Christopher Bahn
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chrisbahn.bsky.social
Christopher Bahn
@chrisbahn.bsky.social
350 followers 1.2K following 360 posts
Editor and writer from Minnesota. 11 books in the Enduring Mysteries and Amazing Animals series from Creative Company out now! My website: https://christopherbahn.com/
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chrisbahn.bsky.social
Christopher Bahn @chrisbahn.bsky.social · Mar 27
All my life, I dreamed of writing a book. When I was little, I would go to the library and look up at the stacks of books and think about being one of the names up there. This year, the wish came true: Not one, but ELEVEN new books. So awesome. Let me tell you about them. (1/16) #booksky
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
johnmaddening.bsky.social
A very weird list of the best Twin Cities movie theaters (AMC?!?) was just featured on a local podcast, so I figured I’d give you the ACTUAL definitive list. From me. Because I’m right.
November 21, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
c0nc0rdance.bsky.social
Guillotine, Shrapnel, Algorithm, Leotard, Saxophone, Jacuzzi, Sandwich, Cardigan, Nacho...

All common words that are just the name of their inventors.

And I think I have threads on most of them? 😧
c0nc0rdance.bsky.social c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · Sep 20
In 1784, British Lt. Henry Shrapnel of Royal Artillery invented a 'spherical case' cannon shell that exploded in mid-air, raining down lead shot on infantry.

It was replaced in 1803 with a modified design that came to be known as the 'Shrapnel shell' & the name came to refer to the projectiles.
Painted portrait of Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842) He wears a navy and red uniform with gold trim. He has white hair and sideburns. His face is masculine and sort of handsome, and his high collar suggests mid-19th century fashion. Improved shrapnel, and a spherical designed cannon shell, showing internal bits of circular metal.
November 20, 2025 at 1:05 AM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
#LetterboxdFriday! #LastFourWatched 🍿
November 14, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
sharynmorrow.com
The librarian said these limited edition Prince cards are going quickly. Glad I got mine!
A limited edition Prince themed library card held up in front of a Hennepin County Library sign.
November 8, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
spindlypete.bsky.social
happy halloween from samwise gamgee and frodo baggins! cloaks vests and shirts handmade by grandma, lembas bread by fig newtons corporation
two babies dressed as hobbits barefoot in the woods they have walking sticks and cloaks and everything
October 31, 2025 at 1:14 PM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
#LetterboxdFriday! #LastFourWatched 🍿
More Halloween viewing, with a couple of interesting but not completely satisfying efforts and a couple of big disappointments.
letterboxd.com/Rufus_T_Fire...
October 31, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social
Vampira in Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1958
October 31, 2025 at 1:44 AM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
sonictyrant.bsky.social
Waiter: may i recommend the steak?

Dracula: you may not
September 8, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
ellenstekert.bsky.social
Just in time for Halloween, it's a new song from Ellen: The haunting murder ballad "Frankie Silver. Head to her website and give it a listen!
ellenstekert.com/2025/10/27/e...
Ellen Stekert releases haunting new single, “The Ballad Of Frankie Silver” – Ellen Stekert
ellenstekert.com
October 27, 2025 at 11:01 PM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
#LetterboxdFriday! #LastFourWatched 🍿
A day late, but who's counting? An odd quartet of movies this time—all of which have plenty to recommend them and yet never really rise above their worst elements.
October 26, 2025 at 6:21 AM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
joshuajfriedman.com
October 19, 2025 at 10:24 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
indivisible.org
This is what democracy looks like. #NoKings
October 18, 2025 at 11:22 PM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
#LetterboxdFriday! #LastFourWatched 🍿
letterboxd.com/rufus_t_fire...
October 17, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
ellenstekert.bsky.social
Folk singer and folklorist Ellen Stekert's new single, “I’ll Give You Any Mountain,” is a song with roots deep in the 1960s folk revival. Written by her friend Tracy Powers more than 60 years ago but never released, the piece is finally being shared with the world.
ellenstekert.com/2025/10/14/e...
Ellen releases long-lost single “I’ll Give You Any Mountain,” written by friend Tracy Powers in the early 1960s – Ellen Stekert
ellenstekert.com
October 14, 2025 at 11:55 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
kalmn.bsky.social
naomikritzer.com/2025/09/18/e...
Election 2025: Minneapolis Mayoral Race (the four contenders)
There are fifteen people running for Minneapolis mayor. You only have to worry about four of them, and this post will talk about those four. If you want to know more about all the others, that is i…
naomikritzer.com
October 14, 2025 at 8:51 PM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
It took me until the end of Peacemaker S2 to realize that Foxy Shazam's "Oh Lord" is kind of a riff on "Hey Jude": In both cases it's a song about an older man giving advice and encouragement to a kid named Julian.
October 10, 2025 at 9:04 PM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
#LetterboxdFriday! #LastFourWatched 🍿
October 10, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
hannahposts.bsky.social
Richard Scarry: Fury Road
A Richard Scarry illustration of a skeleton-bone dragster being driven by a little mouse
October 8, 2025 at 12:56 AM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
sfencyclopedia.bsky.social
Edgar Allan Poe sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/poe_ed... died on this day, so here are some of Carlo Farneti's illustrations to the 1927/1928 editions of his 'Histoires Extraordinaires' and 'Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires'.
October 7, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
molly.wiki
slightly ominous mailer from the Red Cross
Mailer that reads: Molly, Seasons may change, but the need for blood is constant.
October 1, 2025 at 7:24 PM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
In today's "feeling old" news, my daughter was watching a Simpsons chalkboard gag from season two that said "I will not Xerox my butt" and the joke didn't land because she didn't know what Xeroxes are.
October 1, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
mattressisland.bsky.social
King Kong is a movie about how your skills as a film director don't necessarily translate to success on Broadway
September 30, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
nedraggett.bsky.social
And now I'm just spelunking around and here's this Facebook post by Kaleb Horton from September 2017. It was three months after MTV dumped its freelancers. I'm sure it would have been a piece there; instead he posted this on FB just to have it written out: Toys 'R' Us as societal microcosm.
Facebook post from Kaleb Horton, September 18, 2017: Toys R Us is probably going out of business this year. I'm fascinated by the collapse of retail, because what it really signifies is the collapse of the 20th century. The reason I pushed to profile guys like Harry Dean Stanton, Merle Haggard and Chuck Berry, was that writing about them is a way of writing about the 20th century, and how different it was from where we are now. How shockingly different, in retrospect. The migration out of the south, the descent of the Dust Bowl, which was a Biblical plague; the millions of people who were killed during World War Two. Monoculture, and the idea that a great episode of a television show would be seen by *half of all people.* The arrival of flight, and the end of horses. Homes without electricity. Coming of age without computers, without television. Listening to the radio for entertainment. The 20th century was a long time ago and it's a ghost now. It's a ghost you see in the places you wouldn't expect. It's seen in towns that were bypassed by the freeways, the dusty little towns out west that still have old diners and motels and payphones. It's seen in the places that we left, places where mines shut down, places where tourist attractions died off. It's seen in Bakersfield with Buck Owens' Crystal Palace and it's seen in Roswell, which stubbornly maintains the relics of the '90s UFO boom. Things like that won't be around forever. Someday owners will die and towns will burn and they won't be rebuilt. And it's difficult to suss out what those things are, because they're on roads, physical and metaphorical, that we no longer travel. The ghost sightings happen in stupid places, unexpected places, and uncool places. A few months ago, I went with Marie to the Toys R Us on Victory Blvd. in Burbank, which still looks exactly like it did in Back to the Future in 1985 somehow. It's not nostalgia that you see there, it's just a customer base and economic model that's aging and won't be around a lot longer, and it's *boring.* There's no reason for anyone to ever go to Lancer's, the little diner by that Toys R Us. Because it's not good. People go there out of tradition, and old habits. 80 and 90 year olds go there. We were lining up for a Nintendo, which is still a hard thing to keep stocked in stores. Toys R Us was actually the best place to obtain one, because it's no longer a place children beg their parents to take them to. When we went in, wham, there it was. The ghost of 1996. I was 8 years old, for a fraction of a second. The feeling wasn't nostalgia, it was a kind of temporal dislocation. A confusion. But it wasn't an immaculate 1996, it was a fading 1996. It was lonelier than I remember it. It's time for Toys R Us to go out of business. It was time ten years ago, fifteen. There are reasons to be nostalgic about the 20th century. We weren't plugged into so many wires, so many screens. We were a little bit closer to the process of manufacturing and agriculture than we are now. We made more things by hand, and our goals as people were uniquely audacious and driven by mad, desperate power that was temporary and had to end. But the 20th century was hopelessly cruel and soaked in blood. The 20th century gave us flight, but it also gave us bombs that can end the world and Richard Nixon and his evil sidekick Kissinger and it gave us new mutations of slavery and race and class subjugation and it gave us useless, disgusting monuments to Confederate slavers and traitors and cowards. It gave us President Trump, who wouldn't exist today without New York City's collective cocaine addiction in the 1980s. I want to find the ghosts, not because I miss the past -- the good old days can't return because they're imaginary and what you really miss is youth and if you're lucky a warm feeling of safety -- but because I don't even know what things we'll lose, or when we'll lose them, or how long we have to document them. I know ghosts when I see them. Toys R Us for the mundane side and the Salton Sea for the widescreen wasteland side. But I have absolutely no idea how many there are. I figure people go first, then places. Those are the things we have a limited time to physically document and historically examine and preserve on film. The ideas will go away much slower, and some of them may be eternal, like cold wars. But those are a lot less fun because you don't get to drive to them.
September 27, 2025 at 8:49 PM
chrisbahn.bsky.social
#LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched
September 26, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Reposted by Christopher Bahn
rebeccarhelm.bsky.social
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM