Throwback Thursday: this 80’s-era fake wood paneling!

People on the “I Found This Online” Facebook page are joking about this weird faux-wood paneling from the 1980’s.  (It got 96,000 “likes.”)  There is even a Reddit page about them!  These walls were everywhere in my rural/suburban New York neighborhood.

I love them!  Sure, you couldn’t hang anything up because you couldn’t get a thumb-tack in.  But they’re dark and rustic, and they take me right back to the 1980’s.  Gimme a basement with these walls, a plush rug, a television, an Atari 2600 and a stack of 80’s horror films on VHS ands I’ll be very happy.  (Hopefully the movies will include 1986’s “Aliens” and 1982’s “The Thing.”)

Better yet, leave out a couple of liters of soda and some chips, and let me invite a couple of Longwood High School friends over.



“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” Francisco Goya, 1799

Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin.

Move over, pineapple pizza. It’s time for OCTOPUS PIZZA.

I am a man who is loathe to tamper with a classic.  And every slice of pizza from Benny Marconi’s in Roanoke, Virginia is a damned artwork.

Still … they did not offer octopus as a topping.  (I searched their website pretty thoroughly.)  And then I realized that I had NEVER seen the most sublime of foods offered as a pizza topping.

Innovation built this country, and I have a flair for the culinary.  So I went home and concocted the brilliance you see below.

Update — Damn.  I just realized I wrote this whole post ignoring the potential for an “octupie” pun.



Cover to “Carnage: It’s a Wonderful Life” #1, Kyle Hotz, 1996

Marvel Comics.

Memoirs of a Geisha Smoked Octopus.

Taste Test — Geisha Smoked Octopus in Sunflower Oil.

MMmmmmmmm.  I give it two thumbs up.  Or two tentacles.

Variant cover to “America” #1, Jamie McKelvie, 2017

Marvel Comics.

“You discover that your longings are universal longings …”

“That is part of the beauty of all literature.  You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone.  You belong.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald



Photo: Photographer unknown. The publicity photo was distributed by Fitzgerald’s publisher, Scribner’s., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hurricane? More like a hurrican’t.

And I’m thankful for that.  There were none of the high winds and flooding in my neighborhood that people were worried about.  And today the skies were sunny and blue.

Sure, we got loads of rain yesterday.  But that just seems to be the baseline for this summer.



Nurse Your Favorite Heresies in Whispers