The Saturday Picture Show, August 22, 2026

 

   Someday, your grandchildren will be in a college classroom hearing a professor talk about the rise and fall of the American mall. He or she will say there was a food court, three or four large department stores, record stores (and the students will want to know what they sold!), at least three shoe stores, and four or five stores whose names ended in "and things": Candles and Things, Cards and Things, Potpourri and Things, Muffins and Things, and of course Things and Things.

Just as it takes a heap of cookies to make a house a home (per Edgar A. Guest), it took a heap of musicians to make Steely Dan records over the years. But if this is what it took to make their great records, thank them for it!

If you ever want to see a X-Ray tech blush, ask them if during slack times, anyone gets on the rack to pose for a gag photo. I love it when they tell you things; you can see right through them.

My third-grade classmates will remember singing "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he." This blue-winged Kooka is too cool!

Sign from Sammy Davis, Jr's home in Beverly Hills. And I mean that, man.

You know that old bumpersticker "If this van's a-rockin', don't be knockin'"? I want a sign for my front door saying, "If you're hearing me snore, don't be knockin' on my door!"

I would rather be in the one-horsepower carriage, please.

The geographic center of the United States is a point approximately 20 miles (32 km) north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota. If you're only looking at the true center of the 48 lower states, you want to head to Lebanon, Kansas, but since Alaska and Hawaii joined up, people with protractors and compasses figured it out, and you need to go to SD to see the GC of the USA!

There is a yard near us where people live who figure their dog, restrained by three fenced boundaries, will not test that one unbounded line. They are wrong.

Welcome to the Vaalserberg Hill near Aachen, where Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium meet. There is this stone marker, and a maze and observation towers.