Random photos, comics, etc.

[Leo Enticknap]

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So in this neighborhood, if you want to cause an horrific pile up, total a dozen vehicles, and send a bunch of people to the hospital, remember to do so on the Sabbath if you don't want to be sued.

[Leo Enticknap]

Apart from the infamous toilet paper shortage during covid, this must be the first time I've seen a supermarket try to discourage buying in bulk...

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[Frank Cox]

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............

[Jim Cassedy]

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"That's All Folks!"

[Leo Enticknap]

This is more likely to get a giggle from UK and European readers. As a note of explanation for those on this side of the pond, Ryanair is infamous for customer service and junk fees that would make Spirit and JetBlue look like private jet operators....

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[Jim Cassedy]

I don't think the manager of my local supermarket majored in geography at college...

In my local supermarket over the weekend, for the upcoming July 4th holiday I saw
some "patriotic" red, white and blue Italian ice cups- - that were made in Mexico !

[Leo Enticknap]

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From Mark's letter above, interesting that Disney had their London offices on Pall Mall, and not Wardour Street, which was considered the epicenter of the British film industry at the time, and where all (well, it seems nearly all) the Hollywood distributors had their London offices, along with Rank and the other domestic ones.

[Martin McCaffery]

Be interesting to see what the end up with. RKO used to distribute Disney films before Disney created Buena Vista. Sure RKO never owned the rights, and I wonder what similar deals they had.

[Paul H. Rayton]

To expand on the mini-history summary that Jim Cassedy started about 8 posts ago ... the combined vaudeville companies he mentioned, known as the "Keith-Albee-Orpheum" vaudeville circuit soon enough became the heart of the company known as RKO Pictures, a name you might recognize from watching some late-night TV shows, for one thing. The head of RCA Corporation, David Sarnoff, was looking to create a market for the variable area soundtrack system (developed by RCA), and ultimately combined the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theaters into what would become RKO Pictures. RKO operated under several variations of that name, but ultimately it was "RKO Radio Pictures" Company, and it established its mark in Hollywood over the years. Two pictures, in particular: "King Kong", and "Citizen Kane", both became classics in the canon of American motion pictures. RKO was sliced and diced over the successive decades, with various portions being sold (and the older pictures distributed) by various entities. Amazingly, just about a month ago, a company by the name of Concord Productions (with wide connections in the music business) re-collected all the disparate parts of the old RKO "empire", and now, for the first time in years, the RKO library is under unified ownership once again. We can thus hope that the combined film history of RKO will remain (or become) more available, since the new owners will [hopefully] be interested in making some of the long-disappeared titles become accessible once again.

[Martin McCaffery]

A Projection "Want Ad" From A 1906 Theatrical Publication- Apparently you not only needed
to know how to crank the projector, but also how to "make yourself useful" and paint signs!

Sign painting was important in the days before standardized posters. Well into the talkie year, many theatres had in house sign painters.

Related trivia: Ever wonder why the top music trade magazine is called Billboard? Because it was originally a magazine for the billboard painters trade. It eventually morphed into a Variety competitor and then specialized in music.

[Mark Ogden]

One for projectionist letter collectors: Disney's The Black Hole.

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[James Biggins]

remove please

[Leo Enticknap]

I don't think the manager of my local supermarket majored in geography at college...

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[Ryan Gallagher]

Just had a nice cell pass over during this film here, luckily not the wind driven stuff that causes water to come in around the edges of the smoke pockets over stage this time. No towel/mop duties in my evening.

The last super cell that hit Austin had us hearing all sorts of noises we don't normally hear on the roof in our anti-booth, all wind, we thought it was thunder, but no it was just stuff banging around up there. Quite impressive. I did have a wet stage after that one.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

We sometimes get them here, but only after several days of what Michael Fish infamously called "organized rain" have overwhelmed the storm drains and runoff channels. On the day that screenshot was taken, there hadn't been any rain locally for some time, and Apple Weather's second prediction was also bang on the nail in that all we eventually got was a couple of hours of light, on and off drizzle (and at almost exactly the time it predicted that we would get it): nothing like what would be needed to cause a flash flood. I guess the warning must have been caused by a glitch in their forecasting models.



True, but I've never had it come from a phone number in the foreign country: international call centers are usually reached by calling a domestic number, and if they call or text you, it appears to come from a domestic number, too. I also had another text with almost identical wording from a number in India.

We're in the organized storm mode for the last two months. It pretty much always looks like this, oh, and the humidity here is 97% this morning... Rain.jpg