Revisiting 2016 (Part 3)

OK, it's time to conclude cleaning out the time capsule marked "Calendar Year 2016." Here's the final collection of running observations and snapshots from this eclectic collection of everyday ephemera dating to the last full year of the Obama administration...

1. We were involved in the York County 4-H Alpaca Club, so I reckon that one of its associated events is how I came across this delightful and ridiculous flyer for a "Galactic Genetic Gathering of Alpacas" in Iowa. 

2. I kept so many yellow receipts from the York Emporium, and I will continue to hold onto them. They're great for tucking away inside books.

3.  An empty wrapper for key lime Creamy Coconut Patties from Anastasia Confections.  

4. A menu for Masa Bistro, one of our favorite York-area restaurants back in the day.

5. There was a little blank notebook in the time capsule with the note "Log the stories you find in this box." I guess I'm blogging as my way of logging. I'll use the notebook to document something else.  

6. On the back of this business card, I wrote "Funniest card I picked up on drive to FL." (I was on a road trip to visit Dad.)

7. A movie ticket stub for Star Trek Beyond, the last movie I watched in a theater with Mom.

8. A printout from the website I Waited 96 Years! ... The website still exists and includes this message as of today: "In the weeks before the 2016 election, this website featured 186 women, ages 96 to 105, who were eager to elect Hillary Clinton. These women were born before the 19th Amendment and were, for the first time, voting for a woman for president of the United States. ... Then, in 2020, we followed up with a few of the (now) centenarians when the female presidential candidates suspended their campaigns. And in 2024, we gathered reflections from one inspiring 106-year-old. At this critical and challenging moment, our nation needs these women’s voices and wisdom more than ever."  

9. A copy of LNP | LancasterOnline's Trending section that leads with an article about Little Free Libraries. The article is still online.

10. A printout of an email sent to me with the subject line "The Troubles," in which one of my former Penn State University journalism professors, discussing the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, tells me "You make incisive comments on Twitter. Keep up the good work."

Speaking of Twitter...

11. ...Not all of my comments were incisive, although the sentiment about Philip Seymour Hoffman still stands.

Also speaking of Twitter...

12. ... This is pretty darn funny. I had mentioned 2016's Pokémon Go phenomenon in Part 1. This also marks the first appearance of a Bulbasaur on Papergreat.

13. A brochure for the Long's Park Summer Music Series in Lancaster.

14. An editorial cartoon, relevant then and now, that I printed and saved.  

15. A Powerball ticket that wasn't a winner. Jackpot was $142 million.

16. A business card for Too Many Books in Roanoke, Virginia. On the back, I wrote "This store had a big friendly black poodle. And some books." The bookstore is still in business. Last August, a Yelp reviewer wrote: "Talk about charming! The store is two floors and has a lovely collection of history/non-fiction upstairs and fiction downstairs. ... I found several names/titles that were new to me and felt like I was prowling around my Pop-pop's basement the whole time. Magical!"

17. Finally, there's a sealed envelope inside the box. A time capsule within a time capsule. "Random old photos of unknown, unrelated folks," the front of the envelope states. I don't have the energy right now, so look for exploration of this one in a future post, maybe.

Revisiting 2016 (Part 2)

Well, this has been (another) horrible week. TGIF. I finally have a few moments to get back to the time capsule marked "Calendar Year 2016." Here are some more observations and quickie photos, while most of the nearly-decade-old ephemera heads for the trash can ...

1. I'm leading off again with something disturbing and, in this instance, too insensitive to amplify with a photo. But it's historically relevant. I kept a homemade "editorial cartoon" and typed message that was mailed to me in my capacity as sports editor. It's an angry commentary from a Lancaster County octogenarian on the "taking a knee" protests at NFL games originated by Colin Kaepernick. In saving the letter then, I added a post-it note on the front stating "Sigh..." There's a vividly clear line from conservatives' reactions to peaceful attempts to raise awareness of racial injustice in America then and our deeply divided, splitting-at-the-seams nation today.

2. Ashar's order form for York County 4-H coffee cake sales.

3. The last birthday card I ever received from Mom. The front states "If cats could talk, and give a crap, they'd wish you a happy birthday." I can barely imagine what Mom's reaction would be to our household of two dozen cats today.

4. An odd sized card for Steinman Park in downtown Lancaster and LNP Media Group Inc.  

5. Part of the box for a Chandler Bing Funk Pop! RIP, Matthew Perry.

6. More printouts of LNP | LancasterOnline sports planning budgets.

7. A flyer for a Halloween sale at Comix Connection on White Street in York.

8. A printout of an email from a student in Arizona (ha!) who was "wandering" about a summer internship "oppertunities" at LNP that would allow him to "get my feet wet in the door." I truly don't mean to make fun, but if you're looking to work in journalism, for heaven's sake, please proof your queries before you send them out.

9. Who remembers Bana al-Abed? She was the young Syrian whose social media account on Twitter (when it was called that) helped to raise global awareness of the terrors for civilians during the Battle of Aleppo. There remain questions about who was actually handling the social media account at that time, but I don't think that changes the importance of the humanitarian message. A book titled Dear World was published in 2017. I found an interview from 2021, when Bana was an 11-year-old living in Turkey but still clearly experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. And then I checked and found that Bana is still posting on X! (I wish she'd come over to the Bluesky.) On December 31, 2024, she wrote: "Dear friends, As we step into this new year, my heart is filled with hope and gratitude. I am overjoyed to see that the Syrian people, once forced to flee their homeland, can now return to their country, no longer running from war but walking back to the place they call home. For those still in Syria, I celebrate with you the peace that is beginning to take root, allowing families to live without fear. Children, once robbed of their childhood, can now play freely, dream of a brighter future, and receive the education they deserve. I truly believe that this year holds the promise of better days ahead. May it be a year of healing, unity, and prosperity, where peace prevails and the shadows of war are left behind. Wishing all of us a year of peace, love and new beginnings. #Syria #Aleppo"

And then there was this post on January 10:

10. An empty bag of Knorr's Cheesy Cheddar. We still go through a lot of it.

11. A map and other items for Panic at the Ballpark, a Halloween walkthrough house of horrors at what was then called PeoplesBank Park in York. Ashar was one of the actors. Here's what I wrote in the footnote of an October 2016 post: "Ashar, now 16½, is working as one of the scary performers this month at a horror attraction called Panic at the Ballpark in York's downtown baseball stadium. From the brochure: 'York's professional baseball stadium, PeoplesBank Park, become[s] a terrifying den of horrors as a force of vengeance and evil wreaks havoc on fans of the great American pastime.' The different areas are called Head Basher's Hideout, The Dismemberment Shop and Dead Man's Play Land. An obsessed police officer, using his fingers as a gun, runs around trying to catch an evil, undead ballplayer."

I'll have to finish this off in a Part 3 soon.

Revisiting 2016 (Part 1)

Due to some meddling by the cats, I had to skip around in the time capsule openings and expedite the box marked "Calendar Year 2016." So, these are items that are between eight and nine years old at this point. 2016 was one of the biggest turning point years of the 21st century, so it will be interesting to see what's inside. And I'm also hoping that I can "Resimplify Me" most of it into the trash bin.

Here are some comments and lots of quickie photos as I go...

1. I have no idea what this means but it's a really, really, REALLY bad start, being the first item pulled. I no longer have any recollection of the story, if any, behind the post/illustration mismatch. I'm sure it was amusing at the time. Now it just makes me more depressed.  (I'm "Printernet Guy," so there are going to be many printouts of tweets, emails and webpages. And consider this your trigger warning for more Trump content ahead.)

2. A $127 receipt for Mr. Bill from the Dover Area Animal Hospital.

3. An illustration of a Pigeon-Man by Wendy Xu.

4. A printout of the Wikipedia page for the Mannequin Challenge, which peaked in the second half of 2016 and included the Dallas Cowboys, Ellen DeGeneres, Adele and Hillary Clinton. Sure.

5. There's ephemera from one of the trips we made to Steel City Comic Con in Pittsburgh. Stars of "The Walking Dead" were the big attraction. I also remember how incredibly sad it was to see the now late John Heard standing there, mostly alone, at his signing table. He was a hell of an actor. ... This April, the Steel City event will include Luis Guzman. I would totally get him to sign some stuff from his Paul Thomas Anderson films, maybe with the phrase "Sports and milk."

6. I thought this might be the drawing of Mr. Bird I used for Papergreat that year. But I guess not. I drew Mr. Bird a lot. 

