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scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Scooby Shakespeare
@scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
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scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Cyclamates probably aren't carcinogenic either.

www.cancer.gov/about-cancer...
Cyclamate As a result of the findings of early studies of cyclamate, it was banned in the United States in 1969. Although subsequent reviews of those experimental data and evaluation of additional data led scientists to conclude that cyclamate does not cause cancer, it has not been reapproved in the United States (although it is approved in many other countries).
November 11, 2025 at 8:51 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Or for those of us of a certain age...
Sergeant Shultz from Hogan's Heroes saying "I Know Nothing!"
November 3, 2025 at 4:00 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
xkcd.com/2272/
[A horizontal timeline spanning between the years 1875 and 2022. Every year is indicated by a tick below the line, and labeled every 5 years. There is a gap between 1883 and 1989 with jagged lines to indicate a jump in time. 7 sections are labeled on the chart, each with a border except for the first and last:] [1875, with no border:] Telephone ringer invented [1878-1883:] Normal ringing sounds [Gap and jagged lines to indicate jump in time from 1883 to 1989] [1989-1996:] Normal ringing sounds [1996-2003:] Cool space beeps [2003-2009:] Song and novelty ringtones [2009-2013:] Cool space beeps [2013-2019:] Normal ringing sounds [2020, with no border:] Everyone sets their phones to vibrate [Caption below the panel:] After 140 years, humanity is finally on the verge of winning the war against ringtones.
October 29, 2025 at 4:06 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Well, they didn't have Netflix yet.

This site makes an attempt to give the history. (I knew the phrase, but hadn't thought to look into it before.)
According to Jill Anding in The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana) of Saturday 26th April 2008: A romantic cliché of the mid-20th century was developed when the phrase, “Want to come up and see my etchings?” was used in Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, “Blackmail,” in 1929. The phrase is attributed to Stanford White, a New York architect, who purportedly used the line to induce women whom he wanted to seduce to visit the townhouse that he had furnished with etchings of nudes.
October 27, 2025 at 2:37 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Granted, it would help if we didn't each carry and consult our own pocket palantir.
"The knowledge which he obtained was, doubt-less, often of service to him; yet the vision of the great might of Mordor that was shown to him fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind."
October 24, 2025 at 5:32 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Wally: "So that was lightning, Garth, and this..."
Wally West wins the lottery, Flash (1987) issue 1.
September 27, 2025 at 2:49 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Adding a pointer to how to specify the open access images in their collection search.

www.artic.edu/open-access/...
Keyword Search On the the Collection page, you’ll find a search box. When you enter either “public domain” or “CC0,” the search engine will return the full list of public domain images available from the Art Institute of Chicago. Filter Search You can also access public domain images using the advanced search filters on the Collection page. Among the many filters is a checkbox to limit your search results to only public domain artworks. You can use this checkbox to view all public domain artworks, refine existing keyword searches, or combine it with other filters such as artist, date, and medium.
August 13, 2025 at 8:33 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
His powers worked about as well when he was batting for the other team. (Literally, in this case.)
A gangster hits on a cross-dressing Jimmy Olsen, angering the gangster's moll.
August 7, 2025 at 11:52 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Or even check to see if the library offers a magazine app that includes The Atlantic. (Ours does!)
Flipster: Subscriptions to popular magazines, including The Atlantic, Fortune, People, and more.
July 25, 2025 at 2:33 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Definitely. From a long letter summarizing the history of Middle-Earth (written when he was trying to jump publishers ahead of the publication of TLotR).
In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.
July 23, 2025 at 1:38 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
In Disney's Carousel of Progress, Uncle Orville improves on this with the addition of an ice block. 🙂
[Uncle Orville sits in a bathtub next to a fan blowing air over an ice block.] FATHER Uncle Orville’s taken over the coolest spot in the house, of course, and he’s rigged up a real clever contraption. He calls it “air cooling.” Hmph. Too bad he’s not reading the help wanted ads. (Lights out on diorama.) UNCLE ORVILLE (Offstage) No privacy at all around this place!
July 19, 2025 at 11:07 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Trekkies: If you see this post your first experience with Star Trek.
Star Trek TOS: "Wink of an Eye". The leader of the hyper-accelerated Scalosians, Deela, demonstrates to Kirk that a phaser beam is too slow to affect her.
July 7, 2025 at 5:51 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
"Don't you think you've had enough?"

"Leave the bottle!"
Bottle of Rose's Grenadine
June 26, 2025 at 1:03 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
And Ty Cobb probably got a bum rap.

imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty-c...
But what about Cobb’s 19th-century Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found—and again, not because I am the Babe Ruth of researchers, but because I actually did some research—is that Ty Cobb was descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob. Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was integrating, and Sporting News asked him what he thought. “The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly,” he said. “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?” By that time he had attended many Negro league games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and often sitting in the dugout with the players. He is quoted as saying that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he’d pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the ballplayer that reminded him most of himself.
June 20, 2025 at 3:29 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
This was a great long form piece about the effort.

magazine.atavist.com/american-hip...
"This is a story about hippopotamuses, as advertised, but it’s also a story about two very complicated and exceptional men. These men were spies. They were also bitter enemies. Each wanted to kill the other and fully expected to feel really good about himself afterward. Eccentric circumstances—circumstances having to do with hippopotamuses—would join these men together as allies and even dear friends. But then, eventually, they’d be driven into opposition again. "Whatever strange bond these two men had, they were loyal to it. They were like repulsive magnets: Some fundamental property of each was perfectly opposed to the core of the other. And yet, somehow throughout their long lives—as several volatile phases of American history tumbled along in the background—they also had a way of continually snapping back together. One of these men was a humble patriot, known for his impeccable integrity. He tried to leave detailed, reliable accounts of what he did and thought and felt. The other, I discovered, was a megalomaniac and a pathological liar. "This is a true story, and a very serious one, even though it’s composed of many details that will seem ludicrous and impossible. Most of those details are irrefutable, though. And while I worked hard to verify the rest, doing so occasionally proved futile. I’d like to try and explain why."
June 16, 2025 at 6:15 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
You’ve been kidnapped. The characters from the last TV show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who is coming to save you?
Cassian Andor & K-2SO from Andor
June 12, 2025 at 4:36 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Thomas also had a few words to say re Civil War revisionism.
[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them. — George Henry Thomas, November 1868.
June 11, 2025 at 8:09 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
That matches the bit in the denoument of The Hobbit, where on the return trip the narrative notes that "First" might be more appropriate in that direction.
It was on May the First that the two came back at last to the brink of the valley of Rivendell, where stood the Last (or the First) Homely House.
May 23, 2025 at 1:42 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Zuck: The average American has three friends.
The original three members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl, from Adventure Comics #247 (1958).
May 2, 2025 at 4:07 AM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Strauss and Howe really overestimated us in "Generations".
Controlling the Boom may indeed emerge as the 13ers' most fateful lifecycle mission. This will be the generation best able to deflect any Boomer drift toward apocalyptic visions . In an age of rising social intolerance , the very incorrigibility of midlife 13ers will at times be a national blessing. The task of preventing disaster may well fall to life- and liberty-loving 50-year-olds, pockmarked by hard experience, to tell zealous Boomers to "get real, " to find cannier solutions that pose fewer risks or that do less to erode personal liberty . A l 3er may someday be the general or Presidential adviser who prevents some righteous old Aquarian from "loosing the fateful lightning" and turning the world's lights out
April 9, 2025 at 2:59 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Post the first video game you remember playing.

(Note: *not* Asteroid*s*. This came out six years earlier. And was a much worse game.)
Screenshot of Midway's Asteroid video game (1973) Flyer for Midway's Asteroid video game (1973)
March 27, 2025 at 11:55 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
Possibly this one.
Photo of old toy: Daisy's Superman Krypto-Raygun (which projected film strips) in its box.
March 26, 2025 at 5:37 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
This probably summed the phenomenon up best.
no no no you misunderstood. I said "fuck YOUR feelings". MY feelings are very important and must be handled gently, like a tiny baby hummingbird
March 15, 2025 at 2:46 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
There's a Jewish story to that effect, where the rabbi tells an abstemious rich man he has to eat and drink more luxuriously lest he think "well, if *I* can get by on only bread and salt, the poor can manage by eating stones."
Rabbi Israel, the famed "Maggid of Kosnitz," once asked a rich man what he usually ate. The rich man was rather ascetic; he proudly described to the Chassidic master his one daily meal, in which he ate and drank nothing more than bread with salt and a jug of water. "Fool," scolded the Maggid. "Go home and eat meat and other delicacies. Drink aged wine. If you don't, I am not finished with you yet!" Later, the Maggid's disciples wondered why their master spoke as he did. Rabbi Israel explained: "If the rich man dines on meat and wine, then he would at least feel that the paupers in his town should be given bread and salt. But if he himself subsists on dry bread and salt, he might think that poor people could live on stones..."
March 13, 2025 at 2:20 PM
scoobyshakespeare.bsky.social
I've long felt Tolkien would have some fellow feeling with George R.R. Martin, whatever he thought of the worldbuilding.
From a letter to Allen & Unwin​ 30 September 1955 When is Vol. III likely now to appear? I shall be murdered if something does not happen soon.
March 11, 2025 at 1:27 AM