Being Sick and Long Reads

So I've got my annual flu and have been more-or-less out of commission for the past few days. I even had to cancel classes for the first time in my long and lustrous teaching career. It's one of those really annoying types of the flu where you can't really concentrate for more than five or ten minutes at a time, so doing any work, even the most mindless of it, is pretty much impossible.

But on the plus side, it has given me a great deal of time to catch up with my best friend, the internet. I actually keep a series of bookmarks for just such occasions -- full of long reads that you don't want to bother with on a normal day, but when you have nothing better to do than lie on the couch and moan, they're fun to delve into.

The best of the long reads I've read today focuses on Costacos brothers and their poster empire. If you're of a certain age (read: basically my age), these posters were a huge part of your childhood. In the pre-internet era, these were as close to memes as anything that existed; often the nicknames the Costacos came up with filtered their way into actual sports broadcasts and the wider sports mythology surrounding players.

If nothing else, the article is great for having collected a good number of classic Costacos posters in one place, and is definitely worth a look. Not included, however, is my most favorite of all of theirs; the Kirby poster below that hung on my bedroom wall for pretty much all of my childhood. And actually still hangs on my bedroom wall now, because I am an overgrown child.