find it. 

I used to have about a half-dozen of these postcards labeled "Guerre 1914-1918." I no longer remember how I acquired them. And this might be the only one I still have, unless the others are elsewhere. Over the years, I've thought often about posting one of them, but there never ended up being a match between the motivation and the moment. 

Now seems like a grimly appropriate global moment.

The photograph for this Great War postcard was taken by Marcel Delboy and was #48 in a series. According to the website undivided-back postcards, Jacques Marcel Delboy (1882-1941) was based in Bordeaux, France: "Delboy published his work as black & white collotype postcards and souvenir booklets. Some of his cards were hand-coloured. He later used Delboy and Yobled (Delboy in reverse) logos."

This postcard features the Great War devastation in Fismes, a commune in northern France. The caption is in both French and English, with the English version stating "Esplanade street after the bombardment of the Germans." 

This photo is likely associated with the monthlong Battle of Fismes and Fismette (Fismette being a hamlet linked to Fismes by bridge), which took up most of August 1918. More than 2,000 Americans were killed and nearly 14,000 wounded during the month of fighting. There are no historical figures for French or German casualties. The horror created a lasting bond between Fisme and Pennsylvania (particularly Meadville), where many of the soldiers had been from.

Hervey Allen (1889-1949), a National Guard soldier from Pittsburgh who survived the gassing, fires, shrapnel and shell shock of the Battle of Fismes and Fismette, wrote this in his memoir, Toward the Flame:

"It took me about half an hour to crawl to the river. I had to put my mask on at the last, as the mustard gas was strong in the little hollow in which I lay. My hands were smarting. Some of the shells brought my heart into my mouth; lying there waiting for them was intolerable. I was sure I was going to be blown to pieces. The river was very nearly in flood and so there was no bank, the field gradually getting soggy and swampy till it sloped out into the water. There was a lot of submerged barbed wire that made going ahead very painful and slow. I had, of course, to throw away my mask as it got full of water. My pistol went also. It was too heavy to risk.

"Once in the water, I worked under the single board of the footbridge, shifting along hand over hand, which took me halfway across. There I struck out, plunging in a few strokes to the other side and working through the wire. Swimming with shoes was not so difficult as I had thought, but the cold water seemed to take all my courage, which was what I needed more than ever. Our own machine guns were playing along the railroad track on our side of the river. After getting across, it seemed for a while that I would be caught between the two fires.

"I lay there in the river for a minute and gave up. When you do that something dies inside."

Feral cats, March 2026

Put it in the Louvre. That's Mamacita on the right. In the center is her older son Creamsicle 

and on the left is her younger son Splash. 

Cats are a primary reason I don't write 10 blog posts a week. In addition to taking care of the indoor cats, we have "regulars" in the neighborhood feral community who get from us the food and water they need to subsist in the harsh desert climate. (I realize that I repeat myself when it comes to these cat posts, but c'est la vie.)

Here's the current March 2026 rundown on the feral/community kitties:

1. The matriarch is Mamacita and we've known her for more than four years, since she was a kitten. There a great picture of her at the bottom of this May 2025 post. 

2. She's often seen with her older son Creamsicle, who is the cat we see most often. He hangs around in the mornings, sits in the firepit when he's trying to be sneaky and catch a bird and looks for shade on hot afternoons. 

3. Splash is a black-and-white tuxedo cat and is Creamsicle's younger brother. The two brothers often come for breakfast together in the mornings. Splash, as I'm sure I've noted before, got his name because, when he was a kitten, he fell into the pool and did tiny paddles all the way to safety before I could even get into the water to save him, which I would have.

4. Blue-eyed Gumball has been coming around for almost two years. I think he was an abandoned or lost pet. He often spends the entire day sleeping in a chair underneath the patio roof. Temptations are his favorite food, and I usually have to distract him with Temptations and a stern look when I'm feeding other cats, because he likes to chase them.

5. Meowmix starting visiting around the same time as Gumball, and the two of them get along relatively well together, especially given that they're both tomcats, so I wonder sometimes if they were essentially abandoned together. Meowmix is much more mellow and always runs off after he's finished eating. He's a sweetheart and is the only feral cat, currently, that lets me pet them.