7. I took my job as chief cook for Christmas Family Dinner 2016 very seriously.

8. Yes, I saved ice cream lids, too.

9. The ridiculous levels of planning that went into being a sports editor. Also, to be very, very clear, I was not reminding myself to email someone a b*mb threat. I'm guessing there was an athletic event that was either delayed or postponed due a stupid, irresponsible threat being called in, and we had to update our plans accordingly.

10. Pokémon Go debuted in the summer of 2016 and, as I'm sure many of you recall, it was bonkers seeing all of the people walking around in public with their smartphones held out in front of them. I played the part of social observer.

11. A very painful printout from The Onion and one that is still very relevant on February 16, 2025, as The Associated Press faces a White House ban for refusing to acknowledge the name "Gulf of America."

12. Maybe my favorite tweet of all time. It appears that @sarahk343 and their account are gone from Twitter. Good for them. That's why I print things out.

12. Brexit headlines from Drudge Report. Sigh.

TO BE CONTINUED

Book cover: "The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus" (1967)

• Title: The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus
• 
  Author: John Burke (1922-2011). Burke was a British World War II veteran and prolific author who specialized in the novelization of movies (including many horror films) and stage plays. He also wrote original novels and short stories and created the Victorian-era occult detective Alex Caspian. Especially popular was his novelization of the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night. According to Wikipedia: "The book was priced at two shillings and sixpence and contained an 8-page section of photographs from the film. It is the first book in the English language to have the word 'grotty' in print."
• Front and back cover artist: Unknown, sadly.
• Publisher: Pan Books Ltd. (M223)
• Publication date: 1967
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 349
• Original price: 5 shillings, which I think was very reasonable for the time. If my calculations are correct, 5 shillings in the UK in 1967 would be equivalent to about 70 cents in the USA in 1967.
• Contents: The novelizations for four different Hammer horror films: The Reptile, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Rasputin the Mad Monk, and The Plague of the Zombies. I've seen three of those four and they're all excellent. I still need to see The Reptile (pictured on the back cover).
• Excerpt from The Reptile: "Franklyn was the bigger man, but the Malay was possessed by a spirit of destruction. A great hierarchy of vengeful gods stood behind him and gave him strength."
• Excerpt from Dracula: Prince of Darkness: "She screamed. It was music such as had not been heard in the corridors and cellars of the castle in a long, long time."
• Excerpt from Rasputin the Mad Monk: "The flames of hell were damp yet searing. There was a shock of ice and then of devouring fire."
• Excerpt from The Plague of the Zombies: "The creature's mouth opened. It seemed to be laughing, but no sound came. There was only the twitching of the lips in a macabre, vacuous grimace."
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.76 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review excerpt: Just days ago, David A. Sutton wrote: "John Burke has once again made a good effort in fictionalizing these films, and adding more background to the characters. I noticed one or two inconsistencies from the films, but these were very minor, and not worth arguing over."
• Message board excerpts: On "Vault of Evil: Brit Horror Pulp Plus!" one poster wrote this in 2007: "Burke's novelisations were a godsend back in those pre-video three channel days when you had to wait years for your most wanted's to turn up (and hope you could stay awake)." ... Other comments from that 2007-2009 thread: "Burkey's books are like revisiting old friends." And: "There's a good case to be made for Burke as a relatively unsung Brit pulp hero. And I'll gladly make it, if pissed enough at the nearest party." Also on Vault of Evil, there are two pages of forums devoted to Burke and his writings. Happy reading!

We're saying farewell tomorrow to Pengin (left), who is moving back to Washington state.

History cannot be erased

Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America (1993), Martin Duberman

Further reading: "Marsha P. Johnson: The Transgender Activist Who Pioneered the Fight for LGBTQ+ Rights"

Realms of the uncanny: Dreamcore, backrooms & liminal spaces

Me, less than a year old, in a stroller on the edge of a liminal space in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania (1971).

A couple of weeks ago, Ashar and I were watching a stream of Eurogamer's Ian Higton as he played a new game called Dreamcore. With the game as a jumping-off point, I learned a lot about dreamcore itself (with a lowercase "d") and backrooms. It's fascinating to see how Generation Z has embraced and adjusted the concept of liminal spaces, creating works that feel both old and new. Their stories (urban legends, creepypasta, memes) and original art are intertwined with the jarring 21st century events and technology that have shaped their lives thus far.

