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Jonathan Key

@jonathankey.bsky.social
174 followers 228 following 1.5K posts

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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Poster for “Have-a-go Archery!” Underneath is a sticker saying “Closed due to unforeseen circumstances”.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Poster for "Mr Holland's Opus", starring Richard Dreyfuss
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
The House on the Rock (Wisconsin, USA) has a life-size diorama of a very toothy blue whale swallowing a boat while being attacked by a giant squid (out of shot). That must have been one hell of a dig.
The blue whale diorama at The House on the Rock, Wisconsin, USA
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Brushes to Brushes
A decorator’s white van, labelled “David Bowie Decorating Service”
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
In a sense, don’t we all have a water balloon hidden under our turban? (Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson)
Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

Calvin arrives, bragging to Hobbes “I’ve got a water balloon hidden under this turban! Pretty ingenious, huh?”

Hobbes replies, “I bet the towel comes in handy.” Calvin is confused.

In the last frame, Calvin futilely chases Hobbes, a soaking wet towel dripping on his head.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Finally identified what it is
The Dune 3 poster, except reading "Echo and the Bunnymen: The Killing Moon".
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Uncertain future for many periodicals
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
The Twin Peaks title card, except it’s “Jet Set Willy”
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Finally, a proper use for AI
News headline reading "ChuckleVision to return for 'new generation' with both brothers, says legend Paul"
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Watterson’s magnificent Calvin & Hobbes is so often wilder than I remember. See, for instance, this strip that frames a seriously dark observation within a frame of a Peanuts-style “kids-talking-like-adults” conceit. …
Calvin & Hobbes comic by Bill Watterson, in which Calvin asks for a heavy metal album, and his mum replies that if the band were serious about what they were singing, they would already have killed themselves. Calvin says that he’s shocked that “mainstream commercial nihilism cant be trusted” and the strip ends with him complaining that “childhood is so disillusioning”.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
The event’s called Everest because that window is double glazed. #gladiators
The Everest event on TV’s Gladiators
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
The Everest event on TV’s Gladiators
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Massive congratulations to all the Birds of War team. A Special Jury Award at Sundance 2026 is a massive achievement. @sonjahenrici.bsky.social
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
So very proud to be associated with this film, premiering at Sundance tonight
Poster for the documentary film “Birds of War”
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
The new world map they've put up in the Oval Office explains so much
The classic Risk game board, showing Greenland and Venezuala as the only routes to expand out of North America. Unless you want to hit Russia.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 27/12/2025
All those years of struggling with the never-enoughness of just four, and I never once thought to check if this beauty exists. It does, and it’s mine. Best Christmas ever.
A 5-gang extension lead. Not four, FIVE.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
The Westen Classics [sic] edition of George Eliot's "Middlemarch", or as she originally titled it, "Carry on Casaubon"
The cover of an edition of Eliot's Middlemarch, very cheap looking, with a photo of (presumably) Casaubon leering down a fruity lady's front. She looks more like Rosamund than Dorothea, to be honest, so it's possible this isn't 100% representative of a scene from the novel.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Ad in New York’s The Voice newspaper, October 1965
Ad in NY’s The Voice from 1965, starting “What is greater than a Swami? Two Great Swamis”
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Stop
Advert for MC Hammer playing at the Fox & Firkin in London on 21st November
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
Watched This is Spinal Tap with the rising generation. All of the “up to 11” and so on was lovely, but all I could think about was the perfection of the London Borough of Squatney.
Poster for 1984’s This is Spinal Tap
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
200AD prog (issue) 300
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Vladimir and Estragon’s Bogus Journey
Poster for the new production of Waifing for Godot, featuring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
I don't follow Formula 1 at all, but even I'm interested to see that Red Bull have replaced team boss Christian Horner with Kirk Hammett.
The new chief of F1 racing team Red Bull, Laurent Mekies, looking very like Kirk Hammett of Metallica
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
Can’t tell you how excited I am to have Michael Cordy’s new one finally in my hand. Dynamic, surprising, enquiring. A proper thriller.
Manhattan Down by Michael Cordy, out in hardcover today
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
Still waiting. (web.archive.org/web/20190105...)
A full page ad from 1984 for Imagine Software's twin white whale projects, Psyclapse and Bandersnatch.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
The Detroit Spinners might have been thinking about coordinated dance moves, or records. Or both. It could very easily be a pun. But the UK Spinners were almost certainly thinking of these folks. The Weavers.
The Weavers, American folk group of the 1940s.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
Although The Spinners had been having reasonable hits in the US since 1961, they were little known in the UK until 1970. By which point, it was far too late to compete for the name with the UK's very own Spinners. These guys. (cont.)
The (British) Spinnners, also a vocal group.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
This is the group (not "band") usually known in the UK as The Detroit Spinners. They first got together in 1954, under a different name, over 70 years ago. The group touring today doesn't feature anyone from back in 1954, although original member Henry Fambrough was still performing in 2023.
The Spinners (US vocal group), or -- if you're in the UK -- the Detroit Spinners.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
Zappa’s favourite trick, of course. Here’s Mike Nesmith pretending to be Zappa and Zappa pretending to be Nesmith pretending to be Zappa.
Mike Nesmith and Frank Zappa both dressed as Zappa for an episode of The Monkees.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
I’m not sure there’s ever been quite the discrepancy between soundtrack and visuals that Zappa achieves in 200 Motels. A film to watch eyes closed.
Ringo Starr made up like Frank Zappa
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
Presumably they're baffled why they're being asked about shoes
Online ad for Barefoot Shoes, tag line reading "Neurologists Baffled: These Barefoot Shoes are a Must for 2025"
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
My American
Woody Guthrie playing his guitar on the NY subway, with his famous “This Machine Kills Fascists” sticker on it, lifted from a wartime ammunition factory, c. 1943
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
The Beatles in Help! in disguise
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Missed the anniversary of Vince Guaraldi's death, at only 47, on February 6th 1976. Weirdly, because he composed the initial Peanuts tracks for a documentary that never aired, the original "Jazz Impressions of a Boy Named Charlie Brown" album predates the cartoon by a year.
Jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, with a fine moustache
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Flying Blind. One season, Téa Leoni looking like she would soon own the world.
Flying Blind (TV series, 1992)
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Fascinating, the annual homicide rate in the UK is fairly stable over the last fifty years at around 12 per million, save for a noticeable peak around 2002. Graph and context from www.murdermap.co.uk/statistics/h...
A graph showing the homicide rate in the UK per million people, from 1970 to 2020. The rate starts under 10, spends most of the time somewhat above that, peaking at around 18 in 2002, and has declined to about 10 by 2020.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Is this the comparison he’s thinking about?
A screenshot from Zuckerberg’s Metaverse showing a woman in high heels maybe dancing, and the Zuckerberg avatar presumably also dancing, but really just squatting weirdly
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
A cancelled TV show you’ll never stop thinking about
Title card for the 1989 ITV show “Interceptor”, showing the Interceptor’s helicopter in flight over some British countryside
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 22/10/2024
This is AI. A technique to enable us, harried and hurried, to reduce our interactions with other humans to a facsimile of engagement. It's the same as using an LLM to generate a poem, a picture, a story. It's enabling us to pass for functional, creative humans when we feel overwhelmed & threadbare.
Bottom of an email in Gmail. Gmail is offering 3 autogenerated responses: Beautiful peom, Beautiful story, and This is beautiful.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 18/10/2024
Fake Penguin book cover for Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, with a screenshot of old MS DOS game Wolfenstein 3D as the cover illustration.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 13/10/2024
Twickenham train station going for the technical truth. You can get anywhere, eventually, via the car park.
Sign at Twickenham train station, reading “London via Car Park”.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 09/10/2024
Sometimes you get the perfect line
British political journalist Pippa Crerrar reports on today’s shock elimination of James Cleverly from the Conservative Party leadership race, writing:

“One Labour MP texts to ask if the story leadership result needs to be declared as a gift…”
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 07/10/2024
Big Trak. Until I realised how limited it was. If they’d attached a brush to the back it could have been a primitive Roomba.
MB Games’ Big Trak programmable robot thing
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 02/10/2024
Astonishing, via the always-excellent Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com/2024/10/01/n...)
Commemorative plaque, reading:

THE TORONTO RECURSIVE HISTORY PROJECT OF TORONTO'S RECURSIVE HISTORY

This plaque was commemorated on October 10, 2018, to commemorate its own commemoration. Plaques like this one are an integral part of the campaign to support more plaques like this one. By reading this plaque, you have made a valuable addition to the number of people who have read this plaque. To this day and up to the end of this sentence, this plaque continues to be read by people like yourself.

Heritage Toronto, 2018
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 23/09/2024
Title card for BBC’s Captain Zep Space Detective
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 12/09/2024
Album cover of 1976’s Top of the Pops LP, current hits re-recorded by the “Top of the Poppers” session band.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 02/09/2024
Box for the Magic Robot quiz game, in which the "robot" always points to the correct answer.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 21/08/2024
#CallAndResponse Answer a tv show or a film with a reply.
Poster for Quo VadisPoster for I, Claudius
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 01/08/2024
Feels like there isn't an outside from which they can even lob a few rocks, at the moment.
Big Black's CD release, "The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape", featuring a bitter complaint about the CD format itself.
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Jonathan Key @jonathankey.bsky.social · 17/07/2024
Art by Murray Groat (www.deviantart.com/muzski)
Cover for a fake Tintin album, “Tintin at the Mountains of Madness”
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