6. Marmalade first started visiting in December, as I noted in the Christmas post, and he's yet another tomcat. And yet another cat that I suspect may have been abandoned or lost. He's extremely not neutered and loves to spray, spray, spray. He has designs on Mamacita, because he's incapable of understanding that she's spayed. I have great hopes that we can TNR at least two of Marmalade, Gumball and Meowmix this month, before the summer weather really kicks. Of course we want to get all three of them neutered, eventually, but these things take time, patience and energy. Marmalade has lost weight since December, which further reinforces the notion that he may not have always been an outdoor cat and is now fending for himself. And so I worry about him, especially, with his first summer coming. Here are two photos of Marmalade in our front window well.

7. And our newest and final semi-regular is Yinzer (named by Joan). I'm fairly sure it's a male. He may be the youngest of the cats, and once again, grrrr, I think there's a decent chance that he was abandoned/lost. He started coming by tentatively and then running off as soon as I went outside. Then he would meow at the back door a couple times before scooting off. Now he stays and eats some food some mornings, which makes me happy. Here he is...

* * *

We had some special cat visitors at the beginning of the year. A new-to-us pregnant female began coming nightly shortly after dark for food and especially for cheese. It got to the point where she would scoot under the table and wait while I put food down for her, but otherwise she was extremely skittish, as a pregnant kitty should be. We watched her get really big as she came for a few weeks and then, unsurprisingly, she stopped coming. I suspect we were her secondary/supplementary food source during pregnancy, so I'm honestly not sure if/when we'll see her again if she lives a fair distance away. We'll worry for her and her kittens and be here to help if they ever return. We named her Daisy and, yes, she has a heck of a R.B.F. Life in the desert is tough for the mama cats.

And Daisy came with a surprise! On three nights and three nights only, she was accompanied by a male tomcat that we realized was the long-lost Fjord Nubbins. Fjord is a son of Mamacita and is Creamsicle's brother from the same litter. He disappeared a couple years ago, before we could TNR him, and we had just assumed the worst. But it appears that he's thriving. In my head canon, he's Daisy's mate and, when she was pregnant and needed food, he remembered this place and led her here, accompanying her a few times to say hello. I could be completely wrong, but I like that story and I'm sticking with it. I could only get snapshots of Fjord, and his very recognizable face, through the window. Here they are: 

Meanwhile, we still have occasional skunks but I can't tell who's who anymore after naming most of them last year. Given the time of year, I suspect that we might not be far from the time when we start seeing some tiny, adorable baby skunks. 

We also seem to have overnight raccoon(s), given the levels of mayhem I find sometimes in the morning. I'm glad we're helping them, but they're hitting the cat food budget pretty hard. (I could just stop leaving out food overnight, but I always imagine that the most skittish and vulnerable cats, ones I never see, depend upon it, so I'll keep doing it.) 

If you're interested in helping in a small way to feed the feral kitties and skunks, my Redbubble page offers a lot of postcards of these cats (both the indoor pets and the ferals) posing in adorable fashion.

What George Michael sang 36 years ago

What does it mean when you wake up the in middle of the night and have a song in your head that you haven't thought about in decades? How and why do the brain's electrical byways even dredge up something like that?   

That was George Michael's 1990 lament "Praying for Time" for me, two nights ago. It wasn't even part of a dream, to my knowledge. I just woke up around 3 a.m. when nature called and it was right there, rolling about:

The rich declare themselves poor ... 'Cause God's stopped keeping score

So weird. Yet so timely, perhaps? Michael's commentary was correct for its moment but also prescient about ours.

Speaking about "Praying for Time," he told The New York Times this in 1990: "It’s my way of trying to figure out why it’s so hard for people to be good to each other. I believe the problem is conditional as opposed to being something inherent in mankind. The media has affected everybody’s consciousness much more than most people will admit. Because of the media, the way the world is perceived is as a place where resources and time are running out. We’re taught that you have to grab what you can before it’s gone. It’s almost as if there isn’t time for compassion.” 

This is the year of the guilty man

Your television takes a stand

Fast forward from TV to the internet and endlessly scrolling social media.

Those who once called television a "vast wasteland" had no idea what would follow within a half-century.

Two nights ago I woke up to "Praying for Time." This morning I woke up to another unsurprising war.

The week in images

I thought about doing some short explanatory text, but I'll just let future Papergreat Scholars™ weigh in.