I grew up with fantasy books and movies about liminal spaces (though I certainly wasn't using that term). Two that spring immediately to mind are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the 1978 movie The Water Babies. I was a kid in various houses with cubbyholes, twisting staircases and unsettling attics and basements that fueled the imaginations of my friends and I, as we sought to transform the ordinary into something out of this world.

 

Now we have cottagecore, goblincore, dreamcore, weirdcore and countless other aesthetics contributing to the culture of younger generations. Additionally, for many of them, there is a deep nostalgia for roughly the period of 1995 to 2005. I won't dive more deeply into all of that, but since it's where this post began, here's a definition of dreamcore from Aesthetics Wiki, a fasincating rabbit hole of a website you could lose yourself in: "Dreamcore is a surrealist aesthetic that uses motifs commonly associated with dreams, daydreams or nightmares, portrayed through media such as images, videos and, on occasion, music." Dreamcore's "base images" often have lighter tones, even pastels, and can involve (but certainly aren't limited to) endlessly rolling hills, clouds, rainbows, bubbles, flowers and empty, nondescript buildings.

And then you have backrooms, or The Backrooms, as the Wikipedia page labels it. There are many places to find the history of The Backrooms online (the lore runs deep), but I really like how Austen Travis described them in a 2023 blog post for Spirit Halloween: 

"Previous, analog generations told scary stories like “The Hook” around campfires, but modern, digital generations spread online 'creepypasta', like Slenderman, Sirenhead, Ted the Caver, and now, the Backrooms. The Backrooms are an aesthetic and a horror story. Somehow instantly recognizable and inexplicably surreal, the Backrooms began as a labyrinth of yellow rooms and hallways. This seemingly-abandoned space is endless, dread-inducing, and weirdly nostalgic. The first image of the Backrooms, along with all the subsequent images that would appear online, resonate with both our past and our nightmares. ... The Backrooms live at the thematic intersection of creepy, nostalgic, sad, and surreal."

In a review of Dreamcore (the game), Lewis Packwood discusses the overlap between dreamcore (the aesthetic) and The Backrooms: "It’s perhaps little surprise that liminal spaces have captured people’s imagination. Images of oddly empty offices and shopping malls were something we were all fascinated with during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, and although such images have always been unsettling, they are doubly so now in the wake of our collective trauma. But the Backrooms also arose directly from video game logic: the act of ‘no-clipping’, slipping beyond the world the player was intended to see. The aesthetic of repeating textures and echoing endless corridors is drawn straight from the gaming realm."

* * *

All of this got me to thinking a lot about photography, and specifically about the kind of photographs that I enjoy taking and looking at. And there's a lot of thematic overlap. My favorite book of photographs is Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places. Shore has an incredible eye for parking lots, hotel rooms, building exteriors, empty streets, crumbling places. The liminal spaces of America; the places that are more past than present. I think my photographic aesthetic and Shore's would both fit in very nicely with some of those that scare and stir Generation Z. 

So, to close, here's a gallery of photos that sort of fit these themes (some better than others). All of these were taken by me, unless otherwise noted. Some of them have appeared on Papergreat previously, but seem a good fit for this post, too.

Ashar standing in front of both a computer screen and a wall-size photograph at a Titanic exhibit. It almost seems as if he could just walk right into that room.

Chests and luggage gathering dust in the attic of the house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford, Pennsylvania (probably taken by my grandmother).

One of my favorite photos, taken at an intersection in Dover Township, Pennsylvania.

First of two photos of the former LNP | LancasterOnline newsroom, emptied out by the pandemic. Here's the full post.

Stairwell in the building at 8 West King in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 

It's now just a memory.

Family photo that seems to be dated 1939. What lies beyond the door in the back?

Another family photo, circa 1985. I think Mom took this and it's at the house in Florida. Another mystery door in the background.

This is from the 1910s, probably taken by my great-grandfather. Unknown building. Possibly an armory, given the guard out front? This building looked old even then. 

I suspect it's no longer standing. At least not in this dimension.

Inside a surreal antiques store in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. See the full gallery in this post.

