I have no idea why I have decided to procrastinate on a blog for the first time in 3 years rather than the ways I usually do. Nonetheless here I am.
New to me: True Detective ends tonight, and I cannot wait. This is the most captivating thing I've seen in years, and I can't wait to see it wrap up. The atmosphere is great, I love the acting, and I love the small ways contemporary politics are woven into its dystopia. io9 has mentioned the school vouchers, but also the issue of forfeiture. The cops in the world of True Detective get a truck through forfeiture, just like in real life. See this report here by PBS.
Old favorites: S and I are rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation on netflix. I particularly recommend the episode Symbiosis, which is a total 90s rumination on the War on Drugs. It is hilarious.

Keeping Up

I feel bad I haven't been posting to my blog. I do love pinterest, but it's still sad when I notice that there's no new months in the archive column of the blog.

So here is my latest shopping task: finding small affordable and thematically appropriate prizes for my students. In Postwar US History, I am making them host a 1950s theme DRY cocktail party in class. To make it more fun for them (since I assume it will already be awesome for me), I bought old swizzle sticks to give out at the door. I personally think these things are awesome. We will see how they feel. And then in my urban history class, I told them that I would give a small prize to anyone who had to use microfilm for their research project. I'm trying to buy enough of these tiny old license plate keychains to give one to everyone who ends up at that damn machine. So far I have 8.



(Neither of these images are things I've bought, but they're representative of what I'm going for. Ebay will no longer let me pull images for some reason).

Winter Reading

After spending all summer at it, I finally finished The Left Hand of Darkness. I adored it, in part because it crept up on me so slowly. For some reason winter is one of my favorite settings for books so I clearly need to read the rest of these as well as Winter's Tale, Time and Again, and Jonathan Strange.

My favorite winter books:
Left Hand of Darkness.
The Long Winter. (I used to read this every March in Chicago).
Far North.
The Golden Compass.
Game of Thrones.

Image here.

Lyrics

I love these lyrics from the 1920s: “Still the Census taker tarried/ With a poised and ready pen; / ‘One more question, Are you married?’ / Came the answer, ‘Now and then.”
--cited in DiFonzo, Beneath the Fault Line, 18.

postcards

Now I just post things on here so I can pin them on pinterest. I am insane. Three vintage postcards:

Adventures 2011 on Iphone (so far)

Featuring the Muppet exhibit from the Museum of Science and Industry, a Charlie Harper mosaic from Miami, and Rosie Red from a Reds game.

Etsy Spree

As promised, another wish list. This is all etsy stuff, but no jewelry. Maybe that will be its own post someday. Stone. Ship card. Spring Demon. Bottle opener. Hair tie. Push pin. Scarf.TV pin. Hankie.