Weirdest thing I'll purge this year

I'm continuing to downsize and this takes up way too much shelf space, so I posted it to my neighborhood's "free stuff" Facebook page with this note: 

Gift cemetery

For my first post on here, I promise this will be the weirdest thing I ever post and then it will be much more normal after that. This is a model cemetery that was clearly someone's art project long ago. Maybe it fits someone's aesthetic or model railroad??? It's about 8.5 inches by 12 inches. Comes with an unattached sheep that is disproportionately sized compared to the cemetery. .... Just want to see if anyone is interested because I'd hate to toss it.

If  there are no takers, I'll at least keep the sheep.

Snapshot & memories: At the Penn State computer lab

Here's a picture that someone (probably Jessica Hartshorn) took of me at a Penn State University computer lab in either 1992 or 1993. Wearing my lucky, lumpy USFL hat, I am surely working on a class paper or project for which I had been procrastinating. I was a bad student in college who didn't put much effort into most classes. Let's just say that my grade-point average would have made me a strong contender for the Cy Young Award if it were my ERA. I was a bad student because I spent most of my time at The Daily Collegian, writing, editing and/or paginating stories for the five-day-a-week student newspaper. I wanted to work in newspapers after college, so I figured that was my hands-on education. And here I am in 2026 still working for one of the dwindling number of newspapers in the United States. It didn't hurt, either, that the folks at The Daily Collegian were awesome and well worth spending endless hours newspapering with.

I have felt bad for years, though, about how little effort I put into my classes. Penn State's liberal arts curriculum offered classes on many fascinating topics that Older Chris would love to spend time on, especially in the realms of history, literature, social sciences, health and the arts. If only some of us could have had our later-in-life passion for continuing education when we were 19, 20 and 21...

I also regret that I haven't yet written much about my college days on Papergreat. When I began this blog in 2010, I was only 17 years removed from graduating from Penn State and it felt far too recent to qualify as "history." But now I wake up and it's nearly 33 years since I left Happy Valley with my diploma. I'm older than the majority of my professors were at the time they graded my low-effort papers, probably while shaking their heads (unless their graduate TAs did the grading).

And now I fear I've waited too long. My memories of Penn State are no longer crisp and detailed. They feel more like dreams I can recall if I close my eyes. I don't have a ton of ephemera from Penn State anymore to spur recollections. And I have very, very few pictures from my four years on campus, which seems bizarre but that was life before these times in which I take two dozen cat photos per day with my phone. There's this photo from my junior and senior year dormitory room (where you can also see the USFL hat in the background), and some photos from THON, but very little beyond that, until Graduation Day. I should have packed a camera for college in 1989! I can think of a hundred things I should have documented with snapshots. Sigh.

I'm going to try to do a better job in the coming months (and years?) of using ephemera as the jumping off point for telling stories about my days at Penn State. They're as worthy of preserving for posterity as postcards from 1915 or vernacular photography from 1935 or travel brochures from 1955. And those stories involve dear friends who represented the very best part of the college experience. 

Other snapshots and memories          

• Adorable little me on Mulberry Street
• Kitchen at Willow Street house in Montoursville
• Me and Pop-Pop in the kitchen
• Commodore 64 corner
• (Missing) snapshot & memories: Thanksgiving
• Me & Cyrano
• Me in a Star Trek shirt
• All kids do these days is play video games
• Posing with a Saturn V in 1982
• The Phillies are hot, and so was I
• Relocated fire engine in Montoursville
• Family outfits of 1972
• Our little bookstore
• Well-dressed for first day of nursery school

A bookmark to finally begin the year

I've been in a bad rut to start 2026, and the spiraling state of our nation (to put it mildly) in what should be its celebratory 250th anniversary year certainly is a big contributor to that daily depression.

We have to find ways to keep plowing forward and I'm starting Papergreat's 17th calendar year with some short posts about items I've come across during some recent sorting and decluttering of family ephemera. Every January brings a fresh urge to purge stuff for sanity's sake. I hope this year sees more meaningful progress by me in that regard.

This is a greeting card that was designed to be a bookmark, if you detach the front cover of the card. It's stained and there's a tear at the bottom, but I've fixed that with tape and I'm going to put this in my pile of bookmarks and toss the rest of the card, along with the generic cursive message.