Parking lot of the Monroeville Mall, near Pittsburgh. Taken from my hotel room window. This was the original "dead" mall, as it was the shooting location for the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead. Now, tragically, it's a truly dead mall. Just days ago it was officially sold to Walmart, which will likely renovate the property serve its own mindless-consumerism needs. 

Dreamcore? An endless path within a York County cemetery.

This is a real photo! Snapped by me in a back alley in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania. How I lived to tell the tale, I do not know.

Poetry is timeless and can be retroactively, heartwrenchingly, predictive, as this haunting circa 1970 piece by James Tate divulges

James Tate (1943-2015) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had a prolific career, publishing collections in six different decades, starting in the late 1960s. The Oblivion Ha-Ha, from Little, Brown and Company, became his second published collection, in 1970.

Examining the collection with a fresh pair of eyes in 2016, Lisa Russ Spaar wrote this for the Los Angeles Review of Books: "What strikes me about The Oblivion Ha-Ha is less its surreality than its blend of desire and indifference, the terrible and the humorous, the cliché and the revelatory, the comedic and the tragic."

Tate's work, she adds, "offers the consolation of absurdity, of the ludic, of the collision of worlds, of the intrusion of one world into another."

It's interesting that Spaar, herself a poet, wrote that piece in 2016, the year in which we were fully amid a collision of worlds, a devastating intrusion that drives deeper and crueler by the hour now, a decade later. And so it was that I was inspired by a recent Bluesky post by Peter Montgomery to reshare the Tate poem from page 71 of The Oblivion Ha-Ha that appears in the above photo. You can listen to it here and I'll also type it out below:

The President Slumming

In a weird, forlorn voice

he cries; it is a mirage!

Then tosses a wreath of scorpions

to the children,

mounts his white nag

and creeps off into darkness,

smoking an orange

I hardly think you need me to point out the modern allusions that now seem to emanate from those seven lines, those 32 words, penned more than a half-century ago. It's actually spine-tingling.

The whole collection isn't like that, of course. So if you're looking for a pleasant, thoughtful diversion, I highly recommend Tate's volume. Or perhaps you'll look up one of his much-praised later collections. Three more snapshots of poems from The Oblivion Ha-Ha follow; I especially especially love the last one, which is why I put it as the closer.

Mommy Orange is the only Orange one I acknowledge.

Vintage postcard of Barrose Terrace in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

This vintage postcard showcases a sprawling estate once known as Barrose Terrace, in West Lampeter Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Some background information about the estate appears on Extraordinary Stories from an Ordinary Guy, a blog by a Lancaster County resident who goes by LDub.

LDub writes of the exterior: "The garden was built by Ulysses Grant Barr who was also one of the organizers of Lancaster's Meadia Heights Golf Club. The garden was located just past the golf club where Mr. Barr resided. ...  In 1928 workmen began to blast rock to form the different levels of the flower garden.  It took four years to complete the entire garden. ... In 1933 fountains and lights were added."

A 2022 article by LNP | LancasterOnline's Erin Negley adds: "People could come here from Lancaster city, often by trolley, to see the terraced gardens and fountain or the neighboring golf course." Negley adds that when the house was purchased by its newest owners in 2018, the main structure on the 8.5-acre property had nearly 8,000 square feet of space. Some smart and needed renovation downsized that figure.

There's no year legible on this postcard's postmark, but the one-cent stamp used was first issued in December 1936. It was mailed to an address in Lancaster and the cursive, pencil message states:

Dear Billy,

I am having a swell time. I'm taking horse back riding this year. Try and come to see me. Please write my address is:

Camp Winnemont

West Ossipee

N.H.

I will write again but not so soon.

Lovingly,

Your Make Believe Cousin, Polly

Camp Winnemont was a summer camp for girls in New Hampshire founded by Walter H. Bentley, who died in 1945. The camp kept going for nearly two more decades after this death. A 2006 post on Winnipesaukee Forum states: "I went to that wonderful camp in... '62 and '63 - that was the very last year that the camp was going to exist and we were all devastated!!"

Another post on that forum contains this cute Winnemont song that dates to the 1930s:

Oh I'm a hayseed

My hair is seaweed

And my ears are made of leather

And they flop in rainy weather.

Gosh-a-hemlock

Tough as a pine knot

I'm from Winnemont you see.