Brendan W
@backwardsghost.bsky.social
420 followers 1.3K following 200 posts
Letter carrier at CUPW. Available on audio cassette. Gene Clark. (London Ontario) 🖖
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
backwardsghost.bsky.social
In addition: produced Ringo's delightful Beaucoups of Blues, played on Stevie's Songs in the Key of Life, and invented the talkbox Frampton used.

His solo records are a blast, and you can stream them anywhere. One of American music's hidden gems.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
If they're really bringing dollar coins to the United States with DJT on them, I don't think Canadians will mind if you also want to call those coins loonies
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Looking forward to your Bob Pollard phase. He writes five while he's on the can and three of them are good
backwardsghost.bsky.social
I love how they came up with voltiguer for outfielder. It's so evocative. Roughly translates to leaping skirmisher.

Raymond and Doucet are so fucking cool.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Paraphrasing someone much smarter than me: Christine is a scathing indictment of toxic masculinity and/or a great movie about a killer car.

The viewer decides what to do with Carpenter's films. Love him.

Don't hear enough about how creepy that Buddy Holly tune feels!
Reposted by Brendan W
breachmedia.ca
Mark Carney is out to dismantle Canada Post. Who stands to benefit?

Dru Oja Jay, a long-time collaborator of @cupwsttp.bsky.social discusses how the post office could be a “genuinely positive nation building project."

breachmedia.ca/why-mark-car...
Why Mark Carney is putting Canada Post on the chopping block ⋆ The Breach
Dru Oja Jay breaks down how dismantling Canada Post fits into Mark Carney’s austerity agenda
breachmedia.ca
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Lol. Lmao. Same offer we just declined two months ago.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Cautiously optimistic about today's offer.

Daydreaming about filling a truck with mail flyers and parcels so I can bring it back empty.

Won't sell out my coworkers to do it, though! My work has value. I know this.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Cautiously optimistic about today's offer.

Daydreaming about filling a truck with mail flyers and parcels so I can bring it back empty.

Won't sell out my coworkers to do it, though! My work has value. I know this.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Québecois swearing is all about church stuff. Bob and Doug would never say tabarnak.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
You seek Witches of Eastwick.

It doesn't have explicit Halloween theming, but there are cute witches in it.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
New to your videos. As a Canadian postal worker who is currently on strike while the PO is being defunded, may I say:

Loved the message of your video, just wonderful.

Also, your patron named "THE_POSTAL_SERVICE_IS_A_SERVICE_YOU_CAPITALIST_FUCKS" has my eternal admiration.
Reposted by Brendan W
alextomlinson.com
Poster I made for the Great Midwest Crane Fest!
Flat, graphic poster of a Whooping Crane standing in the negative space of many Sandhill Cranes. The poster reads "The Great Midwest Crane Fest - Nov. 15-16, 2025 Baraboo, Wisconsin.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
I have no chance of going but I love those cranes and this poster!
backwardsghost.bsky.social
I watched Drunken Master 2 at the suggestion of Drew McWeeny from a recent episode of his great podcast @itsthehippocket.bsky.social

If they hadn't recommended it as joyous I may have skipped it! Such fun. I can't watch this scene without holding my head down

youtube.com/watch?v=FAY2...
The Legend of Drunken Master (1/12) Movie CLIP - The Train Thief (1994) HD
YouTube video by Movieclips
youtube.com
backwardsghost.bsky.social
The Shrines were so sick, every time I see them I wish I had a Cube where the red and white ones were good
Reposted by Brendan W
ohnoshetwitnt.bsky.social
A super cool thing that men can do super easily is just leave women the fuck alone.
Reposted by Brendan W
gunstreet.bsky.social
the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Next step after hearing this is finding out if it's ever been featured as part of a rap beat. Step after that is crossing my fingers that someone makes one. Holy moly, this sounds amazing.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Did you know? CUPW edition.
DID YOU KNOW?

-FACTS ABOUT YOUR CANADIAN OWNED PUBLIC MAIL SERVICE-

THE CEO OF CANADA POST (WHO HAS BEEN MISMANAGING OUR PUBLIC SERVICE) MAKES MORE MONEY THAN THE PRIME MINISTER. DID YOU KNOW?

-FACTS ABOUT YOUR CANADIAN OWNED PUBLIC MAIL SERVICE-

ALL LEVELS OF MANAGEMENT HAVE STILL RECEIVED BONUSES EVERY YEAR THEY LOST MONEY. DID YOU KNOW?

-FACTS ABOUT YOUR CANADIAN OWNED PUBLIC MAIL SERVICE-

CANADA POSTS RETENTION RATE FOR NEW HIRES IS ONLY 10%
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Folks that aren't able to get to their community mailbox have the mail from their CMB brought every Wednesday.

It's inadequate service, and it's not good enough. People shouldn't have to wait an extra week for socioeconomic cheques, or receive their grocery flyers once they've expired
Reposted by Brendan W
corruptario.bsky.social
Yes, we fucking can.

We can afford Canada Post, we can afford universal healthcare and prescriptions, we can afford free tuition.

You're told we can't "afford it" because industry wants all the money you pay in tax going to them instead, and our politicians keep handing it over.
kathleenwester.bsky.social
🇨🇦 Disabled people manage to pick up their mail in every community I've ever lived in because most of #Canada does not have #HomeDelivery.
#Canadians can't afford to continue subsidizing this service for a privileged few.
#CanadaPost
🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
backwardsghost.bsky.social
It's so special. I really like thinking about someone hearing this for the first time.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
They own multiple parcel companies and cry poor with one while the others are thriving. It's pretty bold to claim there's no collusion.
backwardsghost.bsky.social
Last winter, Purolator offered a lower cost shipping option and made mega bank. Canada Post owns Purolator. Seems like undermining a strike to me.
Reposted by Brendan W
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.