The bookmark was produced by Yorkraft and the card is printed with the following explanatory message: "Hand colored Book-Marks (Lese Ziechen), similar to this, with designs derived from religious symbolism, were used to mark the place many old Pennsylvania Dutch Bibles and Hymnals."

For some information about Yorkraft we turn to the York Daily Record and a 2016 Universal York blog post by June Lloyd. The company dates to at least the mid 1940s and manufactured "decorative signs and novelties, including Pennsylvania Dutch trinkets." Lloyd's post cites a 1946 advertisement that states: 

"YORKRAFT Pennsylvania Dutch… Greeting Cards and Gift items, for inspiration, draw upon a rich store of folklore and folk-arts of the Pennsylvania Dutch who have probably contributed more than any other group, to the Early American Folk Arts. Yorkraft has caught the charm and spirit of their decoration and design, their quaint speech and humor and their picturesque dress and customs, which still persist in Pennsylvania and to some extent in other parts of the country settled by Pennsylvania Dutch folks."

There are hundreds of Yorkraft items currently for sale on eBay, some dating to the late 1970s. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the company's first-ever mention on Papergreat. Items range from a set of blank Amish-themed notecards for less than $10 to faux stained-glass display pieces to Pennsylvania Dutch recipe booklets to a 1969 "Make Love Not War" wooden sign that's pretty damn cool and is listed for $329.99.

Shades of Clark Ashton Smith

I had the high (only?) bid on this thing at a recent fundraising auction to help folks recover from early autumn flooding in Miami, Arizona, my favorite small town that I've discovered since we moved here in 2021. 

Now the thing sits on my bookshelf. 

It reminds me a little bit of the eerie sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith, which I wrote about in 2017.

Also, I've read enough paranormal short stories and seen enough episodes of "Night Gallery" — not to mention those episodes of "The Brady Bunch" with Hawaii, the tiki idol and Vincent Price — to realize that I'm now cohabitating with a cursed object, and I should probably tread very lightly.

1907 Thanksgiving postcard

Happy Thanksgiving. There's a lot to unpack in this 1907 postcard published by The Rose Company. Let's start with the illustration on the front. At the top, there's a golden crown. Underneath the crown is a turkey. And the turkey is standing on a shield that has the design of the United States of America's flag, over the top of which is printed these words:

Europe has its turkey

Asia has the same

But the turkey

of America

Is King ~

of all the game

With the crown and the turkey and the pro-America message this card hits in some disconcerting ways in 2025, but that's all my personal projection based upon our current moment with kings and "turkeys" and America First.¹

If I had to speculate, I'd say this is a fairly harmless Thanksgiving postcard that's being a bit playful in touting American exceptionalism during an era when the United States' global power was rising. If anyone has any insights or alternate interpretations of this card, I'd love to read them in the comments.

There are cursive messages on both the front and back of this postcard, which was sent from Newton, New Jersey, to Lowell, Massachusetts, in late November 1907. The message on the front states:

Did you know Mr Hiles [?] has the Typhoid Fever?

Someone having typhoid fever in 1907 would have been a serious medical issue. Though mortality rates were on the decline at that point, thousands of Americans were still dying of the disease. Within just a few years, though, sanitation measures including water filtration, chlorination and pasteurization tamed typhoid's spread, and the military was using a proven vaccine to protect troops in high-risk areas.

The note on the back is a rather perfunctory:

Dear friend:

Rec'd your postal and hope you think of me again real soon. Thanking you for same.

Previous Thanksgiving posts

• Public service announcement that's still relevant
• Bettina's Thanksgiving in the country (and more meal suggestions)
• Nostalgic school bulletin-board material for Thanksgiving
• Three colorful vintage Thanksgiving postcards featuring turkeys
• Stock photo of pilgrims and a dead turkey from a 1940 magazine
• 1971 Thanksgiving gift edition of Ideals magazine
• If you still need a Thanksgiving dessert, make some strawberry pie
• I'd blame the tryptophan, but cat pileups like this happen every day
• 1950 Thanksgiving ads
• (Missing) snapshot & memories: Thanksgiving
• Happy Thanksgiving: Enjoy vintage anthropomorphic vegetables
• Thanksgiving postcard from 1914, plus a little guffaw

Footnote

1. I had a whole rant forming in my head, but I'll be good since today is a holiday. My head is spinning, anyways. I'm not sure if we're barreling toward a repeat of 1789, a repeat of 1933 or some new mixture that future historians simply refer to as "shades of 2026."

Unintentionally unsettling eBay listing

I did a double-take and then uttered a deep sign when I saw that these two vintage mid-century books being offered together on eBay were titled And So the Wall Was Built and A Story That Has No End. Hits a little too close to home these days. 

VHS tapes are improbably popular again, with horror leading the way

Late last November, Ashar and I went to a horror convention in Mesa called A Christmas to Dismember. It was very cool. There were minor genre celebrities signing autographs, you could get your picture taken with Krampus (some people even brought their dogs) and there was a whole hearse-and-coffin setup from Phantasm outside. 

I made one impulse purchase. There was a booth selling VHS tapes and I couldn't resist the box art on two old horror movies: 1946's Shock, starring Vincent Price, (which I'd never heard of!) and the 1941 horror comedy King of the Zombies (which I'd never seen).

Of course, I still couldn't watch them. We have a blu-ray player and a couple of streaming services, but haven't had a VCR connected to our television for at least 12 years, if not longer. Eventually I was able to track down DVD versions of both films, and I was not disappointed. Shock has an entertaining early villainous role for Price. And King of the Zombies, while a bit hokey and uneven, is an interesting entry in the corpus of zombie films and is at its best when Mantan Moreland and his Black co-stars (including Marguerite Whitten and Madame Sul-Te-Wan) are on the screen.

And now I have two nifty VHS boxes to showcase on a shelf, which, yes, is the exact opposite of my slow-moving downsizing goals. I still have no VCR and no plans to get a VCR, so what the hell am I doing with VHS tapes in 2025? I unloaded my videocassette tapes years and years ago, when they were taking up significant space and were already barreling toward being phased out.¹

So what's with the new boom in old tapes?

The VHS revival, spurred by collectors and a new generation of enthusiasts, began pretty quickly on the heels of the great VHS dumping of roughly 2000 to 2010, when DVD became the dominant format.

I hate to promote The Washington Post these days, but an article by Reis Thebault in December 2023 summed up the dynamics of the rise of the "tapeheads": 

"A swirl of societal forces has made the moment ripe for this unlikely rebirth: A booming nostalgia economy that was supercharged during the pandemic, fueling skyrocketing sales of all things retro; mounting fatigue with increasingly costly subscription services; and a growing disillusionment with the algorithms that mediate so much of modern life in favor of unexpected human connections."

There are numerous aspects to this fervor for tape, drawing people in from a wide array of directions. Some people truly like the "VHS aesthetic" of fuzz, glitches and less than perfect video presentation. Some filmmakers release their new movies on VHS. Websites such as Lunchmeat are thriving. Zines and VHS-themed events have helped build momentum.  

At our Bookmans Entertainment Exchange stores here in Arizona, used VHS tapes are taking up more prominent spaces at the front of stores. I took these snapshots at a Tucson Bookmans in early July.

The horror genre is very well-represented in those in-store displays. Horror has been a main driver for the VHS revival and is one of the hottest and most expensive markets. Some people seek out their favorite films; some chase the scarcest titles in their most limited releases; some collect solely for the box art; some relish boxes and tapes still covered with video rental store or library stickers, while others want pristine tapes that are still shrinkwrapped. And some collectors target gory straight-to-video releases that few people have ever heard of — and even fewer have seen.

Ashar, dipping his toe into the VHS marketplace this month, just acquired a tape of 1959's The House on Haunted Hill, one of his favorite films. (And one of my favorites, too.) It will be added to his shelf decorations.

For an article this month on Back Market, Thomas Hobbs interviewed Lunchmeat's Josh Schafer, who said: "A lot of horror movies, especially the more low budget fare, just feel better on VHS. Not everything has to be super hi-def. Sometimes it’s okay to blur the world a little bit, because if things look too real it takes you out of the cinematic world.”

Maybe I should collect all of my childhood horror favorites on VHS. Then set up an old-school television with a VHS player and chase that vibe of watching horror movies on dark nights as a kid in Clayton and Montoursville. It could be a lot of fun. But the true horror might end up being how much disposable income I spend chasing the past, when I could sit on the couch next to my cats and watch a big-screen, crystal-clear version of Suspiria, Kwaidan or, yes, even the original Night of the Living Dead. Nostalgia is fun, but there are only so many rabbit holes I can go down.

Footnote

1. I deeply regret, though, that I got rid of all my MTS3K and St. Elsewhere VHS tapes, plus some other stuff that had been taped off TV. If nothing else, there's a substantial market now for old tapes that include commercials, bumpers, news updates and other record-from-TV content. Add those tapes to the list of ephemera I wish I still had, if only because I could have made some nice coin from selling them now on eBay.

One movie after another*

*or, like a thousand times before, like the castle in its corner, in a medieval game, I foresee terrible trouble, and I stay here just the same

In my movie-viewing this year, I've seen more than 40 movies, spanning 1917 to 2025, that represent first-time watches for me. I'll post the full list of my favorite first watches in early January. But I'm certain that two movies that will reside in my top five are 1982's Missing by Costa-Gavras and this month's One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson.

For me, they're in dialogue with each other. Missing is the best film I've seen thus far this year; the one that resonated with me the most and that was scarier than any of the horror movies that Ashar and I watch. I watched it early in the year, a few weeks after the inauguration, as it became clear that the public roundups, "disappearings" and domestic military deployments promised in 2024 were to become our reality of 2025. Missing's long first act, especially, is gut-wrenching, capturing the visceral terror of a regime that vanishes people simply for what they say, write or believe. Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek absolutely deserved their Oscar nominations.

One Battle After Another is about resisting oppressive regimes, and the immediate and generational consequences of brutal, violent activism carried out by fallible humans confronting monsters.

It's a comedy. 

And a drama. And a thriller. And a satire. There's not really one label for the film, which is par for the course for Anderson. While the obvious comparison within PTA's oeuvre is Inherent Vice, as both are Thomas Pynchon adaptations, sort of, the movie I found One Battle After Another to most be in conversation with is Magnolia. They are both interested in family clashes, especially between generations, and how they are resolved. On what we can and cannot forgive. There are similarities of form, too. One Battle After Another's long, tense middle act in Baktan Cross, and its score by Jonny Greenwood, reminds me of the sprawling "Stanley/Frank/Linda's Breakdown" section of Magnolia scored by Jon Brion (who should have been nominated for an Oscar).

I won't get into more specific details or spoilers of One Battle After Another. I think you should see the film. In a theater. On as big of a screen as possible. Avoid clips and spoilers, if you haven't already seen them. Let the movie unfold and surprise you. Let it marinate afterward.

Then, you might want to check out some thoughtful reviews and essays. Some that I found insightful include Ty Burr in The Washington Post (gift link), Robert Daniels on Substack, Aisha Harris for NPR, Ellen E. Jones for The Guardian, Kristen Lopez for The Film Maven, Walter Chaw for Film Freak Center, Georgia Coley for Sojourners, and Malindy Hetfeld on Medium. Seeking out and considering a diversity of views is important with this movie, which, just like its presumptive heroes, shouldn't be considered faultless. 

Also, here are some great articles and interviews about the making of the film: Kevin Tighe interviewed by The Reveal; editor Andy Jurgensen interviewed for The Film Stage; and this Q&A with Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio on Letterboxd.

Finally, a great movie should spur you to seek out other films. PTA himself suggested these films as sharing themes with One Battle After Another:

• Running on Empty (1988, Sidney Lumet; also one of my grandmother's favorites)
• Midnight Run (1988, Martin Brest)
• The French Connection (1971, William Friedkin)
• The Battle of Algiers (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo) 
• The Searchers (1956, John Ford)

And here are some more, based on some great BlueSky user suggestions and my own brainstorming:

• The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973, Ivan Dixon)
• Missing (1982, Costa-Gavras)
• Z (1968, Costa-Gavras)
• Uptight (1968, Jules Dassin)
• El Mar La Mar (2017, Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki)
• Black Panthers (1968, Agnès Varda)
• The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1965, Zbyněk Brynych)
• Black Wax (1983, Robert Mugge)
• The Golden Dream (2013, Diego Quemada-Díez)
  

Hours after watching One Battle After Another, this headline popped up on my phone. We are living in one hell of a moment.