Joni Mitchell, The Riverboat—Toronto, ON, April 19, 1968.

thinking about how the watch books and the moist books are all about the city, and what would happen if it was moist given charge of the city watch and vimes working in the post office. the easy answer is obviously that it wouldn't work; lipwig's heart lies in selling sizzle, whereas vimes' primary interest is ascertaining where the sausage was on the night in question. but i'm compelled by moist looking at criminality from the other side - it's the same thought process, but the criminal should end up inside the cell, the patrician beams - suddenly faced more often with the consequences of petty crimes, with the victims, with the messy nasty aftermath. vimes, drunk and depressed in a dead-end job in the post office, which no-one uses or respects anyway, seeing the next postmaster die and hearing about the clacksmen dying and deciding: no more. moist would think carrot was his parole officer; vimes would struggle, somewhat, with a nine foot man of clay hiding the bearhuggers all the time. the watch would be shiny and sexy and the post office wouldn't be, not at all, but there would be a very angry man hauling letters about the place, mumbling to himself about setting them on fire because he's not having someone else's words in his damn head. the summoning dark wouldn't like lipwig; he knows its tricks. moist wouldn't arrest an army, or the patrician, because he doesn't believe in the law that way, but he'd talk everyone into such confusion that they'd forget what he was ambassadoring for in the first place. vimes wouldn't race the clacks, but he'd check the vault for gold properly when he took on the bank and get its previous owners arrested, causing widespread chaos and giving lipwig a headache. it'd work out of sheer bloody-mindedness and love of the city and it would shake out all wrong - but it would shake out nonetheless.

also lipwig would think it was so funny, being head cop, and vimes would love playing with trains. they deserve that.

Mark Twain Riverboat at DIsneyland, 1986

Over the Garden Wall masterpost of most of the pieces my sister and I have done over the years.

The problem with stories (or episodes of television shows) in which a character goes "viral" for doing something quirky or embarrassing is that it's virtually impossible to come up with something that would actually go viral in 2023. At the time of writing, the big meme on Twitter is reenacting an elaborate fistfight near a riverboat that involved over a dozen people.

General synopsis of the greatest piece of cinema of 2023 🔥🔥

((daddying intensifies))

I've posted this before...and I'm doing it again...for reasons.

Vincent Price being strip searched by Burt Reynolds

Riverboat - Witness No Evil (1959)

Blackline plans for the Mark Twain Riverboat in Disneyland and the Richard Irvine Riverboat in the Magic Kingdom

What happened in Alabam?

I'm glad you asked, because I've been going insane about it.

So basically, it's an average Sunday evening at the Montgomery Boat docks. There's this group of white people with a boat parked in the way of the river ferry. River ferry can't pull into port with it in the way, so the black security guard REPEATEDLY tells them to move their boat. Eventually, one of the white guys in the group tackles this man and starts to fight him. Black security guard throws his hat up and squares up. Soon, though, black security guard is outnumbered 4 to 1. These white men, in front of over a hundred people, start to literally beat a black man to death for doing his job. All seems bleak. We've seen this happen before, too often now to count.

Until you see one boy (fondly dubbed "Aquamayne") swimming from the ferry to the dock to help him. Then you see more black men bolting to join the fight from the platforms above the docks. Then you see the ferry pull in, and three shirtless black dudes march off that ferry with an ARMY of black people behind them, men and women alike. Suddenly, this 4v1 is a 54v8, and EVERY member of the white group gets their asses whooped.

The cops are there, but it's so intense, they can't do anything to stop it. They literally Just Watch. One man appears, wielding a folding chair. The Chair is rated "E" for Everyone. One woman falls down after getting smacked, and he cracks that shit over her head like she was a poached egg.

Everything about it is a triumph. It was a moment where a black man was in trouble, and the whole of Black America came to his rescue.

All the videos are on instagram, if you want to see the chaos. I'm sure you find it under "riverboat brawl" or something like that.