Colophon

The Author

Mark Boszko is easily distracted and seems not to require sleep. However, this is an illusion. He is mortal, like you. Perhaps doubly so.

He makes videos and a little bit of art and design. He also watches way too many movies and jokes around on Mastodon (since the terrible loss of Twitter to bands of roving villains).

The Name

The story starts not with the WMATA, but with an English teacher my friend AAlgar had in high school, Mr. Lindsay Bach, who was also the sponsor of the school newspaper, The Hornet, where AAl and I were on staff during our senior year. He was an all-around great guy, and a fine teacher, and though he got his share of our immature behind-the-back ribbing for his Muppet-like voice and his penchant for crunching Certs like they were going out of style, we actually thought a great deal of him. Apparently, his then-girlfriend taught at another school in the county, with whom we regularly traded school papers. In the Valentines issue, Mr. Bach submitted a message, which read:

Keemba, a station in the metro, the apparition of your touch in the dark
Let’s shake, rattle and roll— Your somewhat funny valentine

This, of course, amused us immensely at the time. A teacher? Having a love life? C’mon! Years later, I got in touch with Mr. Bach, and he told me the whole sordid tale… the most interesting part being that his first line was adapted from an Ezra Pound poem entitled In a Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Yes, that’s it. Two lines. I hadn’t heard of it before he referenced it, but now I love it — hence the name of my site.

The Theme

The current theme is a custom theme for SitM, created in July 2026, which leans heavily on Bootstrap 5, and refines elements that I liked from several previous themes. I’ll probably be tinkering with it for years to come, but it feels like home.

  • Brand Color: A maroon #800000 that appealed to my mathematical sensibilities
  • Fonts:

The Optical

My real passion is movies, and how they’re made. The Optical News is where I post cool stuff about movies and behind-the-scenes. The Optical podcast is where I chat about the movies covered in the issues of Cinefex magazine, and talk to people who worked on them. Have a listen, won’t you?

Accessibility

I want this site to be usable by everyone. It targets WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and at its last review (July 2026) it met that standard — audited with the axe-core engine across every page type, plus a check of keyboard operation, focus handling, screen-reader semantics, and color contrast.

A few minor things remain, none of which block access: the photo-gallery lightbox and the audio player are WordPress’s own components, which carry small role-labelling quirks that automated tools flag. If you ever hit an accessibility barrier here, please tell me.

Privacy

The short version: this site collects as little as possible, sets no cookies for anonymous visitors, and never sells or cross-tracks anyone. Traffic is measured with a self-hosted, cookieless install of Umami.

If you send me a message through a form on this site — the feedback form below, or the voiceover enquiry form — the name, email, and message you provide are emailed to me and stored so your message isn’t lost, used only to reply and deletable on request. Comments store the name, email, and IP you provide. Avatars are served by Gravatar, which your browser contacts directly. Mail the site sends is delivered through an authenticated relay (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).

Some links on this site are affiliate links — including through the Amazon Associates program, and occasionally others. If you follow one and buy something, I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you; the retailer’s own site (for example, Amazon) may set cookies to credit the purchase, under its own privacy policy. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

To have anything you’ve sent corrected or removed, use the feedback form below.

Feedback

Spotted something broken, have a correction, or want to reach me about the site itself? Send a note here